Plans in place to facilitate salmon run at Big Bar slide site

LILLOOET (NEWS 1130) – It’s coming down to crunch time for the federal Fisheries Department for this year’s salmon run up the Fraser River.

With around one month to go before this year’s salmon run will reach the site of the 2018 landslide along the Fraser River north of Lillooet, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been working on three different plans to help the migrating salmon make it past the five-metre waterfall there.

“Now we’re into what we call the spring and summer works period. This involves putting some systems in place to ensure that salmon can get up the slide site, in case we have higher-than-projected water levels,” says Gwil Roberts, the DFO’s Director of the Big Bar landslide team.

One of the projects, which has already been completed, is the creation of a natural ‘ladder’ for the salmon to use to navigate the obstruction themselves.

“The first piece was to install a fish way. It’s a series of boulders, each boulder about two meters wide. And well over 100 of these boulders were placed on the west side of the Fraser River,” notes Roberts. “That fish way allows fish to rest and move, rest and move up the slide area at a graded, controlled elevation,” he adds.

If water levels along the Fraser remain too powerful due to the flooding being seen this year, the DFO has also contracted some outside help in the form of a pneumatic pump, which is also known as a “salmon cannon.” The fish are will be shuttled through a 160 meter long tube, which will then fire them up and over the slide site, allowing them to continue on with their journey.

Failing this, Roberts says they do have a third, less technical plan.

“We also have the ability to, what we call, truck and transport the fish.”

This will entail gathering up the salmon stuck at the base of the Big Bar slide, put into tanks on the back of large trucks, and then moved manually to a nearby site, where the fish are then released to continue their journey to their spawning grounds up-river.

Roberts says while they have laid out best and worst-case scenarios, he admits it will be up to river itself to determine which methods they use to help the salmon make their way north.

It’s believed less than 300,000 salmon were able to make it past the Big Bar slide last year.

DFO scientists have warned of at least three salmon runs potentially facing extinction, while three others could be significantly impacted, if the slide continues to keep the number of returning salmon at dangerously low levels.

The Big Bar slide was the result of huge pieces of rock shearing off a cliff and crashing into the Fraser River creating the five-metre high waterfall. The slide was only noticed last June, but satellite imagery suggests it occurred in the fall of 2018. Since the discovery, crews have been working to address the salmon migration problem.

Over the winter, a construction firm was employed to break up and remove rock at the site.