Silencing the troubled watersWhile the local chief says removing the gravel poses no threat to salmon, opponents label the plan 'grotesque' and fear its impact
MARK HUME
February 2, 2008VANCOUVER -- Clem Seymour, chief of the Seabird Island band, can remember the day he first heard the sound of the riverbed shifting.
He was fishing for salmon with his family on the great sweep of the Fraser River near his small community, about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver, when his mother turned off the boat's engine and told him the soft, clicking noise, muffled by the water, was made by rocks rolling along the bottom.
"She stopped the boat and I could hear it, just moving under the water," said Mr. Seymour, who is heading a controversial project to mine a large gravel bar just upstream from the Seabird Island reserve, between Hope and Chilliwack, in the Fraser Valley.
The idea of heavy equipment working on the exposed bed of the most productive salmon river in the world has alarmed many. And the project has set traditional native knowledge against modern science, as the Seabird Island band argues they know more about the Fraser than anyone, while some experts on ecology and river hydrodynamics say they are destroying valuable salmon habitat while doing nothing to alleviate the flood threat.
"We are river people. ... We wouldn't be doing this if it hurt the salmon," said Mr. Seymour, whose band has provincial and federal approval to remove 400,000 cubic metres of aggregate from Spring Bar, near Seabird Island.
"Where that gravel bar is, it used to be part of the main channel. But now it's filled in. ... The river seems to move faster now and we've lost about 10 to 12 acres [of reserve land] through erosion.
"We have to do something about it," he said.
The aggregate Mr. Seymour heard rolling underneath his boat was part of a natural process that, over the centuries, has built up massive gravel bars that have been blamed for increasing the flood threat in the lower Fraser River, from Hope to Vancouver.
Mr. Seymour's band, which last spring was nearly flooded when the river rose to within centimetres of topping its banks, plans to take two big chunks off Spring Bar over the next several weeks, with the idea of lowering the water level.
To get access to the bar, the band is building a temporary bridge, with funding of $564,000 from the provincial government's flood mitigation budget.
When the project was announced last month, Minister of Public Safety John Les said it was needed to reduce the Fraser River flood risk.
"Vast deposits like the Spring Bar have raised the river's bed and narrowed its channel, increasing pressure on the dikes that protect homes, businesses and land throughout the valley," Mr. Les said.
But the plan has come under attack from the David Suzuki Foundation, the B.C. Wildlife Federation and dozens of other groups. While it gives the Seabird Island band several millions of dollars worth of high-quality aggregate to sell, they say, it does so at high cost to salmon.
"It is absolutely appalling," said Marvin Rosenau, a former fisheries biologist with the provincial Ministry of Environment who now works as an instructor on fish ecology and environmental management at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
"If this goes ahead as planned, it may end up dewatering a side channel [by changing the river's flow], and it looks to me like an enormous amount of salmon-rearing habitat will be lost," Dr. Rosenau said.
He said there has been considerable gravel mining on Fraser River gravel bars over the decades, but the Spring Bar project is disturbing because of its size.
"This is the biggest chunk of gravel ever removed at one place from a stream in Western Canada," he said. "This is just grotesque."
THE BIG BAR DISASTERGravel mining on the Fraser has been pursued since 1948 because the bars, which emerge during low water in the winter, present vast deposits of gravel that is highly valued by the construction industry, which uses it to make concrete.
In 1998, the provincial government imposed a five-year moratorium on Fraser gravel mining because of concerns about the impact it was having on salmon habitat. When that moratorium was lifted in 2004, the government released a plan that authorized the removal of between 420,000 and 500,000 cubic meters of aggregate each year.
But that plan came under attack in 2006 when the river level suddenly dropped and a side channel below a project at Big Bar ran dry, resulting in the stranding deaths of about two million young salmon.
Dr. Rosenau said that after the Big Bar disaster he expected the government to be more sensitive about where and how mining was done. But the Spring Bar project, he said, has proceeded without adequate assessment of environmental impact.
Mel Kotyk, Lower Fraser acting area director for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, says the project has been carefully planned.
In a letter released last week, Mr. Kotyk stated: "DFO's role is to ensure that the project is carried out in a way that minimizes the potential harm to fish habitat and fish stocks in the river. I can assure you that the Department has been involved in the planning of this project from the outset, and that measures have been taken to ensure that it does not pose a threat to pink salmon habitat, eggs or alevin."
He said a biologist has determined "that pink salmon spawned in the area upstream and downstream, but that very little spawning occurred at the site itself."
Dr. Rosenau said his own studies show one of the two river channels at Spring Bar is prime pink salmon spawning habitat and the other is ideal for rearing chinook salmon.
"The gravel in there is just perfect for salmon," he said.
And he warned that the river could shift dramatically because of the mining, damaging both channels. He said one side channel will get more water and a faster current, while the other will be turned into a big ditch, "basically creating the Suez Canal of the Fraser River."
Frank Kwak, a member of the Fraser Valley Salmon Society, said his group has identified more than a dozen species of fish at Spring Bar.
"DFO hasn't done the kind of work in there that we have," he said. "Among the things we found is that it is an area that has river-rearing sockeye, which is very rare in B.C. Yet DFO has never identified that there are sockeye there. They have no idea."
Sockeye normally rear in lakes and the presence of them at Spring Bar suggests it is an area with special fishery values.
John Werring, a salmon conservation biologist with the Suzuki Foundation, said he is shocked DFO would approve the destruction of salmon habitat. He said the authorization permit states specifically: "The destruction of fish hereby authorized ... is the loss of pink salmon eggs and alevins, and fry ... at sites C and D on Spring Bar."
Michael Church, a professor emeritus in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, has spent more than 30 years studying the movement of sediment in the Fraser River, and the related channel changes.
He said it is "misleading" for the government to cite a flood threat because gravel has not been building up at Spring Bar.
"The reach between Laidlaw and Aggasiz, within which Spring Bar lies, has on the whole been degrading - that is, it has been losing gravel for several decades now. It was accumulating gravel in the early through middle part of the 20th century, but since then the major slug of gravel seems to have moved on farther downstream," Prof. Church said.
So the chattering of gravel that Chief Seymour hears on the river bottom is the sound of aggregate flowing out with the current, more than it is flowing in.
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Topic: "There are safer places to get gravel" (Read 123038 times)