Permanent fishway to be built at Fraser River landslide: Fisheries and Oceans

VANCOUVER — Fisheries and Oceans Canada says it has awarded a contract that would see a permanent fishway built to help fish migrate past a massive landslide on a remote stretch of British Columbia’s Fraser River.

Minister Bernadette Jordan says the landslide response team has been in crisis mode since the discovery of the slide, whose volume she described as equivalent to a building 33 storeys high by 17 storeys wide.

The slide created a five-metre waterfall and prompted a range of efforts to help salmon migrate to spawning areas, including transporting fish by truck and helicopter, building a nature-like fishway and even using a pneumatic pump dubbed the “salmon cannon.”

But Fisheries and Oceans says record-breaking high water levels in the Fraser River this year affected the migration of salmon that are already facing threats including habitat degradation and warming ocean waters.

The department says an analysis in July determined that a permanent fishway is the only reliable, long-term solution for getting fish past the slide site.

Ottawa has awarded Burnaby-based Peter Kiewit Sons a contract worth $176.3 million to design and build a fishway that’s expected to be operational by the start of the 2022 Fraser River salmon migration.

The Fisheries Department says more than 160,000 salmon migrated past the slide and close to 10,000 were moved by the pump system and trucks this year, while 60,000 were helped over in 2019 and 245,000 swam past on their own.

It’s believed the massive landslide north of Lillooet occurred in late 2018, but it wasn’t discovered until June 2019, after fish had already begun arriving.

The decision to install a permanent fishway comes as the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada assessed seven more southern B.C. Chinook salmon populations as threatened or endangered, adding to 12 that it has already classified under those categories.

The committee is recommending that chinook in the Lower Fraser River be listed as endangered on Canada’s species at risk registry, meaning the species faces imminent extinction or extirpation from that area.

Chinook are a key food source for the endangered southern resident killer whales that frequent the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland in the summertime.

The federal government decides whether to list a species on the registry after receiving a recommendation from the committee. Once listed, provisions under the Species at Risk Act apply to protect it.

A listing of endangered for chinook would mean a prohibition against harming the species or destroying its critical habitat.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 9, 2020.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Brenna Owen, The Canadian Press