The water under Denman

2026-08-20

Almost every home on Denman Island drinks groundwater. So we went to the Province of British Columbia's own records — the Ground Water Aquifers dataset and the GWELLS well registry — and put what they say on the map.

The headline: provincial mapping shows a single bedrock aquifer, Aquifer 740 ("Denman Island"), spanning 47.7 km² of an island whose land area is roughly 51 km². One aquifer, fractured sedimentary rock of the Nanaimo Group, under nearly everything and nearly everyone. The Province classifies its vulnerability as High — meaning relatively little natural protection between the surface and the water — and its productivity as Low, with demand rated Moderate. The live GWELLS summary supplies the current well, groundwater-licence, and provincial-observation-well counts shown with the aquifer data below; those administrative counts can change and are not frozen into this narrative.

None of those numbers are ours. Every figure is the Province's, shown verbatim and linked to its source — that's the standard for everything we publish. The island's east side also has a smaller confined sand-and-gravel aquifer (Aquifer 739) with its own provincial record.

Where to see it: the new Water on Denman page tells the full story with sources; the parcel map carries the provincial aquifer boundaries as a toggleable layer (as does every island site in our network); and each lot record now notes which mapped aquifer most underlies it, with the provincial classification and factsheet link.

Water is the island fact that outlasts every argument about governance. Now it's on the record, mapped, and cited.