Fisheries Committee on March 10th, 2020

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

My other question is this. If you're going to build a permanent structure that has no ability to flex in where its upper or lower end is, can you give me some kind of indication of how a fishway on the west side of the slide, would work when you don't know what the...? You gave us a slide with a massive fluctuation in water levels. How would a structure work with no flexibility to change the upper end and the lower end? Can you tell me how that would be engineered and how that would work because I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that?

[Rebecca Reid]

First of all, I'm not an engineer but, from what I understand, we anticipate at some point the natural fishway could become overcome by high waters and be less effective, so we don't anticipate its being effective during a very high water event.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Aren't high water events the ones we're struggling with?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Mr. Calkins, your time is way over. You've gone 30 seconds over.

Mr. Hardie, for five minutes or less, please.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

First, we'll allow you to answer Mr. Calkins' question.

[Rebecca Reid]

This is why we're looking at other contingencies, for example, the fish pump, as another way. If the fish can't pass through the natural fish passway, we have another way of helping them move, the idea being that rock removal is the ultimate solution.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Did you say that it's really going to be about three years before you totally remediate the area?

[Rebecca Reid]

I don't know. We're hoping that next winter's work would be sufficient, but I don't know.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I want to talk a little again about the work that was actually under way. I heard a reference go by at some point in discussions—not here but in other places—of a 200-year flood event. Did that occur?

[Rebecca Reid]

Yes.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Talk about that. When and what was the impact?

[Rebecca Reid]

Last year there was some very high water in the river and it had a very significant impact on fish passage. At times it impeded our ability to do work in the area and it impeded fish passage significantly. It was a very unfortunate set of events last year.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Through the fall and winter, when you were building roads, drilling, blasting and hanging mesh, from the look of that location, with the wind tunnel effect and Lord knows whatever minus temperatures, that must have made for very uncomfortable working conditions.

[Rebecca Reid]

That's absolutely true. We did lose a number of helicopter days as a result of high winds.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Speak a little bit about the crews and some of the conditions that they had to deal with and how they dealt with them.

[Rebecca Reid]

There are a number of activities that had to take place. The most dangerous, I think, was the rock scaling that was going on. You had individuals literally hanging off the cliffs moving rock to stop it from falling on people below.

For the road construction there, you have rocks coming down and you have people building a road. The reason they spend a lot of time putting up rock mesh is for the protection of the workers. That has been a very important factor.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

You had a skid-way in place to skid equipment down there. What size equipment were you winching down the cliff?

[Rebecca Reid]

There were massive excavators. They were winching excavators down the side of the cliff on a cable as one of their first attempts to move equipment down there.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Inevitably, when you have a situation like this, you make decisions and plans and you follow them through. Have you seen anything so far that made you say that, if the exact same thing happened again, we would do this differently?

[Rebecca Reid]

I think 20/20 hindsight is always a luxury.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Of course, but that's what we're here for.

[Rebecca Reid]

I think so. Every situation is different, but we certainly learned a lot from this experience and I'm sure we could do better.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Are there any particular areas?

[Rebecca Reid]

Some of the work in the summer in how we moved fish and some of the efforts to put things in place.... We did our best with the knowledge that we had. I don't know how we would redesign it.

Do you have a view, Andy?

[Andrew Thomson]

I think some of the monitoring as to the fish populations turned out to be quite critical. Having some of those programs in place and understanding the impact of the movement of fish would have been useful from the point of view of knowing how well or how successfully the helicopter moving was going.

Certainly, there are successes as well. The standing up of a tripartite group and the close partnership with B.C. and first nations in the area was a big win for us. It will benefit us going forward in terms of that close collaboration. It serves as a good groundwork for other unforeseen events that may occur.