Fisheries committee  Not necessarily. We try to do riffle dredging, which is basically taking gravel out of riffles. These gravel bars have very high habitat value. In effect, all these high habitat value bars are being high-graded. We tried to have gravel taken out of the big riffles in the adjoining areas during the summer when there are no fish in the middle of the river, turbidity is very high, and the background turbidity addition would not cause any fish habitat impact.

Fisheries committee  Yes. If this had happened at Big Bar, nobody would have complained. There wouldn't have been one complaint. This happened at Minto Channel, Harrison Bar, in 2000. It was a clean operation. Gravel was taken out. I, as a biologist, didn't like to see gravel taken out, but flood protection is predominant, and they did it right.

Fisheries committee  It's the same size of channel, though, the same relative flow. This might even have been a little bit more flow, but it's costly to.... In this particular case, all of the vehicles and all of the excavators were barged across to the island--

Fisheries committee  That's right, and all of the gravel was taken to the conveyor belt. The conveyor belt moved the gravel across to the mainland and then all the vehicles and the excavators were barged back to the mainland so there was never any impact within the wetted perimeter. And 2006 is an even year, so pink salmon would have been incubating in the gravel during even years in the Fraser River gravel reach.

Fisheries committee  This past year and 2005 seemed to have a bit of a crash, as opposed to 2003, which may have exceeded 20 million fish, which may have exceeded 30 million fish throughout the whole watershed. In 2005 they were far less abundant. Within the gravel reach, which is in effect from just above Mission to Hope, is the most densely spawned salmon spawning area in all the province, and we think that it may have exceeded 10 million fish in 2005.

Fisheries committee  This is the first time I have heard of it. My jaw dropped when the C&P; officer said, “If it were my area, I would start an investigation.” Then, as part of the further conversation he pulled out the relevant sections of the Criminal Code. I think it was sections 336 and 122....

Fisheries committee  First of all, the gravel agreement was based on a UBC study that took bed elevation measurements, in other words, a bathymetric profile, from 1952, and then compared it to 1999. This is based primarily on a PhD thesis by Dr. Darren Hamm, of the department of geography. There was an enormous amount of to-ing and fro-ing in terms of the accuracy and precision of this particular study over the period of those years.

Fisheries committee  In that neighbourhood, yes.

Fisheries committee  The authorization and the targets are different things. Individual sites.... I think the Popkum site was around 130,000. This site was about 50,000, and they try to hit around 500,000.

Fisheries committee  I don't know exactly, but I think it was about half a dozen.

Fisheries committee  No, there was Popkum. There was the Big Bar. I believe there were two down at Gill Road. I think there were a couple of smaller ones, one up at Seabird and one at Hamilton Bar. So there were roughly half a dozen sites.

Fisheries committee  That's correct.

Fisheries committee  That's correct. That was our ballpark guesstimate. We basically took the surface area of the redds at that particular site, used biostandards out of the published literature, and basically did our multiplications and divisions as a function of that.

Fisheries committee  No, that's unlikely. The species that are endangered don't spawn at that time of year and don't spawn in that kind of habitat, so these would not have been listed species.

Fisheries committee  There was another species that was impacted in a smaller way. When you drop the water surface elevation on these big bars, you also affect the local hydrology. Chum salmon don't spawn in main channels, as pink salmon do; they spawn in dead-water side channels. At the far perimeter of the bar, there is a dead channel, a groundwater channel, which, when we first went to observe it, was completely dry.