Brian Klassen
Member
Just spent 5 days working at the Big Bar slide. The pictures do not do justice of how big a velocity barrier that water fall is. A huge volume of water that fish can not migrate over. There was some limited natural migration when the water was higher but that has changed as the river dropped. It might change again as the water level changes.The blasters and rock scalers were working the rock face hard and we heard several large blasts and saw several large dust clouds after they pried large rocks off of the cliff face. Blasts have to be carefully controlled as the cliff is extremely unstable so we were told. The scalers have claimed to be seeing some limited movement over the slide but we will have to see. Lots of people on that mountain side daily.
Fish capture and transport was going as well as be can expected as there is a limited amount of workable capture sites. Hard to seine in a canyon that has lots of rocks on the bottom as they don't agree with nets. That said, fish are being helicoptered above the capture site in increasing numbers each day. When I first arrived we were capturing a significant number of fish with head and body wounds and what we were calling "stale" fish. The chinook appeared to have more head wounds as they could go farther up the river before being beat back by the flow. As the week progressed, more clean and sometimes silver fish were captured and these were airlifted over the falls. While the fish wheel was not capturing huge numbers of fish, they were capturing cleaner sockeye and bigger chinook that were not accessible to the seine crews as they were moving in heavier water flow. Every bit helps. More capture crews were being ramped up
In the time there I only observed one dead sockeye but there is no doubt mortality is occurring as fish are definitely staging trying to get by the slide. The stock assessment crews I worked with are top notch field people and they are very good at what they do. I have nothing but good things to say about them as well as the BC Fire crews who are helping with the labour as well as coordinating the helicopter transports. It's one giant moveable ballet with the helicopters. At times we had it so dialed in we were having 7 minute return intervals from loading a monsoon bucket to having the empty one flown back to us. Was impressive to watch except for being sandblasted from the prop watch.
The stock assessment crews also have Didson counters set up the river at Churn Creek and they are getting decent numbers of the transported fish that are continuing their upstream migration. They have also had several of the radio tagged fish monitored upstream of Prince George. They also were speculating that this capture program was going to continue until salmon migration was made possible or the migration was over in late fall.
My guess is that this will be worked on all fall and then in the winter when the water is very low more significant work will be done on the fallen rock. I would not rule out a new large fish ladder like you see at Hells Gate or Bridge River rapids. One other thing to note is that French Bar Rapids is just upstream of the slide site as is / was one of the worst rapids on the whole Fraser River. Evidently this rapid is now gone as it is completely underwater.
While a lot of people like to armchair quarterback on what should be done by DFO, I must say that there are a lot of resources being thrown at this by that agency. I would expect that this slide disaster is going to be on the scale of the Hells Gate disaster. Hopefully we can make it work but ultimately Mother Nature is calling all of the shots.
Anyway that was my impression of what is happening at the slide site. Cheers.
Fish capture and transport was going as well as be can expected as there is a limited amount of workable capture sites. Hard to seine in a canyon that has lots of rocks on the bottom as they don't agree with nets. That said, fish are being helicoptered above the capture site in increasing numbers each day. When I first arrived we were capturing a significant number of fish with head and body wounds and what we were calling "stale" fish. The chinook appeared to have more head wounds as they could go farther up the river before being beat back by the flow. As the week progressed, more clean and sometimes silver fish were captured and these were airlifted over the falls. While the fish wheel was not capturing huge numbers of fish, they were capturing cleaner sockeye and bigger chinook that were not accessible to the seine crews as they were moving in heavier water flow. Every bit helps. More capture crews were being ramped up
In the time there I only observed one dead sockeye but there is no doubt mortality is occurring as fish are definitely staging trying to get by the slide. The stock assessment crews I worked with are top notch field people and they are very good at what they do. I have nothing but good things to say about them as well as the BC Fire crews who are helping with the labour as well as coordinating the helicopter transports. It's one giant moveable ballet with the helicopters. At times we had it so dialed in we were having 7 minute return intervals from loading a monsoon bucket to having the empty one flown back to us. Was impressive to watch except for being sandblasted from the prop watch.
The stock assessment crews also have Didson counters set up the river at Churn Creek and they are getting decent numbers of the transported fish that are continuing their upstream migration. They have also had several of the radio tagged fish monitored upstream of Prince George. They also were speculating that this capture program was going to continue until salmon migration was made possible or the migration was over in late fall.
My guess is that this will be worked on all fall and then in the winter when the water is very low more significant work will be done on the fallen rock. I would not rule out a new large fish ladder like you see at Hells Gate or Bridge River rapids. One other thing to note is that French Bar Rapids is just upstream of the slide site as is / was one of the worst rapids on the whole Fraser River. Evidently this rapid is now gone as it is completely underwater.
While a lot of people like to armchair quarterback on what should be done by DFO, I must say that there are a lot of resources being thrown at this by that agency. I would expect that this slide disaster is going to be on the scale of the Hells Gate disaster. Hopefully we can make it work but ultimately Mother Nature is calling all of the shots.
Anyway that was my impression of what is happening at the slide site. Cheers.
