I want to thank you for your invitation to present on the state of the Pacific salmon.
I've been involved in many aspects of salmon, but my passion is with community engagement through the salmonid enhancement program, SEP. SEP involves enhancement activities as well as programming, such as Streamkeepers, Stream to Sea, community advisers, science branch, veterinary services, and resource restoration teams, which include an engineer and biologists. These were all brought together and built upon under the SEP banner since 1975 to assist the Pacific salmon.
As I listened to witnesses—and the Big Bar slide kept being referenced—I heard reference to the salmon being in jeopardy prior to this catastrophic event.
It was this knowledge that led to the rewriting of the federal Fisheries Act. The work done by this committee on the Fisheries Act assisted in the renewed federal act, with the meaning and intentions of rebuilding salmon runs and protecting salmon in their habitat. The Fisheries Act can be a strong tool, and we await the regulations being written and followed that will allow it to live up to its potential.
Going back to the Big Bar and the response to it, there was questioning around whether there had ever been a time in history where there was a slide of this magnitude. Hell's Gate was brought up. While I wasn't there in 1914, I did work on the Hell's Gate tram in summer 1974 and got to inform thousands of interested tourists about the slide and the efforts that went into the building of the fishway to allow for the safer journey of our amazing salmon after years—