Fraser fish kill linked to gravel operation

Scott Simpson, CanWest NewsService
Published: Tuesday, April 18, 2006

VANCOUVER -- The smell of the dead fish reached Aaron Salt's nose even before his hands could delve deep enough into the rough gravel to uncover their corpses.

On the morning of March 4, Salt and a group of fellow students had set out on a trip to collect photos for a visual essay on British Columbia's Fraser River, which would be their contribution to an upcoming open house for the B.C. Institute of Technology fish and wildlife program.

But when they came up to the south bank of the river, what they found instead was a catastrophic fish kill that claimed the lives of between 1.5 million and 2.25 million baby pink salmon.

That's three or four times the number of fish that died in a toxic chemical spill into the Cheakamus River after a CN Rail car accident near Squamish last August.

A report on the disaster, co-authored by the students, their instructors and the Fraser Valley Salmon Society, was obtained by the Vancouver Sun and will go into general release today.

The report is expected to ignite a controversy focusing directly on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which authorized a short-term gravel mining operation immediately adjacent to an area that contains some of the most productive spawning habitat on Canada's most significant salmon river.

The report describes how upstream, to the right of the students, was a temporary gravel road slicing out across the bed of the Fraser, serving as a causeway for trucks moving gravel out of a mining operation on an island in the middle of the river. Downstream below the road, the causeway had shut off the flow of the river through the Big Bar Island side channel and left high and dry a spawning area several hectares in size.

The river above the causeway was a full metre higher than it was below, just a stone's throw away, the report states.

Salt said the students, guided by BCIT instructor Marvin Rosenau, could tell at a glance the river had only recently receded from the area.

The exposed gravel surface was pockmarked with about 6,500 nest depressions that served now as the grave markers for millions of salmon who were in the most delicate stage of their tenuous life cycle, developing from tiny red eggs into alevin.

"When we first started digging in, just to see if there were any alevin in there, the gravel smelled of rotting fish. It was quite shocking. You could only see a few when you started to dig but you could just smell them down there," Salt said in an interview on Monday.

The students went back to the spot several times over the next several days and noted that when the causeway was finally removed, the flow of water over the spawning area was restored.

Rosenau, a former senior fish-

eries biologist with the province, said he doesn't believe DFO rank and file staff made the decision to ignore the environmental threat imposed by the causeway.

"They would have had to be blind in order not to know the risk was more than trivial," Rosenau said, adding he believes DFO managers pressured field staff to overlook any problems associated with the causeway.

As an example, he said that during a March 9 visit, he witnessed a federal environmental monitor make what he described as a brief, cursory appearance at the operation site -- even as he and his students were mapping out the impacted area and digging into exposed salmon nets to gauge the extent of the kill.

Only two years ago, the federal Fisheries Department lifted a moratorium banning gravel mining on the Fraser, over the objections of conservation and sport fishing groups who feared industrial operations in the bed of the world's most significant salmon river would be harmful to fish.

The department is currently conducting a review of the situation.