Michael Brydon: View from the West Bench: Area F Blog entries on the Sage Mesa water system

It always bothered when I first moved back to the West Bench (actually, Westwood Properties) that I did not know much about what was going on. I did not even know what the RDOS was until I had to get a building permit.

So when I was first elected the Director for Area F, I tried to maintain an informal website that people like me could use to fill in some of their knowledge gaps. I structured it as a hierarchical blog: it was hierarchical in the sense that it had separate sections on water systems, parks, and topical issues like "roaming horses". It even had a section called "Area F owner's manual" which talked about garbage, roads, taxes, and so on. And it was a blog in the sense that I just kept adding to it as things happened and new information rolled in. I thought it would be good to have a historical record of how the issues evolved.

I did my best at the time to make sure people in Area F knew about the areaf.rdos.bc.ca website. I put the address on everything we sent in the mail and sent a monthly summary of new content to everyone whose email I happened to have. When big news broke, I posted a link in Facebook to the Area F site. So although I am sure there are people who never heard of the Area F site in 2008-2018, it was hardly a secret.

My mistake was assuming that the RDOS would treat the website like it treats paper and other records. I stupidly expected the RDOS IT department to keep the site running indefinitely, or at least send me a backup before they pulled the plug. Alas, they pulled the plug and, as far as I know, there is no backup or archive. I do have my own unformatted database backup from 2016, but I was adding stuff up to late 2018 when I left politics.

Fortunately, there is a thing called The Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/). The non-profit project stores content from websites over time. I decided to go back to some of my blog posts to see what I wrote about the Sage Mesa water system. Keep in mind that the Sage Mesa water system was (and still is) a privately-held company regulated by government agencies other than the RDOS. So most of my posts on the topic were mere speculation and thinking out loud. The secondary objective, of course, was to incite Sage Mesa residents to exert some neighborly pressure on the Chapmans.

Below are a number of links to Sage Mesa water posts much as they appeared on the Area F site starting in about 2009. Note, however, the the Wayback Machine can be slow and flaky (due to heavy usage). I have cut and pasted copies of the posts (including follow-on comments) into this blog to save some frustration. Note as well that the Wayback Machine does not do a good job of capturing formatting or supporting content (e.g., images, links) when the source is a content management system (in the case of the Area F site: Drupal). So the pages below are a mess. The content is mostly intact, but don't even bother trying to click on the links.

[This historical background is in addition to my more recent summary of the Sage Mesa water issue.]

Sage Mesa water system top-level blog page:
This was the entry point into the hierarchy. All postings on the topic of Sage Mesa water were posted as child nodes. As can be seen below, there were relatively few posts on the Sage Mesa system (especially when compared to the Faulder and West Bench systems) because, as noted many times, the RDOS had/still has no jurisdiction over the Sage Mesa system.

Local copy: https://michaelbrydon.blogspot.com/2026/01/area-f-blog-water-systems-sage-mesa.html
Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130322071700/http://areaf.rdos.bc.ca/cms/node/7

The child pages within the Sage Mesa water topic are listed in chronological order at the bottom of the page above. These have been copied to the extent possible to this site. Note that some of these have comments from residents. In many cases, I responded to the comments: