Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today.
We understand that you invited us here because of our work with salmon, including at the site of the Big Bar slide on the Fraser River. We want to speak to that as an example of the innovative solutions available to the Pacific salmon conservation and recovery efforts.
With the state of our iconic Pacific salmon, they need our help, and it feels right that the U.S. and Canada have partnered and are working for the recovery of salmon and fisheries in the west, including the Fraser River, historically one of the great Pacific salmon rivers in all the world.
We have been working exclusively on fish passage solutions for 10 years all around the world. We believe that improved passage is the single most important thing we can do today to assure the fish's future everywhere in the world. Our mission at Whooshh is to provide fisheries managers worldwide an entirely new toolset that more affordably addresses fish passage, recognizes the impact of changing climate conditions, accommodates highly variable water levels and acknowledges that the traditional options available simply have not worked well enough, and are not easily changed, to give the native fish species their best and fastest chance for spawning success.
The importance of the Fraser River to the ecosystem of the west’s Salish Sea, the resident orcas in its waters, the first nations on both sides of the border and those sport and commercial fishermen who rely on robust returns for their livelihoods reminds us daily of the importance of our mission. As a company, we are tackling not only a problem of enormous complexity but also a problem that must be solved quickly for all of humanity. Big Bar highlights what can be done and how quickly it can happen when decisions are made, new technologies are adopted, resources are made available, and stakeholders and contractors come together to ensure that there is safe, timely, efficient and effective fish passage.
Whooshh Innovations' headquarters are located in Seattle, Washington, on the waters of Puget Sound about a five and a half hour drive from the Big Bar landslide in British Columbia. DFO contracted with Whooshh on April 15, 2020, to provide passage for four species of salmonids, with our passage portal to enable them to continue their upstream migration in June 2020.
Our Whooshh passage portal allows for volitional and more natural migration without handling or energy-sapping ladder steps causing stress prior to reaching their spawning grounds and impacting their fecundity. It is not our original salmon cannon, which requires one to hand-load fish into the system, but a more elegant and automated solution.
The passage portal also collects data about every fish that passes through the system, including 18 images of every fish taken from three different angles. Our fish recognition technologies are capable of measuring and sorting fish automatically within a fraction of a second. It allows the selected fish to migrate past the barriers, whether natural or man-made, regardless of their height.
The system at Big Bar includes six tubes of five different sizes to accommodate all sizes of the four species of salmonids. Each tube is about 150 metres long. The passage portal capacity can enable passage of tens of thousands of fish per day, or approximately 30 fish per minute. While the system requested and deployed at Big Bar is seasonal, annual, long term and permanent deployments are often recommended.
The magnitude of the challenge at Big Bar cannot be overstated. The rapids you see in the photos might look to be a manageable two- to three-feet high, but when you are on site you realize that those rapids are 10- to 15-feet tall and that the water is moving faster than you have ever seen water move before. When water runs like this it becomes immediately clear that natural fish passage is not an option. The burst swimming is simply not enough.
For those who are working on site, the Canadians can be proud of all the work that the long days, the co-operation and the foresight shown by the project partners there. The rockslide at Big Bar is an enormous slice of a 200-foot cliff that slid into and fell across the 180-foot width of the river at that point. It is technically a more difficult problem than Hell's Gate that requires the latest technology solutions and innovative thinking. The goal of everyone is to provide passage this year and then every year to come.
We hope that Whooshh passage portal changes the map, allowing for real-time fisheries management decision-making. It is intended to future-proof fish passage against the impacts of changing climates such as warmer water and variable water levels from floods or drought; prevent the spread of invasive fish species through selective fish passage; and offer a SMARTer solution with more comprehensive and current data to make fisheries management decisions, such as seeing when pinniped injuries are impacting the fish travelling upstream.
Why do all of this? Because the impact of not deploying such solutions quickly is felt for decades, if not for centuries. If we have learned nothing else in this age of COVID, we can take away this much. It is far less costly to act early and aggressively, and to capture near real-time data than to delay and be faced with a doubtful future and no certain solutions. At Whooshh, we envisioned a better outcome for native fish species years ago, and we are happy to help bring cutting-edge technology solutions to Big Bar today.
Thank you.