Good morning, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the fisheries standing committee. My name is ZoAnn Morten and I work for the Pacific Streamkeepers Federation, through which I'm lucky enough to work with thousands of streams and streamkeepers across B.C.
We are here today to speak to some of the risks of flood control, and at top of mind is that we risk forgetting that flooding is part of the natural process. Flooding is not always a negative to fish and fish habitat. We need to assess the goodness as well as the detriments.
A risk with flood controls is that we tend to think they allow us to do what we want throughout the watershed while containing river flows. For ages, we have taken minimal efforts to protect the natural function of the landscape while extracting maximum value for users. Now that the flood waters have exceeded the ability of current flood controls to protect life and property, we open the public purse to repair the damage and reinforce what failed.
Flood controls have drawn an artificial line. People think that behind this line, we can develop, and the water will be confined to the other side. Dikes and gates have given us a false sense of security. In mid-November, a lower Fraser River municipality granted a permit for development right on a flood plain.
Flood control infrastructure has made silos within governments. While one government is responsible for fish and fish habitat, another is responsible for dike installation and maintenance, while yet another works with agriculture and urban development to keep the lands drained. Communication between the silos is limited, and each works within its own mandates. I haven't seen the protection of fish take priority during planning processes, and with DFO being largely a regulatory body, it is often brought in only once the plans are already complete.
I look forward to this study bringing fish and fish habitat protection into the mix.
Skill sets are often linked to a job, so a person who is a dike builder may know about stream velocity to understand the size of dike to build to keep the water flowing past an area without causing damage to the dike, but they may not be aware of the resulting change to the natural flow patterns and the maximum velocity that a salmon fry can navigate. Not everyone sees salmon as an asset on their lands, and the flood control measures add a sense of “this is my area, and this is yours.”
As to the physical nature and risks of the flood control measures, with regard to dikes, there was a time when dikes were vegetated to allow the waters to be shaded so as to be kept cool, and the vegetation trailed into the waterways to distribute the flows and allow for spots for fish to hide and leaf litter to fall into the streams. Today's dike management, however, is much different, and the vegetation is no longer allowed to grow. Dikes are mowed according to scheduled maintenance routines, and the timing of the mowing doesn't always line up with the life cycle timing that salmon need.
In the past, dikes were erected to allow flood plains to be behind the structures which, we are finding, does not give the streams the room they need, and they are really being taxed at this time of additional storm-on-storm events and with the continued manipulation of the land upstream.
Floodgates are typically built with limited concern for habitat. They're just cement with a hole and a closure. Human error coupled with a failure to pass along information regarding the placement of these structures and the need to control them often causes hardship to fish. We have often heard groups say that they were walking by and noticed that the gates were closed while the migration of fish was occurring. We know that fish want to come up during the spawn return times, but we are a little less clear as to the timing of smolt migration and the fries' travel plans as they explore one stream and then go on to the next while looking for habitat, food, areas of lower activity levels or just clean, cool water.
Keeping these floodgates open seems to be something that is more part of a desk job than a day-to-day operations obligation.
With regard to pump stations, I'm hoping that Watershed Watch will be here. They do a thorough job of explaining the cons of pump stations. My stomach reels when I think of the damage done to fish for no reason due to these non-fish-friendly systems, and I would ask that no public funds be allotted to fish pumps or other structures that are not able to allow fish of all sizes to pass through without killing or mutilating them.
The Fisheries Act suggests that we cannot kill fish by means other than fishing, and yet the installation of fish-killing pumps still goes on. When we are thinking of flood control of any kind, I think we have to remember that if the tide can't get into an area, neither can a fish. So let's open up those controlled waterways to allow the safe passage of fish into their home waters, and work with water from the time it hits the ground.
This is my third attempt at keeping my thoughts below five minutes, and I hope there is still some clear thinking in there somewhere. Thank you for this opportunity and for your continued support of fish and fish habitat.