Lauren Brown Hornor http://www.fraserriverkeeper.ca/ British Columbia’s Fraser River watershed is a vast ecological, cultural and economic treasure chest, which drains more than ¼ of the province before its egress into the Pacific through Vancouver. The Fraser Delta, the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast of Canada, hosts the Pacific Northwest’s most important salmon runs in North America. More than three-quarters of all economic activity in the British Columbia takes place on land drained by the river. Unfortunately, the Fraser River watershed is not immune to the degradation associated with the pressures of the explosive economic and urban development. The region faces a number of challenges imposed by industries old and new, coupled with the pressures of rapid urban development. Decades of heavy resource extraction and high pollution loads threaten to undermine the rich biodiversity that underpinned the success of the Fraser River Watershed and Vancouver in the first place. Salmon fisheries are depleted, and the future viability of mega fauna like raptors and Orca whales is jeopardized – signifying deeper systemic problems.
Mining, manufacturing, logging, pulp and paper making, farming, and energy industries have lined the banks of the Fraser and have fed the region’s development. Consequent of this activity and loosely enforced environmental regulations, or inadequate statutes, the Fraser suffers from a wide range of pollutants, including heavy metals, excessive nutrients, bacteria, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dioxins. In addition to the industrial stresses exerted on the region, new development pressures metastasize as the vibrant Vancouver region draws more residents and more economic activity. The Greater Vancouver Regional District now houses more than 2.1 million people. It is expected that in the coming 20 years the population will increase by another 50%. This growth has detrimental consequences on the watershed due to both the development of surfaces, which exacerbates storm water runoff and combined sewerage outfalls, and the increased demands upon already inadequate sewage treatment infrastructures.
Fraser Riverkeeper is a grassroots non-profit charity dedicated to the protection, conservation and improvement of the water quality and fish habitat of British Columbia's Fraser River and its surrounding waters, including the waters of southern Georgia Strait. Fraser Riverkeeper, part of the international Waterkeeper Alliance, works via citizen involvement and community action. The full-time Riverkeeper, Douglas Chapman, patrols your waters by boat, responding to citizen complaints of pollution and monitoring water quality to defend your local waterways, bringing polluters to justice. Fraser Riverkeeper is part investigator, scientist, educator, lawyer, and advocate, functioning as a public spokesperson for your local waterway, protecting your right to clean water and a healthy watershed. Doug Chapman, seasoned prosecutor of polluters and experienced commercial fisherman, is one of Canada’s most significant environmental fixtures in the last 30 years. Mr. Chapman has also been a commercial fisherman and the captain or navigator on sailing and motor vessels for 40 years, making passages across the globe, including 2 trans-Atlantic small sailing boat crossings.
Waterkeeper Alliance is an international water advocacy organization that fights for everyone’s right to clean water. The Waterkeeper movement was founded in 1999 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and veteran Waterkeepers to promote a particularly strong model of community-based advocacy. In the past several years the Alliance has rapidly grown from 25 grassroots programs to a global network almost 190 member programs on six continents. Waterkeepers defend rivers, lakes, bays, and shorelines in their communities, patrolling daily, responding to citizen concerns, identifying problems and confronting polluters. Waterkeeper Alliance champions clean water and strong communities by supporting its members with legal, scientific, and policy expertise – and capacity-building support. Nine Waterkeeper programs in Canada form a unique national front of the greater Waterkeeper Alliance movement. This additional layer of support provides Canadian programs unique opportunities for teambuilding and strategizing on local issues that have national repercussions. Recently a Canadian Field Coordinator has been hired to create cohesion among the groups and provide support and resources to each member organization. Both the Waterkeeper Alliance and the Canadian Waterkeeper groups provide invaluable support systems and networks for the Fraser Riverkeeper program.
Float the Boat and other Donations
Fraser Riverkeeper established charity status recently and is on the way to becoming a larger waterkeeper organization, but also needs donations to continue to grow. One area necessary in growth is to have our own boat for regular water patrols. Currently the riverkeeper must go out on loaner boats. Fraser Riverkeeper's Float the Boat fund is just one donation option if you would like to help in any way. With our own boat, we can more easily respond to our pollution hotline, take water samples, and gather other evidence for those breaking environmental laws. To make donations, see the Donate Now button at Fraser Riverkeeper's website. For more news about Fraser Riverkeeper's work and spotlight in the community, see its website.
Upcoming Events
Earth Day Clean-up at Peg Leg Bar (same as last year). Fraser Riverkeeper and Woodtone Building Products join forces again in 2009 for a community event to clean up the Fraser River at the Peg Leg Bar near Chilliwack. The event will last from 1-4 pm, April 19th.
Swim Drink Fish: Imagine a Canada where every person has access to clean water for recreation, where every community has a local supply of clean drinking water, a Canada world-renowned for its thriving, diverse fish life. Imagine a swimmable, drinkable, fishable Canada. That is OUR Canada. Fraser Riverkeeper, in conjunction with Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and Ottawa Riverkeeper, is launching the Swim Drink Fish Project designed to protect and restore Canada’s watersheds. The program will help protect and restore swimability, drinkability and fishability in our watershed. The main problems in our waterbodies center around recreational water quality restrictions, caused by water quality problems such as E. Coli at public beaches, drinking water advisories caused by water quality problems or conservation issues, as well as source water protection issues, and fish consumption advisories or problems caused by contaminants in fish, declining fish populations, and loss of fish habitat. The Swim Drink Fish Project will strip away policy, jargon and politics of experts and professionals and creates an opportunity to discuss the way ordinary people interact with water in the community on a daily basis. The project will invent for the very first time a Swim Drink Fish Index so that Canadians can track how the county’s waterways are really doing, and develop pride and concern for our water wealth.
2008 News
Jack Johnson Concert
Jack Johnson promoted Fraser Riverkeeper through "All At Once," a new social action network that connects people with non-profits, providing tools and motivation, and promoting change through actions, voice and choices -- based on the concept that individual action, multiplied by millions, creates global changes. Fraser Riverkeeper hosted a booth at the concert, along with a small number of other local and national environmental groups in the “Village Green,” at the Jack Johnson Concert in Vancouver. Fraser Riverkeeper promoted its projects, new sewage campaign, and signed up new members, providing educational materials to our community. The tour promoted locally grown and organic foods, bioware, composting, and recycling. After all energy conservation measures have been taken, remaining CO2 emissions were offset through a variety of carbon management projects near areas where the concerts took place.
Metro Vancouver Misses the Mark on Sewage Treatment
Metro Vancouver continues to allow primarily treated sewage to be discharged to Georgia Strait and Burrard Inlet. Public consultation for maintaining status quo for upgrades to Lion’s Gate wastewater treatment plant and Iona wastewater treatment plant timelines, 2020 and 2030, were held earlier this year as part of Metro Vancouver’s Strategy for Upgrading the Liquid Waste Management Plan. Both wastewater treatment plants provide only primary treatment before discharging the effluent to adjacent waterbodies: Burrard Inlet in the case of Lion’s Gate and Georgia Strait in the case of Iona. There are three levels of sewage treatment: primary, a mainly mechanical and basic settling process that removes only 50% of total suspended solids and does not adequately treat polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ammonia, mercury, zinc, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and copper, secondary, which further reduces solids and other pollutants through an effective pathogen removal system, and tertiary, the most advanced form of wastewater treatment. Metro Vancouver is not alone in this dubious distinction, municipal sewage is the largest source of pollution discharged to surface water bodies in Canada. Canada has no national sewage standards, and in British Columbia, 66% of the population is served by primary treatment only. By contrast, in the European Union, all communities with more than 15,000 people have been required to have secondary treatment since 2000, with all urban centers slated to have tertiary treatment by 2010. In the United States, all coastal cities are required to have secondary treatment. According to the Outdoor Recreation Council of BC, the Fraser River tied for 2nd place in BC’s Most Endangered Rivers for 2008 survey due in part to the long-standing threat from sewage pollution. The Iona waste water treatment plant was singled out as particularly problematic because it discharges primary treated sewage into the Georgia Strait where millions of young Fraser River salmon pass through on their journey out to sea. Recent federal fisheries reports indicate another disappointing salmon run should be expected for all of the Fraser River salmon species in 2008 with First Nations being warned that they may not be able to fully support their ceremonial needs this year. The reasons for the low return numbers are not well understood but increasing pressure from fishing, pollution and climate change suggests that we must do more to ensure that degradation to important aquatic habitat be minimized. Fraser Riverkeeper has solid experience in addressing these issues and is in the process of developing an official campaign built on the work of our Riverkeeper, Mr. Doug Chapman. Fraser Riverkeeper will have unique opportunities to increase national and international awareness of the waste water issues within the Fraser River watershed and to highlight the issues of waste water in Canada during the largest event that will be hosted within the Fraser River watershed: the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Gravel Grab at Spring Bar
Fraser River Ad Hoc Stewardship Gravel Removal Committee has asked the federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser to look into government flood-proofing claims to justify its reckless approval of gravel mining in the Fraser River. The petition states the 10-hectare site is considered “exceptional” rearing habitat by many for juvenile sockeye and chinook salmon, as well as habitat for other species protected by federal legislation. The petition follows the largest gravel removal operation in the river ever approved by federal fisheries, approximately 400,000 cubic metres at Spring Bar near Seabird Island. The Fraser River Ad Hoc Stewardship Committee believes that this removal, over time, may partially or completely de-water a major pink salmon spawning habitat equivalent to the capacity for several hundred thousand reproducing fish. These large-scale gravel extractions have detrimental impacts to Chinook salmon and white sturgeon angling sites and result in significant losses to fish habitat, with marginal or no gain to flood protection and erosion. The committee also believes that the DFO is caving to local demands for gravel removal at the expense of habitat and without due consideration to the appropriate habitat science and flood-prevention engineering, or the appropriate environmental legislation or policies. Senior provincial and federal government officials are leveraging a climate of fear of flooding to justify gravel removal for the development industry in the local geographic area with politicians repeatedly justifying gravel removal as a means for flood protection despite science to the contrary. After an estimated 2.2 million pink salmon hatchlings were lost in a “de-watering” event at a gravel removal operation at Big Bar in March, 2006, the DFO issued a report with 10 recommendations, including the immediate creation of a multi-agency technical committee to jointly review future gravel extraction projects before approvals are made. The technical advice has been ignored and most of the recent approvals to remove gravel are the result of political pressure on the DFO to provide aggregate for the construction industry and have very little to do with flood or erosion control. Fraser Riverkeeper, continues to speak to the issue of bad politics and a failed process for the protection of the environment perpetrated by the governmental agencies responsible for protecting important resources at a time when the salmon fishery is facing the challenges of pollution, overfishing and climate change.
Earth Day Clean-up
Fraser Riverkeeper, in partnership with Woodtone Building Products, organized a Fraser River clean-up in celebration of Earth Day on April 27th 2008 at Peg Leg Bar near Chilliwack. We were joined by more than 50 volunteers, including several families, ready to do their part for the environment. Peg Leg Bar is one of the numerous gravel bars located on the Fraser River between Hope and Mission that provide important riparian zones for aquatic and terrestrial plants and animals. As the river leaves the Fraser Canyon at Hope and enters the vast floodplain extending westward to the Georgia Strait, it loses a significant amount of energy which allows heavier aggregate material to be deposited and given the right conditions gravel bars and islands form over time. For those unfamiliar with the gravel bars in the Fraser Valley, they are absolutely remarkable to see; during the late winter and early spring before the freshet begins, the gravel bars are exposed and their expanse is mindboggling. Much of the exposed gravel will be submerged underwater once the freshet begins in late spring, becoming one of many sport fishing hotspots in the area. Peg Leg Bar is a well known access point to the Fraser River for recreational fishing, and is one of the more popular and productive bars for fishing without a boat. Bar fishing the Fraser River is a popular way to appreciate the Fraser River and all it has to offer, providing prime gathering spots for socializing in the great outdoors all year round. Unfortunately, there are those who are not aware of the importance of these bars. In the span of two hours volunteers collected over four tons of waste materials: two and a half tons of garbage and two tons of metal, including bicycles, household appliances and mattress springs, and other recyclables. Following the clean-up, volunteers gathered to enjoy the BBQ provided by Woodtone Building Products and to discuss the significance of their efforts with many vowing to make this an annual event. The clean-up would not have been possible without the support of the City of Chilliwack who provided free tipping fees at the landfill as well as some clean-up supplies and Andy Rotz from Waste Services Incorporated who provided roll-off containers for the waste materials, free delivery to the landfill, as well as, the ever important lavatory amenities.
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