The Cheslatta Carrier Nation has a plan to restore the Nechako River, keep Alcan doing its usual business, and pay for the whole proposal by generating public energy.
The plan calls on the provincial government to fulfill a promise to build a doorway into the Nechako Reservoir, also known as Ootsa Lake, where the lake's excess water could flow. Since the Kenney Dam was built in the 1950s, a massive amount of water has been collected behind a rock wall to build up pressure for making electricity. It was done to feed hydroelectric power to what is now Rio Tinto-Alcan's aluminum smelter in Kitimat.
But Ootsa Lake got much bigger than the Kemano Project needs, so to keep the water from pouring over the dam, the excess water is allowed to slip through the Skins Lake Spillway (a door in the wall of Ootsa Lake at about the mid-point of the lake) as needed. It rockets out into a channel made up of Murray Lake, Cheslatta Lake, Cheslatta River and other smaller, connected waterways and it all collects to form the headwaters of the Nechako River.
Before the Kenney Dam, the Nechako used to start off by a smaller Ootsa Lake and tributaries flowing through a deep canyon that still exists not far from the rock wall. At that time, the Cheslatta people lived in the vicinity of Cheslatta Lake and Murray Lake, until they were burned out of their homes by operatives working for the government of the day into a temporary squatter's community on higher ground on another First Nation's land. It remains their home to this day.
When Ootsa Lake flooded to its current size, wildly fluctuating amounts of water started to disrupt the local ecosystem, throwing off the food gathering and livelihood of the aboriginal territory-holders.
Cheslatta senior policy advisor Mike Robertson has unveiled a plan, designed by the First Nation and B.C. construction firm Surespan Group, to not only build the long suggested water release facility but have it pay for itself and provide power for the province, restoring a consistent flow of water through the Skins Lake Spillway. That would allow the Murray-Cheslatta waterway to have a dependable fish and wildlife population again, giving the Nechako River some of its former life back.
"It would be a hydroelectric generation point that could be built with no new flooding needed, there is no negative impact at all but actually has positive environmental impacts. It's a rare bird, in the history of power generation," Robertson said. "It has the potential to address long outstanding environmental issues, and redress long outstanding legal issues from past practices."
The best part of all, on the physical side of the proposal, is it would use that old canyon the Nechako used to originate from.
"It's about five miles [eight kilometres] long and it has been dry since 1952," said Robertson. "This water release facility would actually revive that segment of the river. From a recreation side, because it is so constricted and high-walled, it would be a spectacular sight, all the whitewater that would race through there. And from there it would just flow 152 miles [245 kms] to Prince George the way it used to. It would still be a lot less water than the Nechako River used to have, so there is certainly plenty of capacity there in the Nechako channel for this, and perhaps most importantly, it would eliminate the pressure on the Murray-Cheslatta system."
By forcing all the excess Ootsa Lake water through the Murray-Cheslatta waterway - at fluctuating rates depending on the time of year, amount of rain, size of the snowpack, smelting activities in Kitimat, etc. - it has caused significant erosion in that region, some of which gets dumped into the confluence of the Fraser River at Prince George.
"The average annual flow used to be about 10 cubic metres per second on the Cheslatta River and now it goes from 50 at times all the way up to 650 in 2007 when they had high water," said Robertson. "If you pour a pop bottle of water onto a sandy slope, it moves the soil around a bit, but if you pour a 10 gallon bucket of water on it, the erosion is going to massive. The whole west end of Cheslatta Lake has been filled in. Almost a mile of debris, silt, trees, and graves and caskets and spirit houses are jammed up on the sides there."
The latter concerns are the subject of a special ceremony today at Cheslatta Lake. About 60 Cheslatta people's graves washed away. Many of these grave markers, spirit houses, caskets and the bones themselves have turned up ion beaches of the two affected lakes.
Today, a ceremony takes place by which the entire lake will be consecrated as a burial site.
Tomorrow, The Citizen looks into the numbers needed to make the proposal possible for the Cheslatta people to take back some stake in the rivers that used to sustain them.
