concerning Site ‘C’ flooding and the aftermath.
Summer of 2023, we made a jet boat trip on the Peace River from Hudson’s Hope to the Site C damsite. We visited every island and did shore walks over four days.
We took plenty of pictures, mostly of the huge mess that BC Hydro has left – hundreds upon hundreds of half burnt log piles – hundreds of thousands of trees from 1’ to 6’ cut and left lay like a thousand pickup sticks.
Anybody have any idea of what will happen with all this trash as the water rises - It will all flow downstream to Site C and maybe get caught up in the log boom, just below Eagle Island.
This log jam of floating debris will be miles long, and any moose, deer, elk, and bears that try to swim across the Peace will get caught up in this log jam and drown.
This will go on for years as stumps start to float, riverbanks slide, and of course tons of trees and logs will come out of the Halfway River during any kind of, and that’s been going on for ages.
This is a repeat of history that was well documented as the Bennett Dam and the upper Peace was flooded to create Williston reservoir.
Hundreds of thousands of moose drowned in the Peace as the waters rose, caught up in the log jams as they could not swim to shore – their rotten bloated carcasses floating in the water for years to come.
This was well documented in the book, Crooked River Rats by Bernard McKay, and you can read it for yourself. This is going to happen again as the Site C waters rise.
Fort St. John gets its water supply from the Peace River aquifers just downstream of Site C, water that will be contaminated with all sorts of decaying carcasses.
This will go on for years, and BC Hydro will have to clean up all the floating debris and dead animals – the ones that sink will be lost to fish food, I guess.
This article was written by Mark Meiers.
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