Thank you very much.
I'm a commercial fisherman and long-time resident—well, as long as my life has been, anyway.
My family goes back four generations at the mouth of the Fraser River. From speaking to my grandfathers when I was young, I learned a lot of the history. My great-grandfather was a tugboat skipper on the Fraser. He named Calamity Point, up by Harrison Hot Springs. There's a lot of history.
They told me about the old route of the Fraser River. Harvey Gifford went to the archives and looked up some old maps. The very important part that Harvey touched on was the alteration of the flow of the south Fraser River. Someone in the past made the decision to make the northern part of the main river the main flow.
I live on Westham Island—you guys didn't get quite far enough down the river to have a look at it this morning—where I own an old fish cannery site. It's the first cannery site when you come up the river. Right in front of that site was the old main arm of the river, where the tugboats and the freighters used to go up. We had deep-water access for the freighters to unload their cargo, right up into Ladner Slough. The dynamite boat used to go up into Ladner Slough—I call it a slough now, but it used to be the main river—and that was in my lifetime, thirty years ago. I can plainly remember it.
Now they've taken these islands, and what used to be an island is no longer an island. They dammed off the top end of it when they built the Massey Tunnel. It stopped all that water flow from coming down into Ladner.
They've taken Kirkland Island and built a 500-foot-long rock wall up there that stopped that flow of water from coming down into Ladner. They've built the Woodward Dam. That stopped the main flow of the river from coming down into the Ladner area.
It's hard to believe that in this day and age, someone can actually dam the Fraser River and alter the natural environment of the wetlands, but it has happened. You can see it on any map you look at. It says the name “Woodward Dam”, and Deas Island was an island. It's insane how much the water flow has been altered down there.
As they've diverted 80% of the water flow away--roughly, because initially it was 80%--we were left with 20%. Over the years, as that 20% has slowed down, the siltation has increased because there's just not enough water to have the corrosive or erosive effect of the river flowing. In my life, the water in front of my dock.... I used to be able to tie up at a dead low water and have 15 feet of water. There's now eight feet of mud. This is not a small issue; it's huge.
The way it's going right now, Ladner Slough will probably fill in completely in twenty years. Once the flow stops, the sediment settles down. It comes out the main river, it backs up with a flood, and the sediment just settles down at the bottom.
As for the effect on the fingerlings, it's like Harvey said. We used to have salmon fry swimming by the dock all the time in the spring. You'd see it coming out. I don't know what the effect of it is, but probably one of the most vast areas of marshland and wetland of the Fraser Delta is in the south Fraser area.
Safety issues are just incredible. The boats tip over at the dock. We all have Dickinson oil stoves in our boats. They can tip over and cause fires, but who's going to come and put out a fire? There's no one there. The houseboats are lifting over. People have candles going. That's a fire hazard.
Right out in front of my dock, below the Woodward Dam where the old main channel used to be, it's high and dry. On the low tide, there's eight feet of mud all the way across the whole expanse of what used to be the main river. There are three training walls out there that used to keep the river flowing in the direction they wanted it to flow. They're so far in the marsh grass now that you can hardly even see them.
In terms of the channel, there's not a weekend in the summer when there's not a boat high and dry up on it and stuck for a tide. There are guys coming by the river in front of my house. They just hit that bar and they're stuck there for the day.
I don't know what can be done, but something needs to be done. Someone made a comment a while ago, and to me it seemed to hit the nail on the head. Dredging is like shovelling your driveway in a blizzard. Unless we get the flow of water going back down there to some degree, it's not going to do the job it needs to do.
We seem to have the great desire to bring all that deep-sea traffic up into the Fraser River and keep that one arm of the river deep. I can see that there's financial benefit to it, but is it really what the people want, to have that happen, when it's possibly a detriment and such an alteration to the wetlands out there? I'd like to see someone look into it to see what the long-term effects are going to be or how the environment is altered, because it is, and that's how it has been altered out there.
Another thing I would say, as representing fisheries, is that the guys are forever getting heck for prop-washing. I guess you probably all know what prop-washing is. When our boats go dry at the dock, we run the boats so that they don't tip over at the dock. Prop-washing—something that's not supposed to be there—shouldn't be a problem. We're silting in because the water doesn't come there any more, so we shouldn't be getting heck for doing this. I don't know whether there should be a funding program to hire someone to do the prop-washing. We're not talking about one mile of water; we're talking about miles and miles of docks and waterways that are filling in.
Thanks for taking the time to come out here to have a look around. As Harvey said, I really wish you guys could have seen it on a low tide. I had a great big dock that's 100 feet long and 40 feet wide, which on a one-foot tide looked as though it was going to break in half, about a month ago. If you'd come down there and seen that, and the one on June 4 that we have coming—it's a minus-one-foot tide.... It very well might. It is a real, serious issue.