Michelle Connolly is the director of Conservation North. Ben Parfitt is a policy analyst with the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Two respected news organizations have aired recent investigative documentaries showing how trees in B.C.’s drastically over-cut primary forests are chopped down, only to be turned into wood pellets that are burned by the millions of tonnes to make electricity in the United Kingdom.

First, the BBC televised a report on its feature series Panorama. Then, a few days later, CBC’s The Fifth Estate weighed in.

Both investigations demonstrated that massive numbers of logs — which come from trees, which come from forests — are being trucked to mills in B.C. owned by Drax, a U.K.-based multinational power generation and wood pellet corporation.

Drax then turns those trees into pellets that leave B.C. in ocean tankers and make their way to England, where they are burned at Drax’s North Yorkshire thermal electric plant.

Both documentaries validated what we and others have been saying for some time.

Not only are mountains of wood pellets from B.C. burned every year, but massive British government subsidies underwrite this on the spurious grounds that burning “waste” wood instead of coal amounts to a climate solution.

In reality, even more greenhouse gases are emitted burning wood than coal. What Drax wants us to believe, however, is that somehow those wood-burning emissions don’t count because newly planted trees will eventually replace those that were cut down.

Following the airing of the first of the documentaries, Katrine Conroy, minister of forests, lands, natural resource operations and rural development was asked in the legislature to confirm that no old-growth trees were being turned into wood pellets by Drax.

“I just want to clarify for the record,” she said. “There is no old-growth being cut down to utilize in Drax mills across the province.”

In response to other questions, Conroy clarified that Drax “might” use logs to turn directly into wood pellets, but only logs that lumber markets did not want.

The BBC discovered, however, that not only did Drax own a licence to log old-growth forest, but that the forest in question was in a “deferral” area identified by B.C.’s own Technical Advisory Panel as at risk. Conservation North recently filmed the logging taking place in this Drax licence area.

Even the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, of which Drax is a member, acknowledges they use logs. They just argue that so-called “biologs” can’t be used for anything else because they are of such low quality — an assertion that a wood worker interviewed by the BBC said was false.

In a recent report commissioned by the association, the authors estimate that 19 per cent of the feedstock for B.C. pellet mills is, in fact, logs.

Which means that at the very least, one million cubic metres of logs per year are being turned directly into wood pellets by Drax and others.

Since almost all previously logged forests in B.C.’s Interior are still too young to log, that means any logs entering Drax’s mills come from “primary” forests, which have never been industrially logged. Once cut down, such forests won’t reach an advanced age again, since industrial forestry is predicated on cutting down planted trees in 80 years or less.

The rapid rate at which our primary forests have been logged has placed us squarely in an ecological crisis, which is mirrored in an unfolding economic disaster as thousands of jobs in the forest industry disappear.

Too much forest has been logged too quickly. Little is left. Even the B.C. government says so, noting in its most recent budget that logging rates are poised to fall dramatically.

This unfolding disaster has accelerated in part because of the pellet industry, which over the last two decades has quadrupled its output, placing further strain on forests that were already overtaxed by the sawmill and wood pulp industries.

Changing course requires that government stop the denial game, admit the mess we are in, and take action. We believe that action includes:

• A transparent, full accounting of where all logs and residual forest products go, whether to sawmills, pulp mills or pellet mills;
• Unambiguous policies that compel forest companies to get the maximum value from each tree logged, with priority given to solid wood products; and
• Rapidly protecting what little old-growth (and other primary forest) remains, which is what scientists on a panel appointed by the government said must be done.

The absurd practice of cutting down forests just to burn them must end.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This article originally appeared on Policy Note.

Massive amounts of water pumped with brute force into the earth at thousands of fracking operations is priming the pump for potentially deadly earthquakes in British Columbia’s Montney basin, warns a former top scientist with B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission.

In a peer-reviewed article published today in the Journal of Geoscience and Environmental Protection, Allan Chapman, a former hydrologist with the commission, says that it is not single, errant fracking operations that explain why many earthquakes have already occurred in B.C. and will occur in the future, but the “cumulative development” or fracking of thousands of wells.

And he warns that the surge in fracking-induced earthquakes that lies ahead poses serious risks to communities and critical infrastructure in the Peace River region — including the Site C dam, an aging bridge and critical lifeline to the north and a massive gas processing plant.

Like the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back, at some point a dangerous tipping point is reached, Chapman concludes, adding that the commission’s current approach to preventing earthquakes from occurring isn’t working and will have to change to reduce the risk of future calamities.

“The future in the Montney is not if M>5 [magnitude 5 or greater] earthquakes will occur, but when, with that occurrence possibly without any precursor warning,” Chapman reports in the paper, adding that the fossil fuel industry’s ongoing “experiment” with fracking poses significant public health and safety risks and should be regarded as “an issue of paramount concern.”

Communities in the crosshairs?

“At any point of the day, in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, life as folks in the Peace region know it could be altered forever. The ground could shake. Roofs could come down. People could be injured, possibly seriously. Bridges can collapse. All kinds of things can happen, none of them good,” Chapman said in an interview, adding that two of the most at-risk communities in the region are Taylor and the isolated First Nation community of Upper Halfway.

Chapman’s work is grounded both in science and a distinguished public service record that includes nearly eight years as the commission’s top water scientist, and before that, eight years as head of the province’s River Forecast Centre where he assessed potential flood risks and provided early warnings to at-risk communities. In 2014, the Association of Engineers and Geoscientists named him its Westerman Award winner, the top honour for geoscientists in the province. He is now retired from public service and working as a consultant in Victoria.

During hydraulic fracturing or fracking, immense volumes of water, sand and chemicals are blasted down wellbores to fracture the surrounding rock so that it releases its trapped natural gas and valuable liquids like condensate. The brute-force technology has triggered earthquakes everywhere it is deployed, including the Montney, a 26,600-square-kilometre region extending from south of Dawson Creek to 200 kilometres north of Fort St. John. Those induced earthquakes have prompted a flurry of academic research in recent years — but Chapman’s may be the first to so clearly spell out the mounting risks associated with one fracking operation after another. 

On November 29, 2018, a trio of earthquakes was seemingly touched off at a fracking operation conducted by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., or CNRL, at a well pad carved out of grain fields owned by one of the Peace region’s two large Hutterite communities. Nearby fields had also been turned into huge pits to store water used by fracking companies operating in the region.

The initial 4.6 magnitude earthquake was felt by residents in their homes in Fort St. John and in Chetwynd, more than 80 kilometres away. Esther Pedersen, who raises horses on acreage overlooking the Site C dam construction project, recalls being at home in her kitchen when the earthquake struck. She called it “a counter grabber.” A “strong jolt” was also felt at Site C, prompting BC Hydro to order an immediate evacuation of hundreds of construction workers. Two other earthquakes followed, one a magnitude 4, the other a magnitude 3.4.

In the immediate aftermath of the event, the commission ordered CNRL to cease all fracking operations at the site.

Understanding the impacts of cumulative fracking activities

But was it CNRL and CNRL alone that was behind all the drama?

To better understand the insidious way that multiple fracking operations can lead to seismic events, Chapman looked closely at 56 earthquakes in the Montney that had magnitudes of 3 or more. Thousands of smaller earthquakes are associated with fracking activities, but Chapman chose to narrow his primary focus to only those earthquakes large enough in magnitude to be felt by people.

Using data from Natural Resources Canada, he pinpointed each earthquake epicentre on a map, and then drew a five-kilometre radius around each one. Then he used water data from the commission to look at all the water pumped over time in fracking operations within the wider zones. (Fittingly, one of Chapman’s first actions upon joining the commission in 2010 was to require that all fossil fuel companies operating in the province file quarterly reports on how much water they used to frack.)

Analyzing site-specific information on cumulative fracking activities, Chapman reached a far different conclusion about what led to the dramatic events in late November of that year.

In the days immediately leading up the cluster of strong earthquakes, Chapman found, CNRL pumped the equivalent of nearly six Olympic swimming pools of water into two well bores 20 kilometres to the north of Site C.

But that water use paled in comparison to the 688 Olympic swimming pools worth of water that four companies including Ovintiv (formerly Encana), ARC Resources, Crew Energy and CNRL had already blasted underground at 109 other gas wells within five kilometres of the earthquake epicentres in the previous three years. When CNRL then added those last six Olympic swimming pools worth of water to the mix, it was like “the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” Chapman concludes. In a subsequent interview he said that the case that cumulative effects are behind the earthquakes becomes even more compelling when you expand the radius by just two more kilometres. Then, the total amount of water used in the fracking operations nearby CNRL’s wells rises to an astonishing 2.93 million cubic metres and the number of fracked wells climbs to nearly 200.

Chapman also looked closely at the events surrounding a 4.6 magnitude earthquake, then the largest ever recorded in B.C., which was set off three years earlier at a Petronas fracking operation near Pink Mountain north of Fort St. John. In the week before the strong earthquake on August 17, 2015, Petronas had pumped 67,625 cubic metres of water into three gas wells, Chapman reports. But in the two years prior, the same company had injected more than four times as much water into another 13 wells within five kilometres of the eventual earthquake’s epicenter.

‘Things get worse over time’

“Things get worse over time,” Chapman said in an interview, noting that the earliest fracking operations do not appear to trigger many earthquakes but as time marches on they do. “It appears that once certain volumes of water are pumped underground that the geology is seeded such that earthquakes result more readily from fracking.”

Gail Atkinson, a renowned expert on the dangers posed to critical infrastructure such as major hydroelectric dams by induced earthquakes, is an earth sciences professor at the University of Western Ontario. Her work has highlighted how earthquakes induced by fracking can have more serious consequences for critical infrastructure than naturally occurring earthquakes because of the relatively shallower depths at which induced events occur. The nearer to the surface the earthquakes are, the closer that puts the ensuing shaking to dams and other vulnerable infrastructure.

Her work has been instrumental in convincing TransAlta, a company that owns and operates dams and other power facilities, to push for a fracking exclusion zone near its Brazeau dam in Alberta, an effort now being fought by fracking companies operating in the region.

“If you have an exclusion zone you’ll keep the cumulative effect out of a certain area,” Atkinson said in an interview. “What Allan Chapman’s article points to — and what we’ve also seen in observations in the articles we’ve been working on — is that once you start something going it’s easy to retrigger things. You’ll be fracking in an area, nothing much is happening, and then things start to pop off. And then it seems that everything you do is making things pop off. And that agrees with Allan’s basic idea that it is a cumulative effect.”

To reduce the risk of “priming the pump” and triggering earthquakes near vulnerable infrastructure, Atkinson says, you need to establish firm no-go zones where fracking is banned.  But that’s a big challenge now because both the B.C. and Alberta governments have effectively sold off rights to drill into the subsurface just about everywhere that oil or gas can conceivably be found.

As detailed in documents obtained through freedom of information requests by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, dam safety officials and engineers with BC Hydro have specifically sought such bans near their W.A.C. Bennett, Peace Canyon and Site C dams, out of concerns that nearby fracking operations could trigger earthquakes that damaged the dams, or, in the worst case, led to a dam failure, an outcome that would have catastrophic impacts for thousands of people living downstream.

But the hydro utility’s efforts have yet to convince the Commission or provincial government to establish firm no-go zones, perhaps because of the compensation costs that the government would have to pay out to the companies it sold the subsurface rights to.

Water use in fracking going up over time

“This whole thing could have been avoided if there’d been a little bit more foresight on the behalf of those who were selling the rights to these subsurface properties and they simply had avoided making those sales,” Atkinson says. “B.C. did it. Alberta did it. They … sold leases without regards to the locations of critical infrastructure. And [now the companies have] put money into both buying those leases and into research and development to figure out whether there’s oil and gas there. And now that they’ve invested all of that money, they want to reap the profits.”

Chapman concludes that a total of 439 earthquakes recorded by Natural Resources Canada in the Montney region between 2013 and 2019, had a “close association” with fracking and that the overwhelming majority of them — 77 per cent — were linked to the fracking operations of just three companies led by Petronas with 209 associated earthquakes, Tourmaline Oil with 79 and Ovintiv (formerly Encana) with 38.

Petronas, which is a significant partner in the proposed LNG Canada facility, has such a high number of earthquakes associated with its operations partly because it operates in the northern portion of the Montney, which is geologically distinct from the more southern portion of the basin and treated as such by the commission. Petronas is also the largest subsurface rights holder in the province and holds a monopoly position in the north Montney, Chapman found.

Chapman also found that 15 per cent of fracked gas wells in the Montney are associated with earthquakes, and that nearly 2 per cent of all fracked wells are associated with earthquakes that are magnitude 3 or stronger.

That is of concern because while the pump may already be primed for earthquakes of potentially great magnitude in northeast B.C., the fracking companies are only just getting started in the Montney.

Chapman notes that between 2012 and 2019 a total of 39 million cubic metres of water — enough to fill 15,600 Olympic swimming pools — was blasted into the earth in the Montney. During that same timeframe, there was also a steady increase in the amount of water used per fracked well. From an average of just over 7,000 cubic metres of water per well in 2012, to more than 22,000 cubic metres by 2019.

When individual companies are looked at, the picture is even more complex. ConocoPhillips, for example, used 83,000 cubic metres of water at each of 13 wells it fracked in 2019. “It is not known whether ConocoPhillips is an outlier or a harbinger,” Chapman wrote. However, he notes that four other fracking companies each used 30,000 cubic metres of water or more per well in 2019, a trend that may not bode well for future frequency and severity of earthquakes.

Protocol system in B.C. not designed for fracking-induced, ‘runaway’ earthquakes: Chapman

To understand what lies ahead, Chapman says it is worth considering the very large well pads that the industry has built in the Montney. Carved out of what were once tracts of boreal forest or plunked down in farmer’s fields in the provincial agricultural land reserve, those pads are generally designed to accommodate 20 or more fracked wells. At one monster pad built recently by Ovintiv, on farmland not far from the community of Taylor, up to 56 wells could eventually be drilled and fracked.

Right now, on average, most of the 639 “multi-well” pads in the Montney have just over 4 wells per pad on average.

Should the Coastal GasLink pipeline and LNG Canada plant be built, there will be an explosion in fracking activity in northeast B.C. as the province becomes a liquefied natural gas exporter.

To give an idea of what lies ahead, Chapman estimated that it would take the “equivalent water volume of as many as 100,000 Olympic-size swimming pools” to fill out those 639 multi-well pads with an average of 20 wells each. That almost certainly would result in not only more earthquakes, but stronger earthquakes.

According to a recent scientific panel that reported to the provincial government, there is no scientifically credible way to predict how large future induced earthquakes may one day be. Their strength will only be constrained by the unique geological conditions in which they occur.

At present, the only tool that the oil and gas commission employs to reduce earthquake risk is a “traffic light protocol,” that calls for the suspension of fracking if a magnitude 4 or greater earthquake is triggered in the Montney. The protocol is somewhat more stringent in the southern portion of the Montney, in an area the commission calls the Kiskatinaw Seismic Monitoring and Mitigation Area or KSMMA. There, the threshold is set at magnitude 3. Named after the nearby Kiskatinaw River, the KSMMA is a hot zone for fracking.  

In the traffic light protocol, suspension equals a red light.

The traffic light protocol also calls for mandatory reporting of smaller earthquakes if they reach certain lower magnitudes and for various “mitigation efforts” to be undertaken when those earthquakes occur to theoretically prevent bigger earthquakes.

This is like approaching a yellow light and proceeding with caution.

Unfortunately, Chapman says, the protocol system has not prevented higher magnitude earthquakes from being triggered by fracking. Roughly a third of the larger “induced” earthquakes in the Montney were not preceded by any smaller earthquakes. He adds that if such systems are to work they may have to dramatically lower the magnitudes at which fracking-induced earthquakes trigger red or yellow lights.

Just such a proposal has been made recently by four scientists at Stanford University, led by geophysicist Ryan Shultz. In the paper, the scientists say tougher traffic light systems may be necessary to prevent “runaway earthquakes” and the considerable damage they could cause.

The commission, which received a copy of Chapman’s report the day before its publication, was asked to comment on Chapman’s conclusion that the traffic light protocol had not prevented earthquakes from occurring, an issue it chose not to answer directly.

Instead, it stood by its decision to implement the traffic light system that it had put in place in the Kiskatinaw area in particular, and added that it had also worked with unidentified partners to increase the number of public seismic monitoring stations in northeast B.C. from 11 to 22.

“The commission has taken a leadership role in the detection and mitigation of induced seismicity associated with oil and gas development — in North America and globally. Our geologists and seismic experts use sound, peer-reviewed research, data and predictive modelling to understand, regulate and mitigate seismic activity,” the commission said, in part, referring to ongoing work it is doing on induced earthquakes with researchers at McGill and the University of Calgary.

A cautionary tale – deadly earthquakes in China

But ongoing research aside, Chapman warns that earthquakes like the 5.7 and 5.3 magnitude events that occurred in China’s Sichuan province in 2018 and 2019 could occur in northeast B.C. Those two events in China killed two people, injured many more, destroyed or badly damaged 400 houses, caused millions of dollars in damages and triggered landslides.

His list of communities and critical infrastructure that require “enhanced” protections, which could include “no-fracking zones” or much tighter controls on fracking in proximity to at-risk communities and assets, is long and includes:

·   The communities of Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Taylor, Hudson’s Hope and the Halfway River First Nation community of Upper Halfway among others.

·   BC Hydro’s two existing dams on the Peace River — the W.A.C. Bennett and Peace Canyon dams — as well as the Site C dam under construction and years away from completion.

·   Community water supplies and treatment plants.

·   The Taylor gas plant and the Taylor bridge.

·   Dozens of earthen dams built without permits by oil and gas companies to capture water used in their fracking operations.

At the end of his paper, Chapman concludes that “British Columbia’s experiment” with fracking gas well after gas well has resulted in the province having “the sobering distinction of having produced some of the world’s largest fracking-induced earthquakes.”

The provincial government, in his view, owes a duty to the public to ensure that future earthquakes triggered by fracking do not kill and maim people and badly damage or destroy  vital infrastructure.

“Part of what motivated me to write this paper was to put the focus on the risk to the people in these communities and the infrastructure that’s in these high-risk areas,” Chapman said in an interview. “I very strongly believe that the primary function of government should be to protect the people that it’s governing.”

Updated April 27, 2021, at 12:18 p.m. PT: This article previously incorrectly stated the Taylor bridge is a suspension bridge. The original Taylor bridge, which collapsed during a landslide in 1957, was a suspension bridge. The bridge built to replace it was not.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

On a late afternoon in early October, Anja Hutgens and Hans Kirschbaum walk out of their home at the edge of an expansive field dotted with black Angus cows in B.C.’s south Peace River region. They herd their two dogs into the back of their pickup truck and drive up the long, steep dirt driveway that takes them into a world they used to love but now barely recognize.

After the ascent from the bucolic valley bottom, Kirschbaum guides the truck onto an industrial gravel road. Soon the couple passes by a natural gas processing plant, where a spire of flame shoots out of a tall flare stack. Beyond that lies a cavernous industrial water pit, filled with water from the nearby Pine River. And beyond that, a deforested patch of land dominated by two giant steel containers painted a Mediterranean blue and filled to near capacity with a menacing brew of rust-coloured wastewater. Strips of colourful plastic flagging hang above the containers, known as C-rings, to warn ducks and geese to stay out. Birds would quickly die in the stuff. Cows would perish drinking it.

At the entrance to the clearing, the natural gas company operating in the immediate region, Crew Energy, has posted a sign emblazoned with the internationally recognized radiation warning symbol. Beside the symbol is another sign saying that “NORM” may be in the neighbourhood.

The unassuming acronym, Hutgens matter-of-factly explains, stands for naturally occurring radioactive materials. But there is nothing natural about radioactive elements including radium, thallium and selenium suddenly appearing on the threshold of Hutgens and Kirschbaum’s home and ranch. Something brought those potentially dangerous contaminants to their doorstep, and that something is the natural gas industry.

Contaminated fracking wastewater fills two C-rings at the top of the hill above Penalty Ranch. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Hutgens and Kirschbaum have been here before and know what to look for. They walk up to a spongy piece of industrial cloth lying at the base of one of the C-rings. The cloth is there to absorb any wastewater that may spill as trucks offload it into the tanks. 

Hutgens pulls a small device about the size of a cellphone out of her coat pocket and turns it on. It’s a Geiger counter, which detects radiation. She lowers it until it almost touches the cloth. Instantly, clicks begin to emanate from the counter as radioactive particles interact with gas inside the counter’s chamber. 

It doesn’t take long for the counter to record 100 clicks per minute, at which point an alarm goes off. But the clicks just keep coming, before topping out at 170 counts per minute, meaning the radiation level here is much higher than the normal, naturally occurring background radiation that surrounds us at low levels from sources such as the sun. 

Hutgens and Kirschbaum have repeatedly asked Crew Energy and the BC Oil and Gas Commission to test the water inside the C-rings as well as the accumulated muck at the bottom of them, but they say the company has refused, leading the couple to take matters into their own hands so they know what they’re up against.

Anja Hutgens holds a Geiger counter, which detects radiation, above a piece of cloth placed along a C-ring to collect spilled wastewater. Soon, an alarm starts to sound. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Anja Hutgens and Hans Kirschbaum rely on a Geiger counter to get an idea of what’s in the wastewater in the C-rings by their property because they say the company that owns them refuses to reveal any information. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

After turning the Geiger counter off, Hutgens and Kirschbaum return to the pickup truck, which is parked just in front of a metal grid known as a cattle guard that’s intended to keep their cows from wandering onto the site.

“We’re not against the gas industry,” Hutgens says. “I mean, we all need those resources. We all depend on it as well. But there need to be boundaries. And first of all, we must protect our water resources, which is the most important thing of all.”

Water is everything to ranchers and B.C.’s natural gas industry

Water is everything to the Peace River region’s ranchers and farmers. But it’s also everything to the region’s natural gas industry. And as that industry rapidly expands its water-intensive fracking operations, people like Hutgens and Kirschbaum fear their critical water sources could dry up or become poisoned.

During fracking, tremendous volumes of water, sand and chemicals are pumped at extreme pressure into rock formations deep below ground. The earthquake-inducing force at which all that water is pumped busts open or fractures the rock, allowing trapped oil and gas to be released. But much of the pumped water then flows back to the surface, contaminated with whatever it has come into contact with underground. Typically, it is so salty that it would be lethal to all aquatic life if it was piped into a stream. Other contaminants typically include trace metals, chemicals and hydrocarbons. And yes, sometimes, radioactive materials. 

Anja Hutgens isn’t against the natural gas industry, but she wants it to respect water resources. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Hans Kirschbaum’s father bought Penalty Ranch 40 years ago, back when there was much less industrial activity in the Peace River region. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

The amount of wastewater being generated by the fracking industry is dizzying. In just the immediate vicinity, there are as many as 21 C-rings belonging to Crew Energy, each capable of holding 5,000 cubic metres of wastewater — enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools. If just a fraction of that water spilled or seeped into the ground at the wrong place, the consequences could be devastating for their ranch. 

And Crew Energy is just one of many companies operating in the region. Other companies — including Ovintiv (formerly Encana), Shell and Canadian Natural Resources — have even bigger operations, producing greater volumes of wastewater. 

For 40 years, a natural spring has been the primary source of drinking water at Penalty Ranch, which was purchased by Kirschbaum’s father 40 years ago after he journeyed to northeast B.C. from his home in Bavaria, Germany. The spring is also an essential water source for the couple’s 300 head of thirsty cattle. 

Hutgens and Kirschbaum’s greatest fear is that the industrial activity at the top of the hill above their ranch will lead to the contamination of their water.

In July, Crew Energy received permits from the BC Oil and Gas Commission to dramatically increase the amount of wastewater stored near the ranch. The company’s plan involves building two massive wastewater pits and retiring all but eight of its C-rings. 

Each pit would require excavating holes deep into the earth. The pits would then be lined with three layers of thick industrial plastic and filled with up to 60,000 cubic metres of wastewater each. If the pits proceed, it will mean that eventually Crew Energy can store enough wastewater — potentially radioactive — to fill 64 Olympic-sized swimming pools close to the ranch and Worth Marsh, a body of water that may be the spring’s water source.

Anja Hutgens gives reporter Ben Parfitt a tour of Penalty Ranch. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

In an effort to stop this plan from moving forward, Hutgens and Kirschbaum appealed to the quasi-judicial Oil and Gas Appeal Tribunal to rescind the permits. A video hearing was held earlier this month and the couple expects a ruling by the early new year.

In documents filed with the tribunal, Crew Energy said digging the pits will ultimately save it millions of dollars because it will no longer have to truck its wastewater to dispersed C-rings. 

But Hutgens and Kirschbaum say the pits pose a danger far greater than the C-rings. They’re bigger and they’re sunk into the earth. If the pits leak — as similar pits have — the highly toxic water will enter the ground deep below the surface, where it can more readily contaminate aquifers that feed springs. 

“Our biggest worry is our natural spring, our water situation. If we were to lose that, or it became contaminated, it would simply be devastating to our business. I do not see how we could get over that,” Hutgens says, as a gust of wind whips her thick mop of hair about.

Underscoring her concerns, just a short distance away, one of the couple’s cows tilts its head into a pipe to drink the spring water trickling down to the field from the wooded slope above. 

Hans Kirschbaum (left), Anja Hutgens and reporter Ben Parfitt discuss the impacts the natural gas industry is having on agricultural lands. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

B.C. oil and gas versus cattle and crops

When farming and fossil fuel interests butt heads, oil and gas almost always trumps cattle and crops. And the stakes just keep getting higher. The more wells the industry drills and fracks, the more water it uses. The more water it uses, the more wastewater it generates — waste that is rarely if ever treated because it is so toxic.

Much of natural gas development, as previously reported in The Narwhal, now occurs directly on farms or agricultural leases that farmers hold on Crown or publicly owned lands. Significantly, many of those lands are in B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve. 

When the reserve was created in 1973, it was hailed as one of the most progressive pieces of farm-protecting legislation in the world. It was designed to bring an end to the steady erosion of farmland in the province, which was then losing about 6,000 to 7,000 hectares each year to other land uses, particularly urban development.

A cow drinks natural spring water at the Penalty Ranch. The spring lies between the ranch and heavily contaminated wastewater storage sites. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Penalty Ranch is home to 300 head of thirsty cow, which rely on spring water that could be contaminated by encroaching natural gas operations. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

But despite the reserve, fossil fuel industry development continues to erode the farmland base in the energy-rich northeast corner of the province.  

“The development of the energy sector has exceeded the capacity of the current regulatory environment to protect farmland,” concluded a committee appointed by Agriculture Minister Lana Popham to examine threats posed to the reserve. 

The committee, chaired by former independent MLA Vicki Huntington, went on to note in its 2018 report that unrelenting energy industry incursions on farmlands in northeast B.C. were making it “increasingly difficult for many farmers and ranches to effectively use their land.”  

The committee called on the government to ensure that provincial agencies like the BC Oil and Gas Commission worked more closely with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture to help the province’s “increasingly besieged agricultural sector.”

Oil and Gas Appeal Tribunal has sided with industry in the past

Hutgens and Kirschbaum must now wait to see what the tribunal does in response to their pleas, but they know their chances of success are not good.

Penalty Ranch obtained agricultural leases from the B.C. Ministry of Forests decades ago allowing it to graze its cattle on some of the same Crown or publicly owned lands where Crew Energy later set up operations.

In 2016, alarmed by the company’s encroaching operations, Hutgens and Kirschbaum filed an appeal with the tribunal, asking it to rescind Crew Energy’s permits from the BC Oil and Gas Commission allowing it to clear two patches of land in preparation for drilling and fracking five new gas wells. 

They lost that appeal but were back before the tribunal again a year later fighting another Crew Energy plan to build three more gas well pads and drill and frack another 22 gas wells. Some of that drilling and fracking would run under Worth Marsh, according to Crew Energy’s diagrams.

Hans Kirschbaum (left), Anja Hutgens and Ben Parfitt watch the ranchers’ cattle graze on land that could be compromised by nearby industrial development. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Hutgens and Kirschbaum were concerned that drilling and fracking could disrupt and contaminate water flows from Worth Marsh — in turn harming their spring.

But the tribunal ultimately dismissed the couple’s appeals because the lands owned outright by Penalty Ranch were not directly impacted by the proposed industrial activities, only its agricultural leases were.

The couple also argued Crew could easily move elsewhere as the company had rights to drill and frack over a wide area of land. Already 10 pipelines, 50 gas wells, 12 C-rings and one large freshwater storage pit was located on lands leased by Penalty Ranch. 

But once again, the tribunal was not swayed.

Crew Energy refuses to reveal information about toxic waste

In documents filed with the tribunal, Crew Energy said the toxic water entering the pits following the fracking process will “undergo a filtration and separation process” before being pumped in.

But when The Narwhal emailed Paul Dever, Crew Energy’s vice-president, to ask about the company’s treatment plans, he refused to answer any questions and declined an interview request.

Questions included: where does Crew Energy take radioactive waste for disposal? Where does the company truck any of the muck that accumulates at the bottom of such pits? And what does Crew plan to do should one or both pits fail?

Crew Energy refused to answer questions about how it handles toxic waste in its C-rings and how it will handle such waste from its proposed pits. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

“Crew Energy Inc. adheres to legislative and regulatory requirements regarding its operations in British Columbia, as regulated by the British Columbia Oil and Gas Commission,” Dever said in a brief email.

Dever did not expand on what those requirements were. But a scientific review of fracking operations released by a panel of experts in June 2019 found that radioactive material can accumulate in tanks and pits at fracking operations and B.C.’s regulations governing potentially radioactive waste in such pits is not as rigorous as it could be.

After reviewing wastewater pits at several fracking operations across B.C., the panel characterized the risk of leaks from containment ponds as “moderate to high.” 

Two experts interviewed for the review told the panel’s three scientists that “they were not aware of any studies on NORM in B.C., and that generally there is a lack of water quality data in B.C.,” especially data on NORM concentrations.

The review also found that companies themselves are responsible for identifying radioactive waste in their fracking operations and that there are no wastewater treatment facilities for radioactive water in B.C.

The panel was also told that there are virtually no searchable provincial records detailing where radioactive wastes originating in the province are sent.

Wastewater pits have failed before

Seven years ago, pits very similar to the ones Crew Energy plans to build leaked, resulting in a massive cleanup effort. The failure occurred just north of Beryl Prairie, a farming enclave about a two-hour drive from Penalty Ranch, where Talisman Energy managed four wastewater pits.

The leaks in one pit likely began in January 2013. But it was almost six months before Talisman Energy reported it to the BC Oil and Gas Commission. In the meantime, toxins flowed unchecked from the pit to the earth and groundwater below. Leaks were subsequently discovered at a second pit. As reported in The Narwhal, the contaminants initially discovered at the pit sites included arsenic, barium, cadmium, lithium and lead.

Shortly after the environmental disaster began, Talisman sold its operations in the region to Progress Energy Canada, a subsidiary of the giant state-owned Malaysian corporation, Petronas. 

Documents obtained by The Narwhal show the company that coordinated the cleanup, Secure Energy, had the muck at the bottom of the pits tested and the results confirmed the presence of radioactive radium, thorium and uranium at levels that are dangerous to people. 

This presented the company with a huge dilemma: how was it to get rid of all that radioactive waste — initially 15,000 cubic metres, or enough to fill six Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to correspondences between Secure Energy and the province.

Reporter Ben Parfitt looks onto a wastewater pit owned by Petronas, one of many natural gas companies operating in the Peace River region. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Secure Energy tried unsuccessfully to get the Ministry of Environment to allow the muck to be pumped into a hole in the earth at a distant “disposal well” near Fort Nelson, 500 kilometres away from the pits. But disposal wells are designed to take contaminated water, not muck, and certainly not radioactive muck. The ministry declined the application.

Ultimately, Progress Energy paid for the contaminated muck to be trucked across two provincial borders to an underground salt cavern disposal facility near Unity, Sask., owned and operated by Tervita Corporation.

Tervita also owns the sprawling Silverberry Landfill — about a 45-minute drive north of Fort St. John — which received thousands of cubic metres of contaminated soils from the pits.

The Narwhal filed 11 questions with Tervita Corporation, including what fees it charges companies to drop off radioactive wastes, how much waste trucks typically deliver at a time and how waste deliveries and disposals are tracked.

But, like Crew Energy, Tervita declined to directly answer a single question.

“We take pride in responsibly managing all aspects of our business to ensure compliance with relevant environmental and safety legislation, regulations and standards,” Kelly Sansom, Tervita’s communications manager, said in an email.

Petronas owns two giant wastewater pits near the rural community of Beryl Prairie. The pits are just down the road from similar pits that failed in 2013, triggering a massive cleanup. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

The costs to clean up the failed pits has never been disclosed.

But based on a previous report by The Narwhal — which detailed initial cleanup costs at another wastewater pit suspected of leaking and contaminating groundwater and soil — the cost to truck away the wastewater alone would have been in the millions of dollars. 

If companies go bankrupt, taxpayers could end up on the hook for covering some or all of the cleanup costs. 

And getting rid of the contaminated water would have been only the beginning of a laborious process involving excavating and trucking away contaminated soils, disposing of the pits’ contaminated liners and moving all the radioactive mud far, far away.

Progress Energy has now installed four much larger wastewater pits just four kilometres east of Beryl Prairie, where all signs of the environmental calamity have been wiped away. All that remains there now is a recently graded field, populated with patches of wild grasses and weeds. 

Fracking radiation ‘(literally) off the charts’: BC Oil and Gas Commission

The BC Oil and Gas Commission has long known that the shale rock formations natural gas companies typically drill into and frack can be hotspots for radiation.

According to an email obtained by The Narwhal, the commission’s senior petroleum geologist wrote to staff in 2016 to say that some of those formations “would be expected to have NORMs” at concentrations that were “(literally) off the charts.”  

Despite this, the commission does not require fracking companies to test for the presence of radioactive materials and there is no requirement for companies that do testing to submit the results to the commission.

Karen Hosford, an environmental consultant who has worked in the mining industry for companies like Teck Resources and who assisted Hutgens and Kirschbaum in preparing their appeal, calls the lack of testing requirements “crazy.” 

Crew Energy plans to replace several of its C-rings with wastewater pits, which some people say are more likely to cause serious environmental damage if they fail. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

It was that lack of a commitment that led Hutgens and Kirschbaum to ask Crew Energy if they could collect their own samples for analysis. But the company denied the request, Hosford said.

“Basically, there’s no onus on the company to do anything. They hide behind the regulator, and the regulator protects them,” Hosford told The Narwhal.

If the wastewater pits are dug near Penalty Ranch, both Crew Energy and the commission say there will be additional safeguards in place to prevent leaks. Instead of only two liners in the pits — as was the case at the environmental disaster at Beryl Prairie — there will be three.  

But that’s cold comfort to Hutgens and Kirschbaum. If two liners can fail, so can three.

Calls for Crew Energy to pay penalty in event of failure

When Kirschbaum’s father, Karl, bought Penalty Ranch, he learned the previous owner had picked the name in honour of a tradition at the ranch. If a ranch hand did something dumb like failing to latch a gate, they had to hoe a garden or muck out a horse stall as a penalty at the end of the day.

Kirschbaum doesn’t want the pits. But if they do go in, he says Crew Energy should pay a penalty of sorts if things go wrong.

Penalty Ranch’s name was inspired by a tradition at the site: if you make a mistake, you pay for it. Hans Kirschbaum would like natural gas companies to follow that same rule. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Ranchers have raised cattle at Penalty Ranch for decades. Encroaching natural gas operations put that tradition at risk. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

If the first and second liners in the pits start to leak, Kirschbaum thinks the company should have to immediately absorb the costs associated with swiftly draining all of the water and muck out of the pits before the third layer and last line of defence fails as well. “The pit should be emptied and liner one and liner two fixed,” Kirschbaum says.

Hutgens agrees. As dusk approaches and she and Kirschbaum prepare to leave Crew’s C-rings behind, it doesn’t take a Geiger counter to see that whether the fracking industry’s wastewater is stored in a pit dug into the earth or in tanks above ground, it is dangerous stuff.

“We love living in such a beautiful place,” Hutgens says. “But it’s heartbreaking to see how our once so quiet and natural ranch is turning into an industrial site. There has to be a bit more of a balance.”

And with that, she and Kirschbaum get back in their pickup truck and head home.

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Two years after a catastrophic flood caused tens of millions of dollars in damage to homes and businesses in the Grand Forks area, the B.C. government and several timber companies are being sued on grounds that excessive logging caused the devastation. 

In a notice of civil claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court by Peter Waldmann, a lawyer specializing in class action lawsuits, B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, the major logging companies Interfor, Weyerhaeuser and Tolko, three First Nation-owned companies and pulp producer Mercer Celgar are accused of negligence for logging local forests too quickly, creating the conditions that caused the devastating flooding in May 2018.

The claim alleges that too much clear-cut logging occurred on lands higher up mountain slopes where deep snow packs can build, releasing torrents of water in the spring; many of the clear-cuts greatly exceeded size limits; road networks were excessive; too many trees were logged before previously logged forests had recovered sufficiently, and that all of this and more set the stage for the devastating flooding that began on May 8, 2018.

“The defendants’ overharvesting of timber resources has significantly increased the rate of sedimentation from their land, increased the stream flow into the Kettle Basin watershed and increased the frequency, duration and magnitude of major flooding events,” the civil claim alleges.

Three Grand Forks residents or family members of residents whose homes were either destroyed or seriously damaged during the flood are named as plaintiffs in the claim. It is expected that others whose homes, properties and livelihoods were disrupted by the flood will join as part of a broader class action or civil lawsuit in which damages are being sought.

The “proposed class” in the Grand Forks case are “all persons” living within 15 kilometres of the community whose homes, businesses, health or livelihoods were “lost or destroyed” in the extensive flooding.

Logging in the Kettle River watershed between 1965 and 2020. Grand Forks is located toward the southern border. Map: Commons BC

Of the three major logging companies named in the claim, Interfor’s operations are notably singled out. The company has by far the largest share of logging rights in the region, and owns and operates a sawmill in Grand Forks.

“The defendant, Interfor, has unsustainably clear-cut tens of thousands of hectares of land during the last several decades in the Kettle River basin and has extensively profited from the timber resources. This has increased the frequency, duration and magnitude of peak flows that resulted in the May 8-11, 2018 flooding event,” the claim alleges.

The Narwhal, which reported extensively on the human toll of the flooding and on allegations by Grand Forks residents and independent foresters and hydrologists that logging was behind the flooding, asked the company to respond and received a short email in reply. 

“We are aware of this claim and cannot provide much comment on pending litigation, except to say that Interfor has acted in accordance with its permits, licences and applicable regulations, and intends to defend itself fully,” said Xenia Kristos, Interfor’s chief counsel and corporate secretary.

Jennifer Houghton, one of the plaintiffs, had two feet of water in her home when flooding occurred in 2017. Worse flooding the following spring doubled the amount of water in her home, prompting the yoga teacher and local realtor to build a small home on wheels so that she could get it out of harm’s way if another flood occurred.

Jennifer Houghton on the steps of her unfinished tiny home with her two dogs in 2018. She planned to move her new home if spring runoffs threatened her property again in the future. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

Houghton declined to comment on the civil suit on the advice of Waldmann. She did say that what has been filed with the court thoroughly captures what she and others believe are the relevant events that increased the severity of the floods and that upended her life and the lives of so many others in her community. 

“I think that the lawyers did a very thorough job of putting the filing together. I’ve put my faith in them,” Houghton told The Narwhal.

Next to Interfor, the provincial government itself is directly responsible for much of the logging that is alleged to have caused the horrendous flooding. BC Timber Sales is an arm of the Ministry of Forests that auctions blocks of forest for logging on a one-time basis, whereas the logging by Interfor and other companies is done under long-term licences awarded by the Ministry of Forests and covering multiple years. The claim alleges that BC Timber Sales had “the responsibility to establish and auction” those forests in ways that “sustainably managed” water runoff from those lands.

But that didn’t happen for a number of reasons, the claim contends.

Both logging under the BC Timber Sales program and logging by Interfor and others often resulted in clear-cuts that were larger than the 40-hectare limit set out in regulations. The lawsuit alleges that for 20 years beginning in 1998, fully 41 per cent of all the logging cutblocks in the Kettle River basin, which feeds into the Grand Forks area, were larger than 40 hectares in size. And BC Timber Sales was the worst offender, with fully half of the cutblocks on lands that it auctioned for logging exceeding 40 hectares. 

Peak flow of the Kettle River. Data from the United States Geological Survey. Graph: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

In addition, the vast majority of clear-cuts were on lands higher up hills and mountain slopes in the region, where snow packs are deeper and become major sources of water as temperatures climb and the sun beats down on exposed snow in the cutblocks. The lawsuit alleges that in the four years ending in 2017, right before the devastating 2018 flood, 69 per cent of all the cutblocks were in that critical zone. 

The larger cutblocks meant that more snow accumulated on the ground where it was not shaded by trees, which made it prone to a fast melt.

Regulations were also in place that were supposed to limit how many forests could be logged based on the healthy regrowth of trees in nearby areas that had been previously logged. That re-growth is known in forest industry parlance as “green-up.” But the suit alleges that healthy green-up in previously logged areas had not been achieved before new logging commenced, even though senior Ministry of Forests personnel had been warned this was endangering the “hydrological recovery” of logged lands, leading to increases in peak water flows.

A house in South Ruckle, one of the Grand Forks neighbourhoods most affected by the 2018 spring flood, was spared falling into the Kettle River. A small shed adjacent to it wasn’t so lucky. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

The suit also alleges the Ministry of Forests, which has key powers to set the rate at which forests are logged, used a suspect computer model for predicting how much forest was available to be logged. The model actually over-estimated how much forest was available by 20 per cent, according to the suit. Based on this, the ministry’s chief forester allocated more timber to logging companies than was “available and sustainable for the region.” 

“This has led to increasing the frequency, duration and magnitude of peak flows. Without sufficient timber regrowth and watershed recovery the result is increased sediment transport, increased water quantity and stream channel discharge associated with flooding that caused the major flooding events in the Kettle and Granby river systems resulting in the damages to the plaintiffs’ and class members’ property,” the suit alleges.

The Narwhal asked the ministry for comment, but it refused to respond saying that it would be “inappropriate” to do so given that the matter is now before the courts.

Anthony Britneff, who worked at several senior positions during his 40 years as a professional forester employed by the ministry, has kept a close eye on events in the Grand Forks area since his retirement and has been highly critical of logging rates and road-building in the region and the threats posed to grizzly bear populations.

He said the filing of the claim could be a pivotal moment in ongoing disputes across the province about how forests are managed, particularly in community watersheds. 

“This is a landmark lawsuit,” Britneff told The Narwhal in an email. “The allegations likely apply to many watersheds throughout B.C.’s southern interior. If other communities, First Nations, farmers and ranchers dependent on water have incurred damage due to drought or flooding caused by upstream logging, then they should consider joining this class action. Good luck to the residents of Grand Forks; they deserve full restitution.”

A poster in a downtown Grand Forks coffee shop offers a help line for residents feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with life after the floods. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

Contacted at his law offices in Toronto, Waldmann said it can be anticipated that if the matter proceeds to trial, arguments may be made by the defendants that a whole host of things caused or contributed to the flooding.

“There are multiple causes of everything in life. And you have to put before the court scientific evidence that this is the one that really matters,” Waldmann told The Narwhal. “Our basic test is whether the actions of the defendants contributed to or were part of what caused the harm, even if it wasn’t the only factor.”

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B.C. rarely inspects hazardous waste handlers even though the province knows companies routinely break the rules, an investigation by The Narwhal reveals.

The Narwhal has also learned that even when provincial environmental compliance and enforcement staff do check companies, it’s virtually impossible for them to effectively investigate because the government stopped producing a digital database of shipments at the end of 2014 and now stuffs paper documents into cardboard boxes without a filing system.

Provincial investigators  — as well as journalists and members of the public — can no longer easily access information on where companies are picking up and moving hazardous waste such as batteries laden with corrosive acids, dangerous flammable liquids, spent and carcinogenic dry cleaning fluids, biomedical waste from hospitals, lung-destroying asbestos fibres and industrial sludges contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides. 

And if anyone outside of the government wants access to that information, they’ll have to pay an exorbitant amount. When The Narwhal requested a complete paper record of the most recent year of hazardous waste shipments, it was told it would have to pay  $125,910 to obtain the documents.

Andrew Gage, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, said the change to a paper-only system is “hugely problematic” from a law enforcement perspective given the “high levels of non-compliance” by companies in an industry that has associations with organized crime.

Toxic waste handlers break the rules 70 per cent of the time

Since the electronic database was scrapped at the end of 2014, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy has conducted more than 530 inspections of hazardous waste handlers, according to senior public relations officer David Karn. The inspections include companies generating and receiving hazardous waste as well as those transporting the waste. 

Without the database, it is hard to put the number of inspections in perspective, but nearly 70,000 shipments were reported in 2014, suggesting only a small fraction are checked. 

The companies inspected weren’t in full compliance with provincial hazardous waste regulations 70 per cent of the time.

In 48 per cent of cases, Karn said the infractions were minor in nature and presented a “low risk” to the public. Typical violations included “insufficient” labelling or storage of waste. In such cases, the companies were issued “advisories” to correct business practices.

In the remaining 22 per cent of cases, companies were issued warnings for violating provincial regulations in more serious ways or were subject to more exhaustive investigations. 

The Narwhal asked the ministry if it could review documents related to those cases but was told it would have to file freedom of information requests to obtain them, a time-consuming process that can take months and often results in the return of heavily redacted pages.

The ministry did furnish a list, however, of some of the companies that were the subject of more thorough investigations, including Canoe Forest Products, United Concrete & Gravel, Sumas Environmental Services, Bio-Tox Medical Systems and El Cheapo’s Auto Wrecking & Towing.

The list also included Load ’Em Up Contracting, which in 2015 was fined $575 for “knowingly” providing “false information” on the hazardous waste it was shipping.

By using data from the last digitized hazardous waste record, The Narwhal was able to glean some understanding of what Load ’Em Up’s business dealings were in the year prior to receiving its fine.

The record shows that in 2014, the company picked up and trucked nearly 5.5 million litres — plus an additional 500,000 kilograms — of hazardous materials including waste oils and other lubricants, solvents, petroleum distillates, flammable liquids, contaminated soils and various other unidentified “environmentally hazardous substances.” Its clients included forest companies, gas wholesalers, pipeline companies and mining companies. The waste would overflow two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Gage said handing a fine to a company that knowingly breaks the rules is a ridiculous tool to use in an industry that makes huge amounts of money for handling substances, which, by their very definition, are harmful to human health and the environment.

He said the ministry should levy much stiffer penalties or charge offending companies and take them to court.

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy George Heyman declined an interview request.

Loss of digital database makes it difficult for investigators to do their jobs

Under provincial law, companies handling hazardous waste have long been required to fill out paper manifests detailing the type of waste they are handling, where the waste is going and who is shipping and moving it. Copies of those manifests are then sent to the Ministry of Environment. Truck drivers transporting waste are also required to have those manifests with them in the event they are inspected or involved in an accident and there is a spill.

Until the end of 2014, two data entry clerks inputted details from the manifests into the government’s now-defunct database. If provincial investigators later decided to investigate a company, they could turn to the database to see what companies reported handling and crosscheck that against what the companies were actually transporting through spot inspections.

B.C.’s vanishing hazardous waste database

Gage said with the database now a thing of the past, the government has effectively stymied timely and effective enforcement efforts. 

“Anyone in law enforcement” knows that readily available data is “absolutely critical” to doing the job, he told The Narwhal.

“If [compliance and enforcement staff] are not able to review it easily, the entire value of all the work that they’re putting these companies through [by requiring them to fill out the manifests] and the entire benefit to the public is entirely undermined. So it’s hugely important.”

Access to information? Please pay $125,910

Late last year, The Narwhal filed a freedom of information request with the Ministry of Environment asking for a complete paper record of the most recent year of hazardous waste shipments. A month after filing the request, the  ministry responded, saying if The Narwhal wanted the record, it would have to pay $125,910. The government previously charged $100 for copies of the electronic dataset.

A letter from the Ministry of Citizens Services accompanied the response to the freedom of information request and explained that the massive bill was due to the volume of manifests. The Narwhal subsequently learned from the Environment Ministry that approximately 300,000 pages of waste manifests are generated each year and are stuffed into roughly 50 boxes with each box filled in the order that the manifests are received.

Hazardous waste handlers in B.C. move a range of toxic materials from lung-destroying asbestos fibres to biomedical waste from hospitals. Photo: Anna Vaczi / Shutterstock

In other words, no member of the public, nor the ministry for that matter, can readily retrieve one, let alone several, specific paper manifests because they are not filed alphabetically by company, waste type, waste generator, waste receiver or waste transporter.

Gage said it’s extremely troubling that information on hazardous waste handlers is so difficult and costly to obtain given the government knows there have been serious violations of hazardous waste laws in the province.

One of the more spectacular of those violations occurred in 2007 in Abbotsford, where a company had stockpiled thousands of rusting barrels of toxic waste, including explosive materials, at a leased warehouse, compelling then-environment minister Barry Penner to declare a state of emergency.

15 years and counting for digital filing option

In a global economy in which companies like Amazon and Shopify keep tabs on the shipment of vast quantities of consumer goods using electronic tracking technology, Gage said it’s baffling that B.C. has gone back to a paper-only system. 

Courier companies have used hand-held devices for years to track goods, he points out, and using them to track hazardous waste would be cost effective and would greatly assist provincial compliance and enforcement staff.

“In this electronic age,” Gage said, document filing “should be automated.” 

He imagines a system that allows provincial investigators to monitor the movements of hazardous waste in real time. “If there’s an issue with the manifest, then that’s picked up. Like they get an email saying, ‘There appears to be this quantity of hazardous waste that was delivered by this producer two weeks ago and we haven’t confirmation of where it went.’ ”

The ministry has thought about moving to an electronic filing system since at least 2005, but the idea still remains “in the scoping phase” and there are “no set timelines” for when such a system would be in place, the ministry said in response to questions from The Narwhal.

Cowichan Valley MLA Sonia Furstenau, who is running in the leadership race for the provincial Green Party and fought against the dumping of contaminated soils at Shawnigan Lake, called the slow progress toward a robust, timely hazardous waste reporting system inexcusable.

“There should absolutely be transparency when it comes to the movement of hazardous waste in the province and the expectation that there’s compliance with the regulations that exist and that there are consequences for non-compliance,” Furstenau told The Narwhal.

Furstenau called the current system “very worrying,” adding that “the potential impacts of hazardous and contaminated material on groundwater, surface water and air are significant.”

Meanwhile, Ontario has committed to fully moving to an electronic system, which it expects will be up and running by 2022.

Ontario first introduced an electronic filing option in 2002, according to Lindsay Davidson, a public affairs spokesperson at Ontario’s Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks. But the option was “ahead of its time,” he said. “Most facilities did not have ready access to electronic tools that would support electronic reporting from locations where waste was picked up.”

Ninety-nine per cent of hazardous waste manifests in Ontario are still filed by paper. But unlike B.C., Ontario continues to pay public servants to input key details from the paper manifests into a provincial database, Davidson said.

Paper system drives up costs, illegal dumping 

Usman Valiante, a senior policy analyst with the consultancy Cardwell Grove, has extensive experience in hazardous waste and waste recycling issues. He told The Narwhal that paper filing is not only archaic but is also dangerous because it creates an environment where companies are more likely to break the rules because of the time and expense involved in paper filing.  

Valiante said Ontario’s move toward electronic filing is actually being driven by one of the province’s biggest hazardous waste producers.

“Basically, the chemical industry and the hazardous waste management industry said, ‘This system is so inefficient, it’s driving up costs and in some cases it’s driving illegal dumping,’ ” Valiante said. “It’s all out of self-interest.” 

Electronic filing is also more useful to the industry, regulator and general public alike, Valiante said.

“An electronic system allows you to track stuff in real time, whereas a paper system doesn’t allow you any of that. Which is why, you know, Amazon doesn’t use a paper system.”

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When Woodland Cree Chiefs met with commissioners of the Crown at Lesser Slave Lake in June 1899 to sign Treaty 8, it’s likely no one completely understood the full scale of industrial development that lay ahead.

Alberta was a half-century away from the major oil strike that would set Canada on the path to becoming the world’s fifth-largest oil producer. Back then dams in British Columbia were built by beavers, not BC Hydro, and the Peace River flowed freely from the Rockies all the way to the Athabasca delta.

The document, subsequently signed by Dunneza and Chipewyan Chiefs, would govern relations between Indigenous peoples and the Crown over the largest tract of land in Canada covered by a single treaty — a landmass larger than France.

One hundred and twenty years later, oilsands pits, sprawling tailings ponds, clearcuts slicing through the boreal forest, fracked oil and natural gas wells, pipelines, seismic lines, dams and a massive hydro-electric reservoir filled with mercury-contaminated fish have turned much of that landscape into one giant industrial sacrifice zone.

The “cumulative effects” of such disturbances lie at the heart of a recent important judgment handed down by the highest court in Alberta. It’s a decision that lawyers representing First Nations in proceedings before the courts in British Columbia say may have positive implications for their clients as they fight the ongoing loss of their rights on treaty lands.

A map of Treaty 8 territory. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

A management plan that never was

The Alberta Court of Appeal’s decision in late April marks a major victory for Fort McKay First Nation, which had tried for decades to protect the Moose Lake area north of Fort McMurray.

In 2015, Chief Jim Boucher and other members of the nation were promised by former Alberta premier Jim Prentice that the government would help them develop an access management plan for the critical area that would limit industrial activity near the lake and within traditional harvesting areas.

“When Chief Boucher asked for our support to protect the small parcel of land near Moose Lake for his community, I didn’t hesitate to say yes,” Prentice said in a government press release at the time.

But the promised management plan never materialized. In 2018, the Alberta Energy Regulator approved an application by Prosper Petroleum Ltd. for a 10,000-barrel-a-day oilsands project adjacent to Moose Lake, propelling the nation into the courts.

It devours our land

The three Appeal Court justices concluded the regulator failed to properly consider the public interest and “that there was no basis” for the regulator “to decline to consider” the promised planning process.

“Due to the extensive industrial and resource development surrounding Fort McKay, [the Fort McKay First Nation] is concerned that the ability of its members to pursue their traditional way of life in the Moose Lake Area has been severely and adversely affected by the cumulative effect of oilsands development … 70 per cent of [the Fort McKay First Nation’s] traditional territory is leased for oilsands purposes,” the justices noted in their judgement.

The justices quashed the regulator’s approval of the project and ordered it to “reconsider” whether the project was in the broader public interest and the project’s impacts on Indigenous peoples.

Careening into obliteration

In a concurring judgement, Justice Sheila Greckol took the added step of telling the provincial regulator what was required to uphold the honour of the Crown. Greckol noted the Alberta government knew the nation objected to “consultation” on a project-by-project basis because doing so meant the “cumulative effects of development” were never addressed.

“That is not honourable. And it is not reconciliation.”

“The honour of the Crown may not mandate that the parties agree to any one particular settlement, but it does require that the Crown keep promises made during negotiations to protect Treaty Rights,” Justice Greckol wrote, adding “the honour of the Crown has as its ultimate purpose the reconciliation of Aboriginal interests with Crown sovereignty” and seeks to prevent Aboriginal Rights from turning into an “empty shell.”

“It certainly demands more than allowing the Crown to placate [the Fort McKay First Nation] while its Treaty Rights careen into obliteration,” the justice wrote. “That is not honourable. And it is not reconciliation.”

Maegen Giltrow, a Vancouver-based lawyer representing the Blueberry River First Nation in a case in which the nation seeks to stop the British Columbia government from approving industrial development that “unjustifiably infringes their Treaty Rights,” said the judgement is highly relevant to the Blueberry case.

“The last paragraph of the judgement is actually so telling,” Giltrow told The Narwhal. “The obligation to implement the treaty is far more than an obligation just to consult. It’s not just sort of talking pleasantly while you continue to approve.”

Giltrow added the finding is “obviously true across all provinces” where Treaty 8 applies.

In the Blueberry River First Nation’s case, three quarters of the nation’s traditional lands now lie within 250 metres of an industrial disturbance, and opportunities for the nation’s members to carry out their Treaty Rights to hunt, fish and trap have plummeted.

Only a few witnesses remain before lawyers representing both sides give their closing arguments, which are expected to last a month. A decision by the court may be a year or more away.

Blueberry River and the death by a thousand cuts

Entire ecosystems submerged

Tim Thielman, a lawyer representing the West Moberly First Nations in another matter before the B.C. Supreme Court involving the provincial government and cumulative impacts, also said the Alberta Court of Appeal decision may apply in B.C.

Thielman said the Alberta case “could be a positive sign for other First Nations that are seeking remedies for … multiple Crown projects in their territories.”

The most significant industrial project underway in West Moberly First Nation territory right now is the Site C dam. The project will flood more than 120 kilometres of the Peace River valley and tributary valleys, on top of the extensive flooding caused by the W.A.C. Bennett and Peace Canyon dams upstream of Site C.

The impact that just one dam would have on treaty lands was probably never considered at the time Treaty 8 was signed, let alone the potential impact of three dams on the Peace River.

“That cumulative effect was never contemplated by the parties that entered the treaty,” Thielman told The Narwhal.

“At the time, they had in mind some small-scale mining and logging, and guys working with pickaxes — not entire ecosystems being radically transformed and irreversibly submerged.”

How big does a herd of moose have to be?

Jack Woodward, who along with Joseph Arvay represented the Fort McKay First Nation before Alberta’s highest court, also represented the Treaty 8 Tribal Association before the Supreme Court of Canada in 2005’s landmark Mikisew Cree case.

The case involved a winter road the federal government first intended to run right through a Mikisew Cree First Nation reserve. The federal government later rerouted the proposed road to skirt around the edge of the reserve. The nation wasn’t consulted in either case.

Central to that case was the tension inherent in the two main provisions of the treaty: the right of the First Nations to hunt, fish and trap, and the right of the Crown to “take up” land for settlements and other purposes.

What the court decided in that case, Woodward said, was that there must be “meaningful” opportunities to hunt, fish and trap.

“It took until 2005 for Canadian law to work out what those two conflicting objectives of the treaty are,” Woodward told The Narwhal. “Obviously there’s a point where those two things clash. If you take up every square inch of the land, then there’s no more right to hunt, fish and trap.”

“It becomes an ecological question,” Woodward continued.

“The ecological question is how much habitat must be preserved in order to provide a meaningful opportunity to hunt, fish and trap. And … a meaningful right to hunt, fish and trap must mean that there is a perpetual, harvestable surplus of a necessary species in sufficient abundance to satisfy the need. So if you’re talking about moose, how big does the herd of moose have to be in order to support an annual harvest necessary to create a meaningful hunt for that First Nation?”

Increasingly, members of the Fort McKay, Mikisew Cree, West Moberly and Blueberry River First Nations appear to have the same answer to that question: “A heck of a lot more than we’ve got right now.”

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Opponents of the widespread practice of burning wood waste at logging sites across British Columbia say the government is backpedalling on a commitment to suppress the controversial practice by subjecting it to the carbon tax.

When George Heyman became Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy in July 2017, Premier John Horgan instructed him to extend the carbon tax to so-called “slash-pile burning” operations. The thinking was that the tax would force the industry to alter course.

But nearly three years into the government’s mandate, the tax has not been extended and Heyman’s ministry won’t say if and when it will be.

“Government is committed to fighting carbon pollution in a way that puts people first and supports the transition to a low-carbon economy,” the ministry said in an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal. 

“We are committed to working directly with industry to develop a strategy to strike a balance between industrial competitiveness and our goal of cutting carbon emissions.”

Yet some say the province’s delay is creating a cascade of problems as slash-pile emissions inflate B.C.’s climate impacts, heighten air quality concerns and lead to industrial practices that see valuable wood products going up in smoke.

‘Terrible conditions of smoke’

Len Vanderstar, a resident of Smithers who regularly witnesses the emissions from slash-pile burning, said prior to the last provincial election he and other members of a local group called Voices for Good Air pushed local MLA and now Forests Minister Doug Donaldson to back the idea of applying the carbon tax to those emissions. 

“It’s because of Doug Donaldson that that became part of the mandate letter,” Vanderstar said. But he’s now convinced the government won’t do what it said it would.

“They have no intentions of following what they promised or what was in the mandate letter. What they are doing is they are skirting around doing something that will make COFI (the Council of Forest Industries) happy,” Vanderstar told The Narwhal, adding that’s bad news for residents in the Bulkley valley.

“We have lots of people in Smithers that have vacated the valley and moved elsewhere because of air quality issues, asthma issues,” Vanderstar said, adding that the intense smoke from slash-burning that typically begins in late September packs an economic wallop as well.

Based on a calculation of 50 cubic metres of wood burned per slash pile, Vanderstar estimates that about one million cubic metres of wood per year are torched in slash-burning operations in the region. And all that smoke is bad news for fishing and hunting enthusiasts who flock to the region each autumn. 

“They come up here, and the whole backcountry, it’s terrible conditions of smoke.”  

Ray Chipeniuk, has lived in the Smithers area for 22 years, and said the amount of wood being burned each year is mind-boggling. 

In 2017, he prepared a report for Voices for Good Air that was later delivered to Donaldson. “In just one airshed, the Bulkley Valley-Lakes District airshed, the number of slash piles burnt is 20,000. In the province as a whole, the number of slash piles burnt may be as much as 400,000,” Chipeniuk wrote.

One of the justifications given for such burning is that it reduces the hazard of future wildfires. Under B.C.’s Wildfire Act, waste wood piles are considered a hazard, and typically the way logging companies choose to deal with the hazard is by burning the piles. But Chipeniuk said there’s little evidence to back up the claim that slash-burning is a wildfire preventive.

“Almost no research beyond modelling studies supports the idea that burning slash reduces wildfire for more than a few years,” he said.

Meanwhile, huge numbers of trees are being logged high up on the hillsides and mountains above Chipeniuk’s home in the Bulkley Valley and many of them end up being burned, even though they could be turned into forest products instead. Proof of that is not far from where Chipeniuk lives.

Smoke rises from burning slash piles at a logging operation on the west coast of Vancouver Island: Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

A mill built for small, imperfect logs

A 40-minute drive north from Chipeniuk’s home on the Yellowhead Highway takes visitors past portions of the winding, steelhead-rich Bulkley River, fields of grazing cattle and the thickly forested hills and mountains that hem the valley.

You can follow that valley all the way to the entrance of the Seaton Forest Products mill near the community of Wit’set.

Andy Thompson built the mill with equipment salvaged from another mill he was a partner at in Fort St. James. But neither the partnership or the mill lasted long.

“It was going really nicely until . . . a cold minus-20-degree day and one of my employees left their gloves on a heater to dry out and that caused the whole thing to burn down,” Thompson recalls.

Four years after the fire, the Seaton Forest Products mill opened in the summer of 2016. It currently employs 24 people, 80 per cent of which are either members of the Gitxsan or Wet’suwet’en First Nations.

Thompson started the mill with the intention of processing the small and imperfect logs that the major forestry companies operating in the region — Canfor and West Fraser — clearly weren’t interested in. “I knew there was a lot of wood that was being wasted,” he told The Narwhal. “I’d been out to a couple of logging sites and seen mounds and mounds of these logs burnt.” 

Between them, Canfor and West Fraser control most of the logging in the interior of the province and operate some of the largest sawmills in the world.

The larger mills owned by the companies feed on a steady diet of logs that are a specific diameter and length and as free of “checks” (industry jargon for splits and cracks) as possible.

But logs with checks and other defects are perfectly usable, Thompson said, if companies take the time to figure out how to work with them.

Logs processed at the Seaton mill are generally cut twice in a simple and elegant operation. Two rounded sides of the logs are cut off on one pass through the mill. Then the logs are flipped 90 degrees and the other two rounded sides are cut off, leaving large squared pieces of wood, known in the industry as cants.

The cants are then bundled together and shipped mostly to small mill owners in China where they are re-cut into smaller finished pieces.

Thompson said there is value in the wood that is being treated as waste at these larger logging operations.  

Much of this wood, Thompson said, is being pushed into piles and burned along with the slash rather than being trucked to the bigger mills, like the Pacific Inland Resources (PIR) mill in Smithers, owned by West Fraser. 

Thompson said he went into the Smithers mill and asked to work out a deal. 

“I went into PIR — the West Fraser office — and I said: ‘Look, listen … I know you guys are getting nothing for that stuff … I’ll give you thirty bucks a metre for it. You know, it will help lower your logging costs. Everybody will be happy.’ ”

The deal hashed out in the office that day allowed Thompson to gain access to droves of sub-alpine trees that West Fraser typically logged and left behind to later be burned because of the higher number of checks in the trees. Instead, the rejected trees were trucked to his mill and processed. 

Melana Bazil, Gitxsan member and employee at Seaton since 2017, said like many in the Wit’set region, she is not a fan of clear-cut logging and its associated wood waste and fires.

“I don’t believe in clear-cutting at all. But I know the logging industry is not going to be lasting forever and so I’m really grateful to be a part of the clean-up,” Bazil said, adding that she feels she is helping to set an environmental example by making a product that would otherwise be going up in smoke.

“I think it’s important that we take those logs and process [them] here.”

Saving wood, only to burn it

Since Thompson and West Fraser reached that initial agreement, West Fraser became a minority partner in a new wood pellet-making venture in Smithers called Pinnacle Renewable Energy. 

The pellet plant, which started operating in November of 2018, now uses some of the logs and debris from logging sites that otherwise was burned — although the plant produces a product destined for burning in stoves and furnaces.

Wood pellet stoves and furnaces are marketed as “environmentally friendly” because they produce very little if any smoke and because their fuel source — wood — is allegedly “carbon neutral.” 

But critics say it is a “disaster” to rapidly expand wood-burning, given the century or longer that it takes the forests those pellets came from to regrow and to store large amounts of carbon once again.

Thompson, along with Kirsteen Laing, a retired professional forester who helps run Seaton’s operations, say the company would be facing significant financial hardship due to the increased competition and escalating costs of getting logs to their mill were it not for a provincial government program unveiled in 2016 by former B.C. premier Christy Clark and run by the Forest Enhancement Society.

The program — set up with an initial infusion of $85 million and a follow-up instalment of $150 million — helps fund various projects to renew forests damaged by wildfires and insect attacks and to promote projects that foster healthier forests where more carbon is either being captured or not emitted through burning.

The remnants of a burned slash pile in the Klanawa Valley. Photo: TJ Watt

Since the creation of the program, numerous reforestation projects have received funding as well as specific businesses being paid money from the fund to offset the costs of hauling wood into their facilities.

The Seaton mill, designed to prevent wood waste from being burned on cutblocks, received $2.56 million under the program.

But the Pinnacle/West Fraser pellet plant partnership also received $1.2 million to turn that wood waste into products destined to be burned. 

A band aid, not a solution

The Forest Enhancement Society claims on its webpage that such investments have resulted in a combined 3.5 million cubic metres of wood to date (one cubic metre is roughly the size of one telephone pole) being processed, rather than being burned across B.C.

While the program has assisted Seaton and others, virtually all of its funds are now allocated and are slated to be spent over the next few years. 

For that reason, both Thompson and Laing say it is not a long-term solution to the slash-burning problem.

“It’s a band-aid. The government’s giving us money that they don’t need to give us if they would just think outside the box,” Thompson said.

“It’s also just on a three-year term,” Laing added. “Once that term’s done, well, we’re back in the same position.”

Both Thompson and Laing say they would rather see the provincial government give the company a licence that would require all the unwanted logs that companies are currently logging and burning to be assigned to their mill.

They also note that giving their mill such a licence would still mean that the pellet industry got wood as well. But rather than pellet makers turning whole trees directly into pellets — a practice that has raised alarm bells in the environmental community — the pellet plant would use the wood chips and waste from the Seaton mill and other mills to make the pellets instead.

B.C. giving millions to transform rainforest into wood pellets for export, new report documents

“I think it would be a shame, if the logs that we have coming into our yard, and the product that we can produce from our yard, would just get chipped for pellets,” Laing said. 

Vanderstar is not a fan of the Forest Enhancement Society either. He said the Society has been music to the forest industry’s ears because rather than the companies that do the slash-burning being taxed for the damaging pollution they cause, it is taxpayers who foot the bill.

A far better solution, he said, is the carbon tax the government promised to implement. Or, if the government balks at calling it a tax, then a surcharge, Vanderstar said. The companies causing the pollution face penalties for doing so and “eventually everybody stops burning slash because now you’ve formed a secondary industry.”

Chipeniuk calculates the industry in the Smithers area burned nearly 1.4 million tons of wood waste in 2017 and that province-wide that year at least 10 million tonnes of wood waste was burned.

“Why is there so little public consciousness of such atrocious greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere?” Chipeniuk wrote in a paper he hand-delivered to Donaldson.

According to the most recent data available from the province, the estimated greenhouse gas emissions generated at slash-burning operations across B.C. were just under 4 million tonnes in 2017. 

But the emissions are not included in the province’s — or the country’s — official emissions tally.

Had those been included in the official tally, B.C.’s emissions would have been more than six per cent higher, according to the inventory report’s figures. However, both Chipeniuk and Vanderstar believe the actual total figure is far higher than is reflected in government reports.

An analysis of provincial data by Sierra Club BC noted that emissions from slash-pile burning, reported at about eight megatonnes annually (the equivalent of more than 1.7 million vehicles on the road for a year) mysteriously disappeared from the B.C. greenhouse gas inventory in 2017. The province simply stated they were “under review.”

A clear-cut problem

Vanderstar said there are many reasons why the amount of waste left behind and later burned at logging sites is getting worse, not better — particularly in his neck of the woods.

Higher elevation forests don’t have the same number of desirable trees for sawmills, so more trees must be logged to get the required volumes. That means more waste.

The region also used to have two pulp mills — one in Kitimat, the other in Prince Rupert. But those mills closed long ago, and with their closure wood waste levels climbed.

And in portions of the northwest, like the Terrace area, few sawmills now operate. That means a lot of log exports and a lot more waste left behind as only the best logs end up in the containers bound for China and other overseas markets.

Ultimately, Vanderstar said the slash-burning problem won’t be solved unless there’s a fundamental shift in how the region’s forests are logged.

“Our first priority should be … really focusing on what we need to leave behind in the forest to ensure its resiliency and its health and its biodiversity and its hydrological integrity,” Vanderstar said. 

“They ought not to be clear-cutting.”

The Narwhal tried twice to speak directly with Donaldson, but on both occasions was told that the minister’s schedule did not permit time for an interview.

Sprawling clearcuts among reasons for B.C.’s monster spring floods

Update May 17, 2020 5:17 pm PST: This article was update to change a previous reference of 45 degrees to a reference of 90 degrees in a description of how the Seaton mill processes small logs. Because geometry!

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After weeks of uncertainty, the British Columbia government has given tree-planting companies the green light to set up worker camps throughout the interior of the province, where up to 5,000 planters could eventually be housed in remote camps or at local motels during the COVID-19 outbreak.

 The announcement comes weeks after B.C.’s chief forester, Diane Nicholls, delayed the start of what was to be — and may still be — a record-setting planting season, so that the province and planting companies could figure out how to proceed in the face of the pandemic.

About 400 tree planters have been planting trees in areas up and down the province’s coastline since February and their camps have remained COVID-free, said John Betts, executive director of the Western Forestry Contractors’ Association, which represents tree-planting companies.

But that planting work began well before coronavirus began to spread in B.C., and represents only a fraction of the trees to be planted province-wide. The vast majority of seedlings are slated for the Interior where the planting program was in doubt until the government’s announcement early Friday afternoon to give tree-planting in the region the go-ahead.

“We believe this important work can proceed with the proper precautions in place,” said Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development.

“Seasonal tree planters are a crucial part of ensuring B.C. can address the impacts of climate change and wildfires and can build a resilient forest sector and meet global demand for wood products.”

But many people are skeptical that planting can proceed. That includes experienced planters who said they are doubtful workers will do a proper job of self-isolating before they commence their remote work.

B.C.’s most ambitious tree-planting season ever on the chopping block as coronavirus wreaks havoc

What counts as self-isolation?

New guidelines released by the provincial Ministry of Health and the BC Centre for Disease Control specify that a key element of keeping workers safe will be to try to limit the number of people that any one planter or camp worker is in contact with during the lifetime of a given planting project.

Chief Forester Nicholls said that a rigorous set of guidelines is now in place for planting companies, adding she is fairly confident that the bulk of the trees to be planted this year will get planted. Although much will depend on events that are always beyond the industry’s control, like fires, floods and sustained periods of dry hot weather.

She said the provincial government itself will also be taking extraordinary measures this year to protect the communities where tree planting crews may be housed.

“The province will be providing on-site security at hotels and motels where planters are staying, to ensure that tree planters adhere to the health officers’ orders and guidance,” Nicholls said.

Craig Turney, who planted trees for five years in B.C. after moving to the province from the Ottawa area 10 years ago, said he isn’t so sure the province’s new catalogue of rules will be followed.

He lives in a communal house with 10 other people in Victoria. They’ve done their best to follow COVID-19 protocols, he said, but “perfect isolation” has not been possible. Yet, tree-planting friends of his, who said they do not want to risk spreading the virus to remote northern communities, have actually proposed “isolating” themselves at his home for the next 14 days before heading off to their camps.

“They’re the people that I would trust the most of my tree-planting friends and they still think that living in a communal house counts as self-isolating,” Turney told The Narwhal. “There’s just no way that 5,000 people are going to properly self-isolate without any kind of oversight.”

Tree planting in B.C. Photo: Johann Simundsson

Living and working in pods

“In situations where employees are required to work together in close proximity to complete tasks, the employer will utilize work pods,” the new guidelines read in part. “These work pods will also include camp and kitchen staff as well as field worker/transport. The number of staff in each work pod should be kept to a minimum and be six or less whenever possible. These pods should stay together for as long as possible during the project.”

According to industry and the provincial government, this year’s planned planting season was in excess of 310 million trees, about 60 million more trees than planted on average in each of the previous ten years.

Nearly one third of those trees, mostly funded directly by provincial or federal government funds, are slated for planting in areas of the province where wildfires and other disturbances have occurred. The remainder are almost entirely destined for the restocking of industrial clear-cuts.

Some tree planters have expressed concern that B.C.’s new silviculture guidelines during the coronavirus pandemic are not enough to protect remote communities. Photo: Ben Hemmings / One Tree Planted

B.C.’s out-of-province planters have tended to originate from Ontario and Quebec — two provinces hit hard by COVID-19. Photo: Ben Hemmings / One Tree Planted

Getting those trees planted, however, will require roughly 5,000 workers. About half of those workers will have to come from other provinces. 

Historically, B.C.’s out-of-province planters have tended to originate from Ontario and Quebec — two provinces hit hard by COVID-19.

Miles Sanoy, who oversees operations at Dynamic Reforestation, a company in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region, said he has 150 B.C.-based planters that can be quickly brought on board. But questions hang over how easily it will be to augment that number with planters from outside the province. Like others, Sanoy said roughly half his work crew typically comes from outside B.C.

Risk of work camps to Indigenous communities

The prospect of workers fanning out across the province and working in close proximity to remote Indigenous communities, in particular, is an issue of concern for industry and government.

Gina Mowatt, is a Gitxsan First Nation member, who has voiced concern about industrial work camps near First Nation communities for some time.

“Our people . . . are living on reserve in small communities who are already not getting, you know, the bare minimum of health care,” Mowatt, who is working on her PhD at the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, told The Narwhal. 

“People making decisions to allow 5,000 transient workers into our territories during a pandemic is absurd.”

Up until the pandemic Mowatt travelled frequently for her work in a number of Gitxsan communities including Gitwangak, Gitanyow, Kispiox and Hazelton.

She said the risks to residents in those small communities and other First Nation communities throughout the province are simply too great to allow for close proximity to industrial work camps.

“Whether it’s a pipeline, or whether it’s tree-planting . . . it doesn’t matter what industry it is. It’s a fact. It’s very clear. It’s a huge risk and it puts our people at risk,” Mowatt said.

But other First Nation members said they are cautiously and conditionally approving of tree planting efforts in their regions this year.

Stewart Alec, chief of the Nazko First Nation, said his community is dealing with an enormous number of challenges even without the pandemic. The nation’s main reserve, which is home to 160 people, is about 100 kilometres west of Quesnel.

The community has been hit hard in recent years by emergency evacuations triggered by flooding and by intense wildfires. The community has already sandbagged in anticipation of rising waters this spring.

A combination of wildfires, pine beetle attacks and heightened logging activities — in response to the beetle attacks — have stripped the region of millions of living trees, which is elevating flood risks, Alec said. 

Amid coronavirus pandemic, some B.C. communities brace for flooding as well

‘Hundreds of hectares of moonscape’: B.C. spruce beetle infestation used to accelerate clear cuts

It’s for that reason the nation cautiously supports planting in the immediate region this year.

But Alec said the Nazko told the planting companies they could only proceed under the strictest protocols, including zero contact between planters and his community. The companies have agreed to pay for monitors from the nation to track all movements at the camps.

If the protocols around worker movement in and out of the camps and through his community are breached, Alec said, “the whole thing will be shut down.” 

There are approximately 30 people living on the reserve that are either elderly or potentially vulnerable to the virus, Alec said.

Colton Hash, who has planted trees for seven seasons, said he is concerned that there are many companies that may feel they have no choice but to go and plant. If they decline they could risk losing work in future years.

Tree-planting companies generally get contracts from logging companies that are legally required to reforest what they log. For a planting company to now turn around and not do that work out of a concern about the virus’s spread would be running a huge risk, Hash said.

“They don’t really have the option to say no without devastating economic impacts and without, like, their company falling apart,” Hash said.

He said that he personally will not plant this season out of a concern for someone in his household who would be particularly vulnerable should they be stricken with the virus.

Former chief medical officer urges B.C. to shut industrial work camps during coronavirus pandemic

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Communities and companies alike are racing to prevent the axe from falling on the largest tree planting program in British Columbia’s history as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupts an industry that typically deploys thousands of workers across the province each year. 

This year was slated to see an increase in the number of trees planted, from roughly 250 million each year in the past decade to 310 million. Accomplishing this feat would require 5,000 seasonal workers to spread out across the province and work in isolated camps averaging 70 people or be housed in communities at motels or other facilities. 

“This year was going to be the big leap for us. Well it still is the big leap for us. And it just got a lot harder,” said John Betts, executive director of the Western Forestry Contractors’ Association, which represents tree planting companies throughout B.C.

Now the season is on hold as the industry works on a plan to keep workers and community members safe. 

On March 24, B.C.’s chief forester and assistant deputy minister Diane Nichols ordered a delay in the Interior planting season until May 4, even though the provincial government declared reforestation an essential service under its COVID-19 rules. The order to delay was made at the industry’s request to buy time to figure out what to do.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is creating huge uncertainty for everyone,” Nichols said in a statement, adding that “one of the main concerns for all parties is that the reforestation season proceeds successfully by implementing all reasonable measures to ensure the safety of workers and the communities they work in.”

Tree planting was already underway before the virus started to rapidly spread, and the work continues in coastal regions. But most of the seedlings — 230 million, or 75 per cent — are slated for B.C.’s Interior. That huge planting program may now be at risk.

Seedlings at K&C Silviculture, a major nursery operation in Oliver, B.C. Photo: Darcy McElveny

About $76 million has already been spent on growing seedlings in anticipation of B.C.’s most ambitious tree planting season on record. Photo: Darcy McElveny

Tree planting in a ‘blown out’ landscape

Quesnel Mayor Bob Simpson said the health of his community depends on new trees. The consequence of extensive wildfires near his community in recent years, including the largest fire in B.C.’s history, is a “blown out” landscape of dead trees, he said. That, combined with the large mountain pine beetle outbreak and extensive logging, has altered water tables and set the stage for potentially devastating floods.

A key to rehabilitating those lands is to get new trees growing on them.

But Simpson acknowledges that people in rural and First Nations communities are justifiably concerned about people from outside coming in and potentially spreading the virus.  

“The challenge for us is to figure out how to plan the congregating and marshalling of these crews in our community in a way that maintains their isolation from the general population,” Simpson told The Narwhal. “As a community, we owe it to ourselves to try and figure out what that could look like so that we meet two goals. One, we can enable the planting season. And two, we can still protect our community from people who are coming from away.”

Communities like Quesnel as well as the tree planting companies now have a bit of time to figure out what that might look like.

‘There’s no COVID on the cut block’

About $76 million has already been spent on growing seedlings, Betts said. The wages associated with planting those seedlings are easily double that, he added.

Rob Scagel, a reforestation consultant, said once the financial transactions between businesses in rural communities and the tree planters are considered, the economic value of this year’s planting season will exceed $220 million. But the big question is whether all or part of the planting season can go ahead given the delays and the extraordinary challenges posed by the pandemic.

The tree planting companies hope to exploit the one thing that typically defines the industry — isolation.

Usually, once planters are out in the field tromping through cut blocks, or logged-over areas, they are on their own for the day.

“They’re working by themselves, within 100 metres or so of the next person,” said Tony Harrison, part owner and director of Zanzibar Holdings, a tree planting company. “They’re working in isolation during the day, which is the norm, and there’s no COVID on the cut block.”

But isolating those workers during other parts of the typical work day will be onerous, as highlighted in a 12-page draft document being prepared by the Western Forestry Contractors Association to help guide companies should the planting season proceed.

The document stipulates that no one who has travelled outside the country will be allowed to plant trees without first self-isolating for three weeks. Everyone else will have to self-isolate for two weeks before going into the field. All workers will be required to file daily health logs that will be checked. 

Workers will travel in small groups to and from work sites in trucks that are disinfected twice daily, Harrison said. 

Betts said the groups will form “social isolation units” within the camp. In addition to travelling together, they will also eat their meals together. And they will not mingle with others in the camp. If anyone in the group gets sick, then they all go into isolation.

And the restrictions won’t stop there. Buffet-style eating at camps will be prohibited. Planters won’t be allowed to wash their own dishes, which will be done by dedicated kitchen staff instead. All “high-touch areas” in the camp — such as toilets, tables, rails, latches, switches, and door handles — will be disinfected with chlorine, hydrogen peroxide or ammonia twice daily. 

Perhaps most onerous of all, no one working in the camps will be allowed to leave on their days off, a rule that will apply to crews housed in motels and other buildings in or near communities.

To limit the boredom that would normally be relieved by periodic visits to nearby towns, tree planting camps “will be equipped with communication, entertainment and wireless services to ensure that workers are able to maintain communication with their families,” according to the document.

But tree planters, who are used to the communal life and camaraderie of the camps, are already expressing concerns about the emotional toll such restrictions will have. On a Facebook group for tree planters, one planter notes:

“I am concerned about the toll on mental health for planters being forced to both work in an isolation environment and also not group together in camp,” James Colalilo wrote in one post. “Even providing amenities and activities for days off, I am worried it will not be enough to keep up morale in an isolation setting . . . after the incubation period has passed in properly isolated camps, crews should be allowed to interact in order to keep everyone sane and happy.”

Three hurdles to be cleared 

Simpson believes there are at least three formidable hurdles to be cleared for the planting season to be salvaged. 

First, health authorities must sign off on the industry’s proposed guidelines. Second, First Nations will have to be fully consulted and consent to the industry operating nearby, but not within, their communities. 

Jordan Tesluk, a consultant to the tree planting industry on health and safety issues, said the latter point is essential. To alleviate concerns First Nations have expressed about the danger the virus poses to isolated communities, it’s essential that tree planters “avoid any and all contact with First Nations communities.”

The third hurdle is figuring out if there are places in or near rural communities where large numbers of tree planters could eat, sleep and shower while minimizing the risk of the virus being transmitted. 

Simpson said an isolated recreation facility that is currently closed could be that place in the Quesnel region. It has ample parking, vacant land beside it and shower and laundry facilities.

 “To me, that’s the kind of thinking we need to do as a community,” Simpson said. “We have an already closed space that could potentially accommodate the need to isolate these individuals and protect our community . . . [and] still enable a planting season to occur.”

Even if such arrangements are worked out, many of the trees slated for planting this year may not end up in the ground because the planting season has already been delayed.

One of the biggest compost piles in history?

For each week that planting is postponed, 15 million to 25 million seedlings will not be planted, Betts said.

Given the stringent restrictions that will be in place should the Interior planting season commence, Scagel believes “triage” will be necessary.

“The critical question is, what can we plant?” he said. “Are we going to plant 70 per cent to 80 per cent? And what are the critical sites that need to be planted?” 

Scagel believes “candidate sites” include long-neglected plots of land that were never satisfactorily reforested following devastating insect attacks or that were burned in fires that in some cases wiped out young trees that had been planted only years before. 

Betts warned that if the entire Interior planting season is scuttled, the result will be one of the biggest compost piles in history. The seedlings “cannot be brought back to life or put back into the freezer,” he said. “They simply will wind up being a tremendous waste.”

Meanwhile, the nurseries that grew all those tiny trees, which are now in freezers awaiting shipment, can only wait and see how things unfold over the next few weeks.

“I’ve been in this business for 20 years now — in Ontario, the U.S. and B.C. — and this is my first experience with something of this magnitude,” Darcy McElveny, manager of K&C Silviculture, a major nursery operation in Oliver, told The Narwhal. The nursery has more than 10 million seedlings in cold storage that could be at risk should the planting season be scrapped.

Darcy McElveny handles boxes of seedlings in cold storage at K&C Silviculture near Oliver, B.C.

Worse, should the pandemic stretch into the fall, it’s possible that not one but two seasons could be shot for nursery operators and tree planting companies.

“Regardless of what foresters ultimately do with the trees they have already bought, equal attention needs to be paid to nursery operations,” Scagel warned, noting that nursery workers, if they stay healthy, are supposed to sow another 296 million seedlings this year.

That is “an enormous amount of work that could be thwarted by an early fall rebound of COVID-19,” Scagel said.

Betts said the industry expects to hear soon from Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development Doug Donaldson on whether the industry’s proposed guidelines have the support of the ministry and provincial health officials. 

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A version of this article also appears on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Policy Note. This is the second in a two-part series. Read the first part here. 

BC Hydro was so worried that its Peace Canyon dam could be badly damaged if an earthquake was triggered at a nearby natural gas industry disposal well that it briefly considered buying the facility for $5 million to make the problem go away.

But the buyout idea was quickly rejected because of the precedent it would set. Virtually all the fossil fuel resources near the dam and for hundreds of miles in every direction had been sold by the provincial government to companies hungry to drill and frack for natural gas.

That placed the publicly owned hydro provider — and its sole shareholder, the provincial government — in a bind. What was to stop another company from drilling a similar well nearby? Would that well owner need to be compensated to eliminate the threat to the dam. And if so, who would foot the bill? 

Details on the conundrum facing BC Hydro are contained in hundreds of pages of emails, letters, internal memos, and handwritten meeting notes obtained in response to a freedom of information (FOI) request.

The documents show that dam safety officials and engineers at BC Hydro knew for 40 years that the Peace Canyon dam was built on top of layers of weak shale rock that could shear or break far more easily than previously thought. They also knew the dam was at risk of significant damage and potential failure in the face of earthquakes induced by the natural gas industry.

The documents show that BC Hydro officials became particularly concerned about the disposal well in early March 2017 after Scott Gilliss, the utility’s point person on dam safety in the Peace region, discovered that three to four tanker trucks at a time were delivering liquid waste to the well site. The well site was owned by Canada Energy Partners and was only 3.3 kilometres away from the dam.

Investigative reporter and award-winning author Andrew Nikiforuk reported the company “spent $3 million drilling, upgrading and operating the well and pumped about 16 million litres of waste water” down the wellbore in the first three months of 2017.

On March 14, 2017, Stephen Rigbey, BC Hydro’s director of dam safety, emailed the provincial Oil and Gas Commission, which had approved the well operation, warning that the Peace Canyon dam had “foundational problems” and that even a magnitude 4 to 4.5 earthquake could cause damage to the structure.

The commission called Rigbey’s revelations a matter of “high concern.”

Two days later, the commission’s vice-president of compliance, Lance Ollenberger, formally notified the disposal company’s CEO, Benjamin Jones, that he had suspended the disposal permit.

An ‘increased likelihood’ of earthquakes

Ollenberger told Jones there was a chance an earthquake triggered at the well site could cause ground motions that were stronger than the dam could withstand. He went on to note that ground motions as strong or stronger had already been caused at other natural gas industry operations in the province.

“If such an event were to occur [near Peace Canyon dam] the consequences would be severe,” Ollenberger said.

A message from B.C. Oil and Gas Commission’s vice-president of compliance, Lance Ollenberger, to the CEO of Canada Energy Partners, warning about the severe consequence of a fracking-induced earthquake near the Peace Canyon dam.

But if BC Hydro thought that was the end of the matter, it was mistaken.

Two weeks later, Jones formally appealed to the Oil and Gas Appeal Board, a body that typically adjudicates disputes between landowners (usually farmers) and the commission.

Jones told the board the permit cancelation was not justified because there had been no earthquakes generated at either the disposal well or the nearby dam.

He also warned that if the decision to cancel the permit was not overturned he would seek financial compensation — either $5 million in cash split between the commission and BC Hydro, or “$625,000 cash plus a transferable royalty credit of $2.34 million” from the commission and “$625,000 cash plus a transferable electricity credit of $2.34 million from BC Hydro.”

But the appeal board was unmoved.

While the board concluded there was “a low likelihood” the disposal well could induce an earthquake strong enough to “destabilize” the Peace Canyon dam, such a horrific outcome could not be dismissed.

Disposal wells and fracking operations “increase the likelihood” of earthquakes, the board said, siding with the commission’s original decision to cancel the permit.

Running out of options

The ruling gave the commission all the justification it needed to shut the well down for good. 

But much to BC Hydro’s dismay, the commission did not do that.

Instead, on Dec. 4, 2017, the commission told the company it could potentially resume disposal operations again — just so long as numerous conditions were met.

The conditions included: installing new equipment to record seismic events within five kilometres of the well site; installing other equipment to record the ground motions associated with nearby earthquakes; and reporting the “date, time, location, magnitude, ground acceleration and depth” of any localized earthquakes in regular, one-month intervals to the commission.

That decision, according to the FOI documents, meant that BC Hydro was rapidly running out of options to protect the dam from the disposal well or any other encroaching oil and gas industry operations for that matter.

In an email to six BC Hydro colleagues on Dec. 22, Rigbey said it would be “much easier said than done” to get the disposal well permit permanently cancelled:

“We only have a few options. 

Make another appeal to the OGC tribunal (destined to fail), followed by

Initiate a court challenge, outside of the OGC tribunal (ie a crown corporation taking its sole shareholder to court!)

Buying out the well (already been discussed, with an asking price of $5M), and then being saddled as a well owner with all responsibilities for well closure and all the ongoing residual risks, as well as making a precedent that BCH [BC Hydro] will buy out anyone who gets a legal permit to drill a well…

We cannot come up with any other alternatives, other than ensuring we have strict protocols in place,” Rigbey wrote.

The buyout option’s $5-million price tag was particularly noteworthy because it signalled that BC Hydro knew that it was effectively on the hook for the entire cost that Jones had said he would seek on a cost-shared basis from both the commission and BC Hydro earlier.

By offering Canada Energy Partners a “conditional” way forward, the commission could not be accused of taking away or expropriating the company’s “subsurface rights,” and thereby side-step any question of having to compensate the company for those lost rights.

Province earned a record $1.2 billion for drilling rights in 2007

BC Hydro first became aware of disturbing ground motions or tremors at its Peace Canyon dam in 2007. Coincidentally, that turned out to also be a momentous year for the oil and gas industry and its biggest booster, the B.C. government.

Provincial statistics show that fossil fuel companies paid the provincial government a record $1.2 billion in 2007 for the rights to drill and frack for natural gas and oil in northeast B.C. It was the beginning of an unprecedented four years of so-called “land sales,” that would see more than $5.3 billion channeled into the provincial treasury.

Between 2007 and 2010, fossil fuel companies gained rights to drill and frack for natural gas under an additional 2 million hectares of land in northeast B.C. — an area larger than 5,000 Stanley Parks.

Fracking pad in northeast B.C. near Farmington. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

What drove the unprecedented spike in land sales was the realization that fracking (pressure-pumping vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals) into shale rock formations deep below the ground could liberate immense quantities of natural gas and oil.

Even the provincial government, which had encouraged a bidding war between companies anxious to exploit those resources, was taken aback at the sharp climb in sales prices during that time.

In a financial review released in September 2009, the provincial finance ministry noted:

“At $3,710/hectare, the average bid price was $3,000 higher than assumed and 99 per cent higher than 2007/08 indicating industry’s continued interest in exploring and developing B.C. resources — especially deep and shale natural gas reserves.”

All that sales activity signalled that fracking was poised to explode in northeast B.C. This included shale rock formations that extended under or near the Peace Canyon and WAC Bennett dams, as well as the planned Site C dam — BC Hydro’s third hydroelectric dam on the Peace river. Today the dam is under construction about 70 kilometres as the crow flies downstream from Peace Canyon.

The government’s fire sale of subsurface rights had brought fracking to the doorstep of some of the most critical — and potentially vulnerable — hydroelectric dams in the province. In an email sent to several of his BC Hydro colleagues in April 2012, Rigbey warned that what lay ahead was akin to “carpet bombing.” And he hazarded a guess that the bombing campaign might last 50 years.

Email from Stephen Rigby

Another well from hell

In BC Hydro’s eyes, the disposal well near the Peace Canyon dam was something of a well from hell — a facility troublingly close to a dam that was both situated on top of weak shale rock and known to be near existing faults that could be reactivated during an earthquake.

Another well site that might fit that bill for BC Hydro is a massive “multi-well” natural gas pad situated just 20 kilometres south of Site C.

The roughly eight-hectare well pad was carved out of farmland by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. on a bench of land between the Peace and Kistkatinaw rivers.

On Nov. 29, 2018, the company was in the process of fracking its eighth and ninth gas wells on the pad when it touched off the second-largest earthquake yet caused by a natural gas industry fracking operation in the province.

Author Ben Parfitt at the CNRL gas well where a 4.5 magnitude earthquake was triggered in November 2018, resulting in a “strong jolt” at the Site C dam construction site. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

According to the FOI documents, the 4.5 magnitude earthquake caused a “strong jolt” at the Site C dam site. All construction work was immediately suspended and workers evacuated from the site.

The commission quickly identified the fracking operation as the cause of the earthquake and the company immediately suspended its operations. The commission then alerted the public that fracking operations would remain suspended at the site and would not be allowed to resume unless the commission explicitly gave its written consent.

Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., or CNRL, is just one of many companies operating in an area the commission has dubbed the “Kiskatinaw seismic monitoring and mitigation area.” The area consists of expansive grain fields and wooded areas between Dawson Creek in the south and Fort St. John and the Site C dam to the north. The rural enclave of Farmington has been particularly affected by developments in the zone.

The commission put new rules in place in the area in May 2018, recognizing that increased gas-drilling and fracking in the Farmington area was causing earthquakes.

The new rules included a requirement that industrial activity be immediately suspended if either a company or the commission concluded that a magnitude 3 earthquake or greater had been triggered by a fracking operation.

Other rules required companies to “take action” and have “mitigation plans” in place should earthquakes of magnitude 2 or greater be triggered by fracking. And, if any earthquakes of 1.5 magnitude or greater were triggered during fracking, companies were required to report such tremors to the commission within a day of them occurring.

But as the events of Nov. 29, 2018 underscored spectacularly, the new rules failed to prevent an earthquake strong enough to be felt in households throughout the region and in communities 100 kilometres apart.

Fracked gas development in northeast B.C. near Farmington. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

Significantly, that earthquake is nowhere near the strongest to date to be associated with natural gas industry operations worldwide.

A 5.7 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma in 2011, later linked to a disposal well operation, released 53 times the energy of the Nov. 29 event. The earthquake is considered the most powerful yet to be triggered by a fossil fuel industry operation. It was felt in at least 17 U.S. states, buckled a local highway in three places and caused injuries. More recently, a 4.9 magnitude earthquake in China’s Sichuan province was suspected of being triggered by fracking. Two people were killed by the tremors and county officials ordered the suspension of the fracking operation.

In early June of this year, the commission received an independent analysis of the Kiskatinaw area, done by two geoscientists with Enlighten Geoscience Ltd.

The scientists noted that much of the rock formations underlying the Kiskatinaw region were riddled with faults, and that it would take only small increases in the pressure at which fracking operators pushed water, sand and chemicals underground to cause those stressed faults to slip.

“Only small fluid pressure increases are sufficient to cause specific sets of fractures and faults to become critically stressed,” the report’s authors, Amy Fox and Neil Watson, warned.

The report gave the commission plenty of ammunition should it wish to extend the suspension of CNRL’s fracking operations at the well site indefinitely or to make the suspension permanent. But a little more than four months after receiving the report, in a move eerily similar to its earlier about-face at the disposal well near Peace Canyon, the commission decided to lift the suspension order and allow CNRL “to resume operations.”

A map showing oil and gas leases surrounding the location of the Site C dam, currently under construction.

Site C dam construction on the banks of the Peace River in the summer of 2018. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

Under new permit conditions — which included “a lower threshold” provision — the company had to “take action” when an earthquake of magnitude 1.5 was triggered, versus the earlier threshold of magnitude 2. The company was also required to report to the commission any earthquakes of magnitude 1 or greater within 24 hours, versus the previous threshold of 1.5.

The commission’s decision to lift the suspension was issued in an “industry bulletin” that ran to less than one page. Nothing in the short document indicated how any of the amendments would actually reduce the likelihood of future earthquakes. The document also remained silent on the issue of what had prompted the commission to lift the ban.

Once again, the commission opted not to cancel a permit in its entirety — an action that almost certainly would have resulted in CNRL seeking financial compensation, along the lines of what Canada Energy Partners had threatened at its Peace Canyon disposal well operation.

A shaky Peace

Less than one month after the ground shook with force at Site C in November 2018, Terry Oswell, a dam safety engineer at BC Hydro, was on a phone call with eight commission personnel. The subject of the call was to discuss proposed fracking activities by Crew Energy, scheduled to take place near the Site C construction project in January 2019.

Details of what was discussed on the call that day are contained in a subsequent email sent by Oswell on Dec. 11 to two BC Hydro colleagues as well as at least two other individuals whose names are redacted from the FOI record.

The email noted the commission had “a shake map” for the earthquake that had been triggered just two weeks earlier by CNRL and that the commission “would share it” with BC Hydro. Oswell went on to say:

“The OGC has asked operators in the area to provide information on the type and length of faults in their areas. They said the event on Nov 29th was in the graben area [a reference to depressed area of the earth’s crust bordered by parallel faults] which may be conducive to larger events but that the … [area] where Crew is working may also have the same type of faulting.”

By then, BC Hydro also knew that there were numerous faults in close proximity to the Site C dam, including two parallel faults that pointed like fingers toward the dam site and that came very close to reaching it — faults that if reactivated, could have significant consequences in the event of a strong earthquake.

In the same email, Oswell recalled some of the questions commission personnel on the call asked. The questions indicated that commission personnel knew that a strong earthquake was at least a possibility, and that if it was strong enough, it could have significant implications for at least a portion of the workers at the Site C dam.

According to Oswell’s recollection of the call:

“Some of the questions the OGC asked:

Have we considered shutting down construction activity because of the work Crew is doing in the area? I think we clarified that they were talking about after they trigger a shake in which case we would follow the response plans and only if it was unsafe to resume work, would we not continue until it was made safe. And that we are not expecting the cofferdams to fail because of a fracking event but that it’s prudent to evacuate people until they are inspected.

How many people are working below the water level? Several hundred

What would we do if Crew caused a shake? Same response as per the 29th event and we would be asking the OGC for the information about the event.

How was the Nov 29th event felt on site? Initial jolt felt strongly and widely followed by several smaller shakes and then a final larger jolt felt widely.”

Less than a month after that December 2018 phone call, a letter arrived at the commission’s headquarters in Victoria’s inner harbour, which is only a short distance from the provincial Legislative buildings.

The letter was written by Jeff Christian, a seasoned lawyer who has represented BC Hydro on several high-profile files, and was written primarily to address BC Hydro’s opposition to any resumption of operations at the disposal well at Peace Canyon. But it applied equally to all of the Crown corporation’s Peace River dams.

A letter from lawyer Jeff Christian, stating BC Hydro’s opposition to fracking or waste water injection near the Peace Canyon dam.

“BC Hydro remains opposed to any waste water injection or fracking in close proximity to the Peace Canyon Dam and any such critical infrastructure, due to the large uncertainties in the hazard, the likelihood of occurrence and the potential consequences,” Christian said.

Christian’s letter reiterated what senior dam safety and engineering officials at BC Hydro have said for years: encroaching fracking operations pose significant risks to some of the Crown corporation’s most important dams. The most efficient way to control such risks, those officials have said repeatedly, is to eliminate the prospect for them happening at all, at least anywhere near such critical infrastructure.

But that is not happening. 

In the place of restrictions on fracking industry operations in areas of high concern are modestly tougher but completely untested permit conditions that the provincial government has no way of knowing will prevent a future catastrophe.

As a report to the provincial government noted earlier this year, one of the great scientific unknowns with fracking is just how powerful an earthquake operations might trigger.

No amount of permit conditions attached to a fracking or disposal well permit gets around the fact that predicting when an induced earthquake may occur, where it will occur and how strong it will be is an impossibility — an unsettling conclusion that the provincial government has yet to act on.

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A version of this article also appears on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Policy Note. 

BC Hydro has known for well over a decade that its Peace Canyon dam is built on weak, unstable rock and that an earthquake triggered by a nearby natural gas industry fracking or disposal well operation could cause the dam to fail, according to documents obtained by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ B.C. office.

For years, knowledge of the dam’s compromised foundation was not shared widely within the Crown corporation. It was even kept secret from members of a joint federal-provincial panel that reviewed the Site C dam, now under construction 70 kilometres downstream of Peace Canyon in the Montney Basin — one of the most active natural gas fracking zones in British Columbia.

The disturbing revelation is among many contained in hundreds of emails, letters, memos and meeting notes released by the publicly owned hydro utility in response to the freedom of information (FOI) request.

The documents show that BC Hydro officials knew from the moment the Peace Canyon dam was built in the 1970s that it had “foundational problems,” and that if an earthquake damaged the structure’s vital drainage systems it could be a race to stabilize the dam before it failed.

The documents also show that BC Hydro’s concerns about threats to the dam were discussed “at the highest level” within the provincial government 10 years ago, but that unidentified provincial cabinet ministers at that time rejected taking any action.

The documents have been augmented with a raft of emails supplied by a former BC Hydro construction manager, who oversaw $350 million in retrofits at the Peace Canyon and W.A.C. Bennett dams in 2007, and who is speaking out publicly for the first time about his concerns.

The Peace Canyon dam in B.C. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

A compromised foundation

Built in the late 1970s, the Peace Canyon dam lies a short distance downriver from the massive, earth-filled W.A.C. Bennett dam.

The FOI documents show that the Peace Canyon dam was built on top of layers of sedimentary rock, including shale — a rock known to present difficulties in large engineering projects.

“A number of weaker bedding planes were identified underneath the dam during construction. Some of these exist directly below the dam within the foundation, and shear tests on bedrock core samples indicated shear resistance that was significantly lower than originally anticipated during design,” reads one internal report on Peace Canyon prepared by BC Hydro. 

“The dam is marginally stable under full uplift considerations, which does not meet modern design practice.”

The discovery was a bombshell. Since the shale rock underlying the dam was more susceptible to shearing or breaking than previously thought, it was vital to prevent any industrial activities nearby that could possibly trigger earthquakes.

But that knowledge was not widely shared within BC Hydro itself, even when disturbing tremors started to be felt at the dam in 2007 — more than 30 years after problems were first detected.

Included in the list of people not to be told was Dave Unger, who began a year-long stint with the BC Hydro in December 2006.

Dave Unger at the Peace Canyon dam with author Ben Parfitt. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

‘My stomach went into my throat’

Unger was hired as the construction manager at BC Hydro’s Peace region dams, where he oversaw the dismantling and replacement of power-generating equipment at both the Peace Canyon and W.A.C. Bennett dams.

In the summer of 2007, while Unger sat in his office at Peace Canyon, he had a sudden sensation that the earth was shifting beneath him. It was the third notable ground-shaking event and by far the strongest he had experienced at the dam that year.

“I felt a real tremor and my stomach went into my throat. I opened up the door and I could hear a ‘ping’ as the concrete split right from the office door out to the front door, which is 100 feet away,” Unger said. “That really woke me up.”

At first, Unger wondered whether the shaking was related to ongoing crane operations that he was supervising and where very heavy equipment was being lifted. But he soon rejected that idea. There were just too many signs the dam itself was under stress. There were cracks in the concrete floors, cracks in the support beams and cracks in the powerhouse.

“It was just incredible what I found,” Unger later recalled. “I couldn’t believe what I saw, and nobody was doing anything about it.”

Unger and Parfitt look out towards the Peace Canyon dam where Unger felt a tremor and watched the concrete split in 2007. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

BC Hydro eventually dispatched Tibor J. Patakay, a professional engineer, to investigate.

Like Unger, Patakay found that the construction work didn’t explain the shaking. Something more elemental and potentially ominous was in play. The canyon walls that the dam was anchored to were slowly moving, Patakay said. Additionally, water pressure appeared to be causing “leaky joints and cracks” in the dam’s walls.

If, as Unger and others who worked at the dam later suspected, encroaching natural gas industry fracking operations were triggering earthquakes, that posed serious dangers to a dam with a compromised foundation — and to the people living and working downstream. 

BC Hydro’s dam safety specialist warned senior officials of fracking quakes

In 2009, two years after Unger’s departure, Scott Gilliss began writing email after email to his superiors expressing fear about how encroaching fracking operations could destabilize BC Hydro’s Peace Canyon dams.

Gilliss was BC Hydro’s dam safety specialist in the Peace region, a position he still holds today.

The FOI records show that Gilliss was particularly worried about the Peace Canyon dam given eerie similarities between it and a dam in California that had failed more than 50 years earlier.

At 3:38 p.m. on December 14, 1963, a hole opened on the face of the Baldwin Hills dam outside of Los Angeles. The hole rapidly expanded under pressure and eventually split the structure open, sending an unstoppable wall of water rushing downhill. Five people were killed and 277 homes were either destroyed or extensively damaged in the aftermath of the dam’s failure.

Thankfully, the death toll was far lower than it could have been because local police had enough time to issue a warning that the dam’s collapse was imminent.

The Baldwin Hills dam was built near known fault lines and near where oil and gas companies operated, a dangerous mix that Gilliss knew was also at play at Peace Canyon. Gilliss also knew that when investigators subsequently looked into what went wrong at Baldwin Hills that “pressure injection” operations by oil and gas companies were at least partly to blame for the “slow movement of the faults” under the reservoir that led to the dam’s demise.

Gilliss began writing numerous emails warning his superiors about the dangers associated with encroaching oil and gas industry operations in the vicinity of the Peace Canyon dam and the community immediately downstream of the dam, Hudson’s Hope, where Gilliss himself lived.

Gilliss alerted several senior officials with BC Hydro about “clusters” of earthquakes that were being reported in fracking operations in northeast B.C. He also warned about proposed natural gas wells that were to be drilled and fracked near Hudson’s Hope, with some wells slated to be drilled just two kilometres away from the Peace Canyon dam.

Gilliss recalls writing so many emails in 2009 that in his own words he started to “sound like a broken record.”

An email from Gilliss alerting BC Hydro officials to his concern regarding the threat of fracking-induced earthquakes to B.C.’s Peace River dams.

Ray Stewart, BC Hydro’s chief safety, health and environmental officer and director of dam safety, soon picked up on Gilliss’s concerns.

In December 2009, Stewart wrote Glen Davidson, British Columbia’s comptroller of water rights. As comptroller, Davidson was in charge of the department overseeing dam safety in the province.

“Hudson’s Hope Gas, a subsidiary of Canada Energy Partners and GeoMet Inc. have drilled at least eight, roughly 1,000-metre deep, coalbed methane production wells in the Hudson’s Hope region to date,” Stewart wrote Davidson. “Future plans could include drilling over 300 wells.”

Stewart warned there were “immediate and future potential risks to BC Hydro’s reservoir, dam and power generation infrastructure.” The biggest risk was increased earthquakes that could “re-activate” existing faults in proximity to the dam, Stewart said.

Thanks to Gilliss’ numerous emails, fracking and dam safety was also discussed by at least two provincial cabinet ministers.

“Your broken record was listened to at the highest level (minister to minister) and was ‘officially’ shut down,” Stephen Rigbey, BC Hydro’s then manager of dam safety, told Gilliss in an email.

Fracking ban ‘a dead issue’

It is unclear who the ministers were. But B.C.’s energy minister at the time was Blair Lekstrom, and Lekstrom had responsibility for both BC Hydro and the Oil and Gas Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry in the province. Barry Penner, meanwhile, was environment minister and had responsibility for dam safety.

Unfortunately, Rigbey told Gilliss, the ministerial meeting did not go BC Hydro’s way. The report-back was that unless BC Hydro could definitively show “a smoking gun” that linked a specific fracking operation to a specific earthquake detected at a specific dam location, a ban on fracking operations near BC Hydro’s Peace River dams was “a dead issue.”

Rigbey told Gilliss all that could be done for the time being was to keep the comptroller of water rights’ office informed.

But Gilliss was not to be dissuaded and kept up his email alerts.

On Feb. 18, 2011, he warned it wasn’t just the Peace Canyon dam that was at risk from fracking operations. The W.A.C. Bennett dam, where two sinkholes were discovered at the crest of the the 183-metre high structure in 1996, was also at risk.

“The Montney formation shale, which is being developed by these companies, may extend below the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. This is concerning because the seismic stability of the dam may be questionable given the possibility of internal erosion of the core and transition (I have already added a Dam Safety issue in our Database on this subject),” Gilliss wrote.

On Aug. 28, 2012, Gilliss wrote again with further concerns about the W.A.C. Bennett dam. This time it was to report about a “strange oscillation event” or sudden, unexplained change in the water levels at Williston reservoir — the seventh-largest hydro reservoir on earth by water volume.

The event had occurred the month before, Gilliss said, and was considered so perplexing that BC Hydro officials flew over the entire reservoir the next day looking for an explanation.

The suspicion was that a massive amount of soil and rock had sloughed into the reservoir — a possibility, given the notoriously slide-prone banks of the reservoir. But no sign of a big landslide was found.

With no means of checking for underwater slides, Gilliss and others began to contemplate the unthinkable — “that a frack opened up a fissure in the reservoir, and there was a release of gas, that could have displaced the water and caused the oscillation.”

BC Hydro engineer sidestepped Site C panel questions about seismic concerns

In 2014, two years after Gilliss wrote that email, three members of a review panel tasked by the federal and provincial governments with reviewing the Site C dam held meetings at the Pomeroy Hotel in Fort St. John.

One of the day’s agenda items was earthquakes and potential risks to BC Hydro’s Peace River dams. Among the experts to testify for BC Hydro that day was Tim Little, a senior consulting engineer with 37 years’ work experience.

Little was introduced to the panel as “an expert in seismic hazard analysis” and as BC Hydro’s former chief engineer, a position he had occupied between 2007 and 2011, years when Unger, Gilliss, Rigbey and Stewart had repeatedly raised concerns about problems at Peace Canyon.

“The seismic design of Site C is very robust and the dam can safely withstand earthquakes up to the 1 in 10,000 level,” Little said.

A map showing oil and gas leases surrounding the location of the Site C dam, currently under construction.

The dam’s designers also took into account the impact that earthquakes with magnitudes of up to 7.6 could happen on existing faults in the area, Little added. He later said that W.A.C. Bennett dam had been assessed “at a preliminary level” and that it, too, would likely survive a 1 in 10,000 event.

Little was then asked about a “seismic performance assessment” of the Peace Canyon dam, and replied that he did not know what the assessment’s status was. (At the time of Little’s presentation, BC Hydro’s board of directors had committed to an “updated stability assessment of the dam including a new analysis of the “seismic hazard” risks at the dam. But the work had not commenced, and to this day remains uncompleted.)

At that point, panel member Jim Mattison asked Little about recent reports of clusters of earthquakes triggered by fracking activities and what impacts they might have on BC Hydro’s dams.

Little acknowledged BC Hydro knew earthquakes were being triggered during fracking operations and that BC Hydro was in contact with the Oil and Gas Commission about them. But he said the earthquakes were generally small, that BC Hydro had considered them in its design of the Site C dam and that such earthquakes posed few risks.

“The fracking process might induce some other earthquakes, but we’ve already accounted for those in the seismic hazard analysis,” Little said. “The only thing that you might say is that fracking speeds them up a little bit over what nature would provide on its own.”

Mattison had been appointed to the panel based on his lengthy career in the provincial civil service, including a stint as British Columbia’s water comptroller. As comptroller, provincial dam safety officers reported to him.

So it would have been natural for Mattison to ask questions of Little about the stability of the Peace Canyon dam had Little volunteered any information about the numerous concerns that had been raised within BC Hydro about the dam.

But Little did not do so even though he himself had been warned by Rigbey in an email five years earlier that a magnitude 5.5 earthquake “could be significant for a meta-stable facility such as PCN [the Peace Canyon dam].” 

The result of Little’s silence was that Mattison and his panel colleagues were kept in the dark about the upriver seismic problems and their potential impact on the construction and operation of Site C — problems that only came to light when BC Hydro was forced to release documents in response to the freedom of information request.

When told about the existence of that and other emails, Mattison who is now retired and living in Qualicum Beach, said it left him feeling “quite uneasy.”

“There was always kind of a wonder about the seismic risk,” Mattison recalls. “They just kept saying: ‘No, we’ve looked into it. We’re on solid ground here.’ ” 

A Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. gas well site about 20 kilometres south of the Site C dam. A 4.5 magnitude earthquake was triggered at the site in November 2018, resulting in a “strong jolt” at the Site C construction site. Photo: Garth Lenz

Toxic waste pumped underground 3.3 kilometres from Peace Canyon dam

In early August 2015, less than a year after Little’s appearance before the panel, the British Columbia government approved Site C — a project t former premier Christy Clark had vowed to push “past the point of no return.”

Only a couple of weeks into preliminary construction work on the dam, a 4.6 magnitude earthquake north of Fort St. John was triggered at a fracking operation by Progress Energy, a subsidiary of Malaysia’s Petronas. At the time, the Clark government was actively encouraging Petronas to invest in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant near Prince Rupert.

The Petronas earthquake was felt for miles around and was far more consequential than the industry-induced earthquakes Little referred to.

The earthquake caught people’s attention at BC Hydro and was much on the mind of Scott Gilliss a year-and-a-half later when, in March 2017, he learned that truckloads of liquid waste were being delivered to a disposal well site just 3.3 kilometres from the Peace Canyon dam.

Disposal wells are where fossil fuel companies deliver truckloads of toxic liquid waste, including contaminated water generated at fracking operations, to be pumped deep underground for “permanent” disposal.

Gilliss alerted Rigbey, who was by then director of dam safety for BC Hydro, and Rigbey quickly contacted the Oil and Gas Commission to express concerns about the threats the well posed to the Peace Canyon dam.

In an email on March 14, Rigbey noted that because of the “foundational problems” at Peace Canyon, BC Hydro had effectively downgraded the strength of ground motions that the dam could safely withstand by one third.

Were even a modest 4 to 4.5 magnitude earthquake to occur within 10 kilometres of the dam, Rigbey said that the ensuing ground motions could easily be three times stronger than what the dam could safely tolerate without some damage occurring.

“It doesn’t take much magnitude to reach this acceleration,” Rigbey warned.

Waving the red flag

Two-and-a-half hours later, Rigbey received a reply email from Ron Stefik, the Oil and Gas Commission’s man in charge of natural gas industry disposal well operations. 

“The seismic tolerance you have noted is of high concern,” Stefik wrote.

Stefik then asked BC Hydro’s dam safety chief to forward on “any engineering reports or other documentation” that the commission could use “to support appropriate regulatory action.”

By then both commission and BC Hydro personnel knew there was a distinct possibility that an earthquake far stronger than a magnitude 4 could be generated at a disposal well.

Three years earlier, a 5.7 magnitude earthquake had been set off at one such well in Oklahoma, a state that prior to the arrival of the fracking industry had few tremors of note. The earthquake and several powerful aftershocks caused the ground to shake in at least 17 U.S. states, buckled a highway in three places, damaged homes, and injured two people. Scientists who studied the event later concluded that the cumulative effect of 18 years of continuous pumping deep into the earth at the well site had unleashed the damage.

A magnitude 5.7 earthquake releases 53 times the energy that a magnitude 4 earthquake does.

Two engineers with BC Hydro — Omri Olund and Norm Stephenson — would later amplify Rigbey’s concerns.

In light of the weak rock underlying the dam, Olund and Stephenson said, it was essential that the dam’s drainage systems function well. That included the dam’s spillway. Spillways are an essential feature of any safe dam. They are a built-in safeguard against water levels behind a dam rising too high and over-topping it — an event that can easily bring a dam down.

Unfortunately, the engineers said, the Peace Canyon dam’s spillway in particular was not up to standard. It only “marginally” satisfied requirements for “usual” operations and was considered “substantially deficient” should a strong enough earthquake occur nearby.

Olund and Stephenson also had other concerns. The dam’s drainage gallery is at the base of and inside the structure itself. Due to the tremendous pressure that water impounded by the dam is under, water at the lowest depths gets pushed under and then up vertically through the pores in the dam’s foundation and into the gallery.

To counter this “uplift,” which left unchecked can destabilize a dam, pumps are used to drain such galleries.

“If the dam drainage pumps at PCN [Peace Canyon] dam have ceased to operate, and it is not possible to open the emergency drainage valves that allow water to drain by gravity from the bucket blocks to the powerhouse sump, the water is likely going to rise in the drainage galleries to levels which will cause a rapid increase in uplift pressures,” Olund and Stephenson warned. “This will negatively impact the stability of the dam.”

The engineers were waving a danger flag filled with qualifications, but a danger flag nonetheless. If an earthquake occurred, and if the dam’s drainage pumps were compromised, and if BC Hydro could not get the pumps running properly again, there could be big trouble.

An earthquake might not immediately bring the dam down, but it could set in motion events that could cause the dam to fail. Stephenson would later say just that in a meeting between BC Hydro and Oil and Gas Commission personnel in December 2017.

The Site C dam and ‘critically stressed’ faults

Less than a year after that meeting, on Nov. 29, 2018, hundreds of workers at the Site C dam were ordered to put down tools and immediately evacuate the area after a “strong jolt” was felt at the massive construction project.

By then, workers at the site were acutely aware of the unstable terrain they were working in. Only two months earlier, a massive landslide had occurred just downstream of the dam site. The wall of mud, rock and trees that sloughed off the steep, unstable bank overlooking the Peace River took out a section of the only road leading into and out of the community of Old Fort.

The epicenter of the November earthquake was just 20 kilometres south of Site C and was soon linked to a fracking operation at a Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. natural gas well pad.

The Old Fort road, crumpled by a September 2018 landslide. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

The CNRL gas well site where a 4.5 magnitude earthquake was triggered in November 2018. Photo: Garth Lenz

Earlier that year, the company had pressure-pumped nearly 63 Olympic swimming pools worth of water along with chemicals and sand deep into the earth at seven gas wells drilled close together on a patch of once fertile farmland. The pressure-pumping or fracking was done to bust up the underlying shale rock and to unlock the natural gas and condensate trapped within it.

When the company pumped even more water into the earth as it fracked a further two wells, it set off the second-strongest induced earthquake yet in B.C. 

As work continues at the Site C dam, more earthquakes near the construction site and the Peace Canyon dam upstream are almost a certainty. What is far from certain and completely unpredictable is how strong those future earthquakes might be.

As three scientists noted in a report submitted in February 2019 to Michelle Mungall, B.C.’s Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, no one can predict how large an earthquake may be triggered by a fracking or disposal well operation. That is just one of the many big “unknowns” and “uncertainties” flagged in the report’s 232 pages.

What is certain is that parts of the South Montney basin, including the area where November 2018’s big shake occurred, are extremely susceptible to “induced” earthquakes.

According to a report submitted in June 2019 to the Oil and Gas Commission by two independent geological experts the “Kiskatinaw Seismic Monitoring and Mitigation Area,” which lies just south of the Peace River, is riddled with fractures and faults, some of which are close to the Site C dam.

Given all of those naturally occurring faults and fractures, continued approval of fracking operations involves known risks with unknown consequences.

Construction at the Site C dam on the Peace River in the summer of 2018. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

“Only small fluid pressure increases are sufficient to cause specific sets of fractures and faults to become critically stressed,” the geologists warned, adding that “generally stressed faults” lead to earthquakes.

Expect more earthquakes, then, as natural gas companies force tremendous volumes of water down into shale rock formations in deliberate attempts to break that rock up — the same brittle rock that BC Hydro knew 40 years ago was a big problem at the Peace Canyon dam, and that could yet be a big problem at Site C.

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