1. July 2010 BCBusiness 207206 BCBusiness July 2010
rockbetween a
hardand a
place
b y T y e e Br i d g e
p h o t o g r a p h y b y H u be rt K a n g
fraser fight:
Activist Frank Kwak
(left) and researcher
Otto Langer are
concerned gravel
removal is harming
Fraser River fish for
no good reason
Isthemultimillion-dollargravelextractionprogramonthe
FraserRiveractuallysavinglives–preventingadevastatingflood,as
governmentofficialsclaim? Orisitjustpaddingthepocketsofalucky
fewandcausingirreparableharmtoafragileecosystem?
When I meet Frank Kwak, he’s in his
backyard planting dahlias, wearing black
polyester running pants tucked into a pair
of gumboots. Screened on the back of his
white T-shirt is a leaping large­mouth bass.
He’s agreed to take me out to the Fraser
RiverandshowmeGillBar,akilometre-long
gravel bar near Chilliwack that’s become
the latest focal point in a decade-long battle
over gravel mining in the Fraser. After we
get into my car, Kwak pulls out an unpeeled
orangeandanenergybar.“Sorryaboutthis,”
he says. “I haven’t gotten around to break-
fast yet.”
Kwak, 62, is a busy man. The president
of the Fraser Valley Salmon Society, he sits
on “well over 20” committees dealing with
sport-fishing issues and river habitat. Ten
yearsago,hetookearlyretirementsoheand
his wife could move to Chilliwack, where
through a local church they worked with
refugees from Kosovo and later launched
their own Christian ministry to feed the
city’s homeless and hungry. A fly fisher-
man, Kwak soon found that the valley was,
if not an angler’s Canaan, at least a decent
place for a retiree to enjoy weekends fish-
ing for steelhead trout and salmon. But over
the next decade, his attempt at a relaxing
hobby led him into the fraught politics of
fishandwater.Hishomelessministryisnow
a reduced-fee catering company, and these
days he makes fewer hot meals than confer-
ence calls.
Kwakdownplayshisknowledgeofstream
ecology and fish habitat. “I don’t know really
very much,” he says. “I’m just a grunt and a
willing participant.” Still, Kwak has been
known to get his hands in the gravel, which
at least once has landed him on the front
page. In 2006, while exploring a channel
island called Big Bar, he found thousands
of exposed, dried-up “redds”: scooped-out
nests of fertilized eggs left in the fall by
spawning salmon. An access road built to
thebarbyalocalgravelcompanyhadcutoff
thespawningchannelanddrieditup,killing
an estimated two million pink salmon fry. It
was one of the largest documented fish kills
inrecentB.C.history.ThepinkkillatBigBar
was big news at the time for being a major
botch but also because it raised old ques-
tionsaboutgraveloperationsintheFraser –
questions that remain unsettled.

2. bcbusinessonline.ca July 2010 BCBusiness 209
in its well-washed gravel come here to
die: millions of chum and up to 10 million
humpbacked pinks in alternate years.
Otto Langer is a retired fisheries biolo-
gist who spent 32 years with Fisheries and
Oceans Canada, colloquially known as the
DFO (after its former name, the Depart-
ment of Fisheries and Oceans). Like many
others concerned about fish habitat in the
Fraser, he questions the motives for gravel
extraction. “The program as it’s presently
being sold is misleading, and there’s obvi-
ously more than a flood-control agenda
being pushed at this time,” says Langer,
who has spent a good part of his retire-
ment years compiling a massive file on
gravel extraction in the Fraser River. He
and Marvin Rosenau (of BCIT’s fish, wild-
life and recreation program), along with
John Werring of the David Suzuki Foun-
dation, the B.C. Wildlife Federation and
othergroups,haveformedtheFraserRiver
Gravel Stewardship Committee to lobby
the government on the impact of gravel
mining in the Fraser.
In a review of the DFO’s role in Fraser
gravel extraction released last March,
Langer notes that gravel mining in B.C.’s
rivers has had a long and occasionally
smelly history. Over the past century,
construction companies and others in the
Fraser Valley, writes Langer, “have often
extracted the clean gravels from salmon
spawning streams as a local source of
cheap aggregate for roads and making
concreteforconstructionprojects....Min-
ing gravel from the Coquitlam River in the
Lower Mainland destroyed much of the
river’s habitat and drove a healthy run of
pink salmon into extinction. Indeed, some
40 years ago, construction workers in the
area complained that concrete made from
Coquitlam River gravels gave off a bad rot-
ten salmon smell due to the large numbers
of salmon eggs in the concrete.” On the
nearby Fraser, extractions continued up
until about 1998 when the DFO asked for
and “largely got” a moratorium on gravel
mining – not completely, as small “experi-
mental” removals continued – pending an
overall management plan for salmon and
fish habitat in the river.
But the pressure to reopen it was per-
sistent. A report on aggregate supply for
theprovincialMinistryofEmploymentand
Industry in 1996 noted a dwindling aggre-
gate supply in the Fraser Valley and thus
“increasing demand on Upper Fraser Val-
ley sources, particularly the Fraser River
gravelbarspossessinghigh-qualitygravel.”
In 2002, after a four-year break, the gov-
ernment allowed mining to resume.
I
t’s a sunny day in late April, and as
Frank Kwak and I drive over the dike
we can see the river shining through
the cottonwoods. We park and Kwak
leads me back onto the dike, an elevated
gravel road set back 150 metres from the
river. Five minutes later, he spots the place
he’s looking for and we make our way back
down. We wade through the knee-high
grass to the riverbank and see a seal poke
its head out of the water near the shore. “If
they say there’s not fish in here, well,” says
Kwak, “obviously there is.”
The seal looks at us with something
like amusement, but Kwak isn’t smiling.
The seal is about 80 metres from Gill Bar,
which is one of about a dozen bars mined
for gravel in the past 10 years and the
otto Langer (bottom right)208 BCBusiness July 2010
Gravel extraction in the Chilliwack
area of the river has been going on by
private aggregate companies for decades.
Since 2004 the operations have increased
in size and number, ostensibly to protect
$6-billion worth of homes, businesses and
public infrastructure in the Fraser Valley
from a New Orleans-style flood – like the
granddaddyFraserfloodof1894ortheone
that devastated the region in 1948. While
private companies are still mining the
gravel, their operations are now approved
and conducted under the auspices of
Emergency Management B.C. (EMBC), part
of the provincial Ministry of Public Safety
and Solicitor General. But a growing num-
ber of biologists, local First Nations and
river hydraulics experts – as well as sport
fishermenlikeKwak–questiontheofficial
story of flood protection and worry that
the program is really a means of subsidiz-
ing a local resource industry. By framing
gravel mining as an “emergency” public
safety work, say critics, the government
is quashing public input and ecological
review – and using up limited flood-pro-
tection funds.
“I’m pretty well convinced this is a
gravel grab that has very little to do with
flood protection,” says Kwak as we step
out of the car. “It’s done under the guise
of flood protection, but the gravel is being
removed for profit. Who all is profiting
from it I’m not sure.”
G
ravel is not sexy. The fortunes
of B.C.’s $300-million-a-year
aggregate industry – sand,
gravel and crushed rock – go
undiscussed at cocktail parties, despite
ourblinddependenceonthem.Gravelisas
basictomodernsocietyasflouristobread
baking; it’s a main ingredient for roads,
home foundations, sidewalks, schools,
bridges and hospitals. Construction and
road maintenance projects require about
54 million tonnes of aggregate a year, an
average of 12 tonnes for each person in
B.C. The Metro Vancouver market alone
is valued at $135 million, consuming about
15 million tonnes of gravel and sand every
year–roughlyequaltotheweightofabout
158,000 Boeing 757s – with most of that
gravelcomingfromtheSecheltareaonthe
Sunshine Coast.
The Fraser Valley market, on the other
hand, is much smaller, with about 800,000
tonnes of sand and gravel (plus another
600,000tonnesofcrushedrock)consumed
annually. Inamarketthissize,theexposed
gravel bars of the 65-kilometre stretch of
theFraserRiverbetweenMissionandHope
– known as the “gravel reach” or the Heart
of the Fraser – start to look pretty appeal-
ing: if costs for building access bridges and
roadstothebarsarecovered,astheyoften
are, by the province under the EMBC flood
protection program, gravel is relatively
clean and easy to access.
The reach is where all the gravel car-
ried by the river is deposited in a braided
alluvial fan – gravel that originates from
the weathering rock of the Fraser Canyon
above Hope or is delivered into the Fraser
by mountain streams and landslides. The
reach is also prime habitat for 30 species
of fish – including steelhead, pikeminnow,
shiners and endangered white sturgeon
– and the passageway for salmon headed
to and from their spawning beds. Droves
of pink and chum salmon that were born
rich riverbed: Thousands of tonnes
of gravel are taken from sites such as
Big Bar in Chilliwack each year and sold
in the construction market. Authorities
say the gravel mining is necessary
for flood protection

3. bcbusinessonline.ca July 2010 BCBusiness 211
is coming into the stretch and not moving
through or past the [gravel reach] . . . the
gravelissettlingontotheriverbedandthe
riverbed is building up. And because the
river is diked, that causes people to begin
managing the river, at least slight portions
of it, to minimize flood risk and meet other
objectives as well.”
Which raises the question, How much
gravel has actually built up in the Fraser?
AccordingtoMichaelChurch,aretiredUBC
professor of geomorphology and hydrol-
ogy, an average of 230,000 cubic metres
of gravel settles in the riverbed between
Hope and Mission every year. If you could
spreaditevenlythroughoutthechannel,it
adds up to about three millimetres a year,
or about 15 centimetres since the 1948
flood. But this is an artificial number, as
gravel is not deposited evenly throughout
the reach. BCIT’s Rosenau points out that
due to erosion by the river itself, which
carries existing deposits farther down-
stream when the freshet is running high,
there are large sections – a 22-kilometre
stretch between the Sumas and Harrison
rivers, for instance – that have lost large
volumes of gravel over the last 10 years.
“Flood protection is very much a specific
and local matter of removing gravel from
where it is building up,” he says. “Manag-
ing flooding in the river to some sort of
artificial sediment budget number over
the entire reach, as the government is cur-
rently doing, is just plain loopy.”
Church adds that “the entire program
[of gravel extraction] is highly experimen-
tal,” and that “in almost every case in the
worldwheregravelhasbeenremovedfrom
a river, it has been removed in volumes
greatly in excess of input, which is almost
never known, and the river has promptly
collapsedintoaditch-likeformwithdrastic
consequences for the riverine ecosystem.”
While removal might still afford a means
of flood protection to complement raising
dikes, Church believes that “the rational
solution” would be to limit the number of
homes, businesses and farms on the flood
plain, “indeed, to start reassembling sec-
tors of the flood plain for preservation as
floodable wetland.” But he acknowledges
that homeowners, the business commu-
nity, farmers and real estate developers
are unlikely to find this appealing, to say
the least.
While his research has been used by
EMBC to justify the extraction program,
Church is largely critical of the govern-
ment’s chosen flood-mitigation projects
to date, calling the 2006 Big Bar extrac-
tion “not an optimal choice” and the 2008
Spring Bar extraction “a very poor choice.”
His opinions are based, he says, on the
notion that gravel should only be removed
from zones where it chronically accumu-
lates, and “only Gill Bar lies in one of those
zones.” Quotedina2008articleintheGlobe
and Mail, Church went even further, saying
that it was “misleading” for government to
say there was a flood risk at Seabird Island
because gravel has not been building up
at Spring Bar. The reach where Spring Bar
lies, he told the reporter, has “on the whole
been degrading – that is, it has been losing
gravel for several decades now.”
Peter Ward of UBC’s civil engineering
department, one of Church’s colleagues,
concurred. “As a hydrology engineer who
has been involved with matters concern-
ing Fraser River flooding for many years,
I am surprised about why this project [at
Spring Bar] could possibly be justified on
the basis of flood control,” he said in a sep-
arate written opinion issued around the
same time, adding that it “looks as though
someoneproceededwiththeconstruction
work without getting or listening to com-
petent advice.”
S
oifgravelremovalprojectshave
not been chosen for flood con-
trol, then why? Critics of the
program point to the money to
bemadefromgravelsalesandgovernment
grants. Between 2005 and 2009, the prov-
incespent$16.6milliononfloodprotection
programs in the Fraser Valley, including
dikeimprovementsinMission,Abbotsford
210 BCBusiness July 2010
largest extraction site of 2010. In Febru-
ary K & L Contractors Inc., a local gravel
company, was given a “Section 9” permit
by the B.C. Ministry of Environment to
work “in and about a stream,” allowing the
company to mine 185,000 cubic metres of
gravel from the bar, about 310,000 tonnes.
More than 10,000 truckloads were hauled
fromthebaronatight10-weektimeline;K
& L had to beat the rising meltwaters that
now covered most of the bar.
Rivers are wild; they can be tamed but
they remain unpredictable. The big flood
of 1948 is still vivid in the memories of
Fraser Valley elders, and the stories trou-
bleanyonewholivesinthearea,especially
those who have stood on the dikes dur-
ing spring thaw and watched the river
roar by. Following another flood scare in
2007, the province agreed to add $100
million to a $60-million, 10-year invest-
ment by the federal government aimed at
improving area dikes and instituting other
flood-protection measures. But residents
are still nervous and want to believe that
authorities are doing everything they can
to protect their homes, families and busi-
nesses. That is why, Kwak says, EMBC’s
gravel extraction program has held such
popular appeal.
“It’s a pretty positive move on behalf
of provincial and federal leaders to tell a
community they’re doing everything they
can to prevent Chilliwack from flooding
in a freak flood. Can it happen? Well, of
course,” he says. “And so for Joe Q. Public,
if his ministers or MLAs tell him that there
is a chance the river will flood someday
– and that what we are doing and what
we’ll continue to do is protect your prop-
erty by removing gravel from the river
– he’ll be quite happy to hear that. If you
own a house in Chilliwack and could care
less about fish and there’s a one in a thou-
sand chance of a flood, you’re going to say,
‘Well, let’s do it.’”
It’s not only Kwak who has questions
about the program and its raison d’être.
In early May, in an exchange at the B.C.
legislature, Delta South MLA Vicki Hun-
tington asked Environment Minister
Barry Penner to provide provincial stud-
ies of flood control in the Fraser Valley
from EMBC. “A number of months ago . . .
I also asked whether the minister or the
office of the solicitor general, the emer-
gency measures office, would provide the
scientific documents that sustained and
showed that gravel extraction was helpful
in flood control. I haven’t received those
documents,” she said. “I was wondering
whether the minister and his staff could
see fit to provide me with [that] . . . I see
no science that is indicating the gravel
removal is anything but of benefit to the
extraction companies.”
In addition to his position as envi-
ronment minister, Penner is the MLA for
Chilliwack and a key promoter of gravel
extraction in the Fraser. (A 2008 article
in the Chilliwack Times noted that gravel
removal was part of Penner’s political
platform in the 2001 and 2005 elections.)
Responding to Huntington’s questions,
Penner argued that the removals were
essential due to gravel building up on the
river bottom. “I know that it doesn’t rise
equallyanditdoesn’triseineverylocation
all the time, but over time we know that as
youdepositsomethinginaconfinedspace,
that area will start to fill up.” He rejected
Huntington’s suggestion that the pro-
gram’s only real benefit was to extraction
companies: “I appreciate that the member
thinks there’s some kind of conspiracy,
but let me tell you that people living in the
Fraser Valley, I think, have every right to
expect flood protection.”
Dwayne Meredith is acting director
of EMBC’s Strategic Mitigation Program,
which oversees the gravel mining proj-
ects – or “removals” as the agency prefers
to call them – in the Fraser gravel reach.
When asked about the nature and motive
ofgraveloperationsinthereach,andifthe
way that it is done is explicitly for the pro-
tection of the public, Meredith’s answer
is unequivocal. “Absolutely,” he says. “As
time moves on and more and more gravel
In2006anaccess
roadbuilttothe
digsiteatBigBar
cutoffaspawning
channel,killing
anestimatedtwo
millionpink
salmonfry
otto Langer

4. bcbusinessonline.ca July 2010 BCBusiness 213
and Chilliwack. Of this, $2.6 million was
devoted to “sediment management” –
building access roads to gravel bars and
providing hydraulic studies and environ-
mentalmonitoring.Asaresult,contractors
extractedgravelon14occasionsfromnine
gravelbars,miningthemforapproximately
3.3 million tonnes of aggregate – worth, at
a minimum retail price for unprocessed
gravel, about $13.2 million.
The proponents of most extraction
operationsinthegravelreacharetwoFirst
Nations bands connected to the Sto:lo
Tribal Council (STC): the Seabird Island
Band near Agassiz and the Cheam Band
near Rosedale. These bands, which claim
traditional rights over several gravel bars
inthereach,workinpartnershipwithcon-
tractorswhopossesstheheavymachinery.
In 2008 Spring Bar became the largest and
most ambitious gravel-mining project in
the Fraser to date. Advocating extraction
was the 850-member Seabird band, which
awarded the mining contract to Jakes
Construction, a Chilliwack company that
handles everything from municipal sewer
upgrades to subdivision site preparation.
Jakes, as it happens, was also the contrac-
tor that built the access road to Big Bar
in 2006, inadvertently causing the pink
salmon kill.
Under the EMBC program, every con-
tractor who extracts gravelfrom the reach
is allowed to keep it for resale in lieu of
cash payment. In the case of Spring Bar,
Jakes was permitted to pull out and keep
570,000 tonnes of gravel – or well over half
the amount of sand and gravel sold in the
Chilliwack area in a given year. (Larger
operators can process gravel and create
a value-added product – clean pea gravel
or larger-sized drain rock sell for around
$26 a tonne – but smaller contractors
such as Jakes usually sell Fraser gravel as
is, directly from a pile, for about $4 per
tonne.) Jakes owner Jake Klaassen would
not go on record with his overhead costs,
but, according to industry sources, remov-
ing gravel from the Fraser reach can cost
anywherefrom$1to$3atonne.Whilemar-
gins are low, volume is high. At the going
rate for unprocessed gravel, the Spring
Bar operation resulted in the capture of an
asset worth roughly $2.25 million.
Turning gravel into cash is a long-term
proposition, however; half of the gravel
taken out of Spring Bar two years ago is
still sitting unsold, according to Klaassen.
“There is a market for the gravel, but
how can you show up at some vendor’s
door with 100,000 tonnes of gravel in one
month? They’re just not going to take it.
They’re going to say, ‘What do you want
me to do with these 10,000 truckloads?’”
Selling off the half-million-tonne pile from
Spring Bar, he says, will take five years
and bring him only a five to seven per cent
return on his investment. “Many contrac-
tors won’t do gravel extraction because
it’s difficult to make it financially viable,”
he says. “You’ll find a lot of these extrac-
tionswon’thappenifthere’snotsomekind
of collective agreement. . . . I always get a
little upset when people say you’re taking
the gravel out and there’s these big mar-
gins in it. I’d love them to know that it’s
not that way at all; it’s an expensive cubic
metre coming out.”
The collective agreement Klaassen
refers to describes a financial arrange-
ment as much as a flood-control plan.
The Seabird band receives royalties for
gravel removal from Jakes as well as
other unspecified payments for additional
services, which form part of Klaassen’s
overhead costs. Neither Klaassen nor the
band’s economic development adviser,
Brian Jones, would place a definite value
on Seabird’s involvement in the partner-
ship, but in the past the band has charged
royalty rates ranging from $0.40 to $2
per tonne. Between 2005 and 2009, the
band partnered with Jakes Construction,
and possibly other contractors, to mine
about 900,000 tonnes of gravel from the
reach – which, at a lowball rate of $0.40 a
tonne,amountsto$360,000.Thebandalso
received $860,000 in provincial funding to
build temporary causeways to the Spring
andTranmerbars–twolucrativecontracts,
bothawardedtoJakes.(Jakesalsoreceived
$200,000 from the City of Chilliwack to
build the access road to Big Bar in 2006.)
The funding process thus forms a loop:
government money is delivered to a band
to build a bridge, the band pays a contrac-
tor to build it, the contractor removes the
gravel – and from the revenue earned by
building the bridge and selling the gravel,
the contractor pays royalties and fees for
“additional services” back to the band.
When asked about this arrangement,
Jones protests that his band barely makes
any money after all the time spent pro-
cessing red tape and permits. “To quote
a royalty amount is not what I would like

5. bcbusinessonline.ca July 2010 BCBusiness 215
to see as this doesn’t reflect our overall
intent, which is to remove materials from
the river to lower the flood profile,” he
said in an emailed response. “Any lower-
ing will be a huge benefit for Seabird as we
do not have any dike protection at similar
heights with others. . . . We are not in this
for the money.”
Similarly,Klaassendefendsthepractice
of gravel mining as having public safety
uppermost in mind and downplays the
profit motive. “We firmly believe it does a
lot of good for our valley and everything
here, so we’re willing to do a long-term
investment,” he says. “Everybody has this
predetermined view that this is very valu-
able material. . . . At the end of the day, it’s
no different than anything else: it’s done
for the emergency, the flood protection,
and after that the thought goes into the
sales and to the market.”
In the same time frame between 2005
and 2009, K & L Contracting – a gravel pit
company owned by Chief Lincoln Douglas
of the 479-member Cheam band – mined
at least four bars in the reach for over
600,000 tonnes of gravel. Like the Seabird
band, the Cheam have been vocal propo-
nents of gravel extraction in the Fraser
River. Ernie Crey is a Cheam member,
former director of STC fisheries programs
and currently a senior policy adviser to
the STC. In a written statement released
in April, Crey insisted that gravel removal
in the reach “is an important public safety
work and an important component in
maintaining viable fish habitat. The fact
thatsciencehasn’tcaughtuptothisreality
should come as no surprise to anyone. An
integral component to understanding the
Fraser River and the fish within it is the
traditional knowledge of the people who
have lived here and been sustained by its
bounty for thousands of years.”
Yet a 2004 DFO briefing memo regard-
ingrelationshipswiththeCheamsuggests
that government-sponsored gravel mining
projects in the reach may have more to do
with economic development, and détente,
than flood safety or traditional knowl-
edge. Following years of confrontations
between DFO fisheries officers and Cheam
band members over fishing rights (one of
which, in 2003, resulted in officers pepper
spraying the band’s head councillor), local
DFO administrators recommended to their
deputy minister that as part of an attempt
to “develop [a] long-term respectful

6. bcbusinessonline.ca July 2010 BCBusiness 217
relationshipbetweenDFO andCheam,”the
fisheries agency should “facilitate a 2004
gravel removal opportunity for the com-
munity: excellent economic development
benefitforthecommunity($40,000),profit
for the band council.”
There was, at that time, no mention of
fish habitat, flood risks or public safety.
B
ack at the Gill Road parking
lot next to the dike, Kwak and
I meet Chief Jack Mussell of
the Skwah Band, a Sto:lo band
of about 450 members not affiliated with
the STC. Mussell has been doing habitat
restoration on the Fraser and its tributar-
ies for the past 15 years. A former logger,
he’s 68 and remembers being “right in the
midst”ofthebigfloodof1948.Heiscritical
of gravel removal, predicting the possible
channelizationcitedbyMichaelChurch.“I
would like to see this river survive so your
great-grandkidscouldseesomethinghere,
see that we cared enough to save it. Oth-
erwise we’re going to have one big trough
from Hope to Vancouver.” When asked if
he considers the gravel removal program
to be legitimate flood control, he laughs.
“I’veworkedontheriverallmylife,andI’ve
spent years doing everything you could
think of with fish habitat,” he says. “Let
me tell you, these guys are just blowing
smoke with all this flood protection stuff.
It’s a money grab.” He leans out the win-
dow of his white pickup and nods at the
river. “Crey and [Chief Lincoln] Douglas
have got a conflict of interest when they
start talking about the fish and the gravel.
If [Crey] was representing us, he would be
asking us. He’s not. There’s 6,000 of us!
Every one of them, they’re not represent-
ing the people. They’re speaking for them-
selves; that’s all they’re doing.”
Gravel extraction in the Fraser River
as currently practiced appears not to be a
risk-mitigation work performed with pro-
vincialfunds,likebuildingadike,butsome-
thing closer to an economic development
project, one housed under an emergency-
preparedness program. This explains why
Spring Bar, a site given a thumbs-down by
leading hydrologists, was mined for a vast
quantity of gravel. Sites are being chosen
not specifically for any strategic value in
reducing flood threat but for easy access
to making a buck – and as a way to build
better relationships between government
agencies and certain native bands.
216 BCBusiness July 2010

7. 218 BCBusiness July 2010
Economic development is no sin,
but neither is it flood control. For gravel
removal to actually lower the flood risk,
says Marvin Rosenau, the provincial gov-
ernment needs to re-evaluate its policy of
offering upgravelbars asfor-profit mining
sites.Ifgravelremovalisjustified,itshould
goforward asapublicwork,basedon stra-
tegic science. “The agencies must provide
a publicly transparent hydraulic ‘trigger,’
where gravel is only removed if a certain
thresholdinincreasedwater-surfaceeleva-
tion is met. Otherwise ‘any gravel removal
is good gravel removal’ becomes the con-
text of flood protection, which is intellec-
tually,technicallyandstatistically absurd.”
He is equally outspoken on the need for
investment in the wild habitat values of
the gravel reach. “In the context of gravel
removal from the Fraser River, ecologi-
cally our kids will have lost such an enor-
mous amount before we ever knew what
we had,” he says. “This is a large, complex
and difficult stream to work on, and it is an
extraordinarilyecologicallyrichstreamby
both BritishColumbiaandworldstandards
. . . anyone who tells you that the agencies
are protecting the resource in the face of
these large-scale mining efforts has no
idea what they’re talking about.”
With the fly fisherman’s reverence for
moving water and the things that live in it,
Frank Kwak also would like to see the pub-
licsectorhaveavoiceinthegravelremoval
program. The B.C. government, he says,
needs to accept – and enact – the ecologi-
cal oversights suggested by independent
biologists such as Rosenau, Otto Langer
andJohnWerring,whichincludesin-depth
assessment of the habitat value of gravel
bars and surrounding channels before
plans are laid to mine them. “That would
be a big step forward.” But he also thinks
thatagenciessuchastheDFO shouldbegin
restoring what the river, and the people
who live on it, have already lost.
“If we’ve cut off side channels or killed
two million young salmon in the Fraser,
we should mitigate that by saying, ‘Well,
here is some habitat restoration project
that we’re going to do, and pay for it’ – to
pay for that loss going forward,” he says.
“Because what’s happening now, not just
in the gravel but in all kinds of other work,
is we’re losing them, losing the fish and
habitat, stream by stream by stream. And
there’s nothing replacing the stuff that’s
being taken away.” n