Gravel Battle in the Fraser River

Image by: Hubert Kang

Activist Frank Kwak (left) and researcher Otto Langer are concerned gravel removal is harming Fraser River fish for no good reason.

Is the multimillion-dollar gravel extraction program on the 
Fraser River actually saving lives – preventing a devastating flood, as government officials claim? Or is it just padding the pockets of a lucky few and causing irreparable harm to a fragile ecosystem?

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 River and show me Gill Bar, a kilometre-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 orange and an energy bar. “Sorry about this,” he says. “I haven’t gotten around to breakfast 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 years ago, he took early retirement so he and 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 fisherman, Kwak soon found that the valley was, if not an angler’s Canaan, at least a decent place for a retiree to enjoy weekends fishing for steelhead trout and salmon. But over the next decade, his attempt at a relaxing hobby led him into the fraught politics of fish and water. His homeless ministry is now a reduced-fee catering company, and these days he makes fewer hot meals than conference calls. 

 

• Video: Man vs Nature in the Fraser River
• 
• Is irresponsible gravel removal from
  the Fraser River jeopardizing the fish habitat?

Kwak downplays his knowledge of stream 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 the bar by a local gravel company had cut off the spawning channel and dried it up, killing an estimated two million pink salmon fry. It was one of the largest documented fish kills in recent B.C. history. The pink kill at Big Bar was big news at the time for being a major botch but also because it raised old questions about gravel operations in the Fraser – questions that remain unsettled.

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 granddaddy Fraser flood of 1894 or the one 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 number of biologists, local First Nations and river hydraulics experts – as well as sport fishermen like Kwak – question the official story of flood protection and worry that the program is really a means of subsidizing 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-protection funds. 


• Tags
  • Tyee Bridge, 
  • Otto Langer, 
  • Frank Kwak, 
  • big bar, 
  • City and Government, 
  • Energy and Resources, 
  • Environment, 
  • First Nations