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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This article was originally published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The provincial government has ordered Progress Energy to drain virtually all of the water trapped behind two massive dams the company built in violation of key provincial regulations.

The company was told on October 31 to drain all but 10 per cent of the water stored behind its Town and Lily dams near the Alaska Highway north of Fort St. John by Chris Parks, assistant director of compliance and enforcement with B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office (EAO).

The order comes after Progress Energy filed an extraordinary application this summer with the EAO asking the provincial environmental regulator to retroactively “exempt” the two dams from required environmental assessments. Both dams are higher than five-storey buildings.

By law, Progress should have filed its exemption applications well before the projects were built, not after. Progress built its Town dam in 2012 and its Lily dam in 2014.

Both are part of a vast network of unlicensed dams that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) first reported in early May have been built across northeast B.C. by fossil fuel companies to trap massive amounts of freshwater used in gas drilling and fracking operations.

ICYMI: A Dam Big Problem: Fracking Companies Build Dozens of Unauthorized Dams in B.C.'s Northeast

Numerous organizations, including the Blueberry River First Nation (BRFN), on whose traditional territory the dams were built, have written to the EAO objecting to Progress’ exemption request.

“BRFN has been repeatedly sounding alarm bells to the Crown (including through affidavits filed in court) about the diminished water quantity in our territory,” wrote Blueberry River First Nations lands manager Norma Pyle. “We have been watching lake levels drop, muskeg disappear, mineral licks dry up and streams reduce to small versions of their former selves.”

"Blueberry’s concern goes beyond these two dams to the failure of regulatory oversight in their territory — it’s not just these two dams, but dozens of them,” Blueberry River legal counsel Maegan Giltrow added in a separate e-mail statement.

“This is in the face of Blueberry’s repeated concerns to the Crown about the diminishing water quality and quantity they are seeing. This September the Blueberry River itself ran dry — Blueberry members haven’t seen that before. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of freshwater in their territory is being illegally impounded for oil and gas operations.”

“And Blueberry had to learn about the problem from media reports — where was the regulator? The Nation still doesn’t have answers to the questions it has put to the Oil and Gas Commission about all the illegal dams and water use."

#Fracking Company Ordered to Drain Two Unauthorized #Dams in B.C.’s Northeast https://t.co/uc9uj2v8y0 #bcpoli #progressenergy #petronas @BCOGC

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 10, 2017

Public Inquiry into Fracking Needed

The presence of the dams — and a host of additional issues relating to how Progress Energy and other fossil fuel companies use the water stored in them for their fracking operations — are among the concerns that triggered a call this week by 17 organizations (including the CCPA) for a full public inquiry into natural gas industry fracking operations in B.C.

In addition to the proliferation of unlicensed dams, the call for an inquiry was prompted by troubling events in the northeast of the province, including evidence of powerful earthquakes triggered by fracking, escalating water usage at B.C. fracking operations, rapidly increasing methane releases at gas well sites, local health impacts and ongoing impacts to First Nation lands.

ICYMI: Coalition Calls for Public Inquiry Into B.C. Fracking

The groups encouraged the government to examine the impacts of fracking and related operations on First Nation lands and resources in particular.

“We are deeply troubled that this dam-building free-for-all occurred on First Nation lands, that First Nations were not fully consulted about the true size and extent of these dams, and that our Indigenous Title, Rights and Treaty rights are still completely ignored or denied. There are still no substantive or meaningful opportunities to fully participate in decisions around how water resources are managed in our respective territories,” said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

“We need a credible, strong, independent inquiry to get to the bottom of this.”

The Environmental Assessment Office has yet to say how it will respond to the Blueberry River First Nation’s letter and those of many other organizations urging the government to reject Progress’ application for exemptions. David Karn, a senior public affairs officer with the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, said in an e-mail that he expects the EAO to make a decision about Progress’ exemption request “in early 2018.”

Both dams are considered “major projects” under B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Act because both exceed a critical height threshold of 15 metres. The Lily dam dramatically exceeds that threshold. It is 23 metres high or as tall as a seven-storey apartment building.

B.C.'s Environmental Assessment Office has ordered Progress Energy to drain almost all of the water from this unauthorized dam. Photo: Ben Parfitt

Build it First, Ask for Permission Later

Both dams are among more than 50 large earthen structures built by energy companies on Crown or public lands in northeast B.C. that are also subject to Treaty 8, the 1899 agreement reached between the Crown and the region’s First Nations.

Most or all of the dams were built without the companies first obtaining key provincial authorizations such as water licences. In addition, engineering specifications appear to never have been submitted to and approved by provincial authorities before the dams were constructed.

Dam safety and water licensing officials with the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations are also investigating additional fracking dams that have been built on private lands, including farmlands within the provincial Agricultural Land Reserve. B.C.’s ALR was created in 1973 to preserve farmland.

It now falls to B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission (OGC), which allowed the dams to be built without the proper permits first being obtained, to retroactively review dozens of pending water licence applications, and to assess the health, safety and environmental risks posed by dams that may not have been built to proper engineering standards.

The first batch of retroactive water licence applications came in late December last year when Progress Energy applied for 13 such licences on a single day.

Each application was for water rights at dams that had already been built and that were already impounding water. The applications did not include the water licence requests at the two dams currently under review by the EAO.

Recently, investigative journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk reported how the OGC sent staff on a flyover of 51 unlicensed dams following publication of the CCPA’s initial research in May.

The inspections revealed serious problems at seven dams, or 14 per cent of those visited.

ICYMI: B.C. Regulator Finds Numerous Frack Water Dams Unsafe, At Risk of Failure

Progress Energy built five of the seven problematic dams (these five do not include the two before the EAO) and ConocoPhillips built the other two.

Noted problems included erosion, slumping and water overflowing the top of some dams.

According to documents obtained through numerous Freedom of Information requests filed by the CCPA, all of the unauthorized dams were purpose-built to trap freshwater used in fracking operations, where huge quantities of water are pumped under intense pressure to fracture or crack open deep rock formations so that trapped methane gas is released.

During a Progress Energy fracking operation north of Fort St. John in 2015, 160,000 cubic metres of water — the equivalent of 64 Olympic swimming pools — was pressure pumped underground at a fracking operation, triggering a 4.6 magnitude earthquake.

Dam Safety at Issue

The EAO’s order to Progress requiring it to drain its Town and Lily dams does not speak directly to the issue of how safe or unsafe those structures may be. Nor does it speak to the broader question of how the dams came to be built under the OGC’s watch, or whether or not the dams may be at risk because of ground motions triggered by nearby fracking operations.

The order notes, however, that “an environmental assessment certificate has not been issued for the dams” and because a certificate has not been issued, the Environment Minister “may order that the construction, operation, modification, dismantling, or abandonment of the project cease, either altogether or to the extent specified by the Minister, until the proponent obtains an environmental assessment certificate.”

Progress is then ordered to:

1. Maintain water volumes stored by the dams at no more than 10 per cent of live storage capacity unless otherwise directed by the EAO’s compliance and enforcement division/branch.  
2. Monitor and record water volumes on a weekly basis during frozen conditions and on a daily basis during conditions where flowing surface water is present, and provide that information to EAO compliance and enforcement upon request.

Following this order, Progress Energy’s president and CEO Mark Fitzgerald issued a statement to the Globe and Mail claiming “that it was his own company that identified problems with some of its dams — including the failure to obtain proper authorizations — and brought the findings to the attention of the provincial government.”

The article continued: “He said an engineering review of the company’s water-holding facilities found no structural issues, but noted that some were larger than permits allowed.”

"We own those mistakes, and are working with the [Oil and Gas Commission] to correct them," Fitzgerald said to the Globe and Mail.

“What's important to me is that we will not make these mistakes again. We're committed to working closely with the regulators and to managing our operations in an environmentally responsible manner."

An unauthorized Progress Energy dam where millions of gallons of freshwater was found impounded in early April. It is among “dozens” of unpermitted dams spread across northern B.C. Photo © Garth Lenz, all rights reserved.

Self-reporting Doubts

But records obtained from the Oil and Gas Commission through the CCPA’s various Freedom of Information requests paint a different picture.

Progress Energy did not suddenly arrive at the conclusion that some of its dams were built without the required authorizations.

Rather, the company — along with all its competitors operating in northeast B.C. — was told by the OGC in May 2016 to submit lists of all dams that it had built. Why the OGC apparently didn’t know the answer to the question is not clear.

Two months later, after the companies had reported back to the Commission, then OGC chief hydrologist, Allan Chapman, wrote an e-mail to the Commission’s vice-president of applications, James O’Hanley, and its vice-president of operations, Lance Ollenberger, stating:

“Hi James and Lance. Progress Energy has confirmed that they built two Freshwater Storage Sites that exceed the EA Reviewable Projects Regulation of 15 metres. In their submission from Wednesday, they indicate that one is 23 metres, which is quite breathtaking. I have advised them they need to contact the EAO.”

So clearly, the company did not voluntarily approach the Environmental Assessment Office. It was compelled to do so by the regulator, which should have prevented the dam from being built in the first place.

Several problems with the Lily dam were also subsequently noted by Progress Energy in its own commissioned engineering report submitted to the EAO. The Lily Dam Project Description document noted signs of seepage, or water leaking from behind the dam’s walls, and improperly graded water outlets for the dam. According to the engineering report, both issues had the potential to cause severe damage to — or failure of — the dam, if left unaddressed.

Whether those troubling words of warning influenced the Environmental Assessment Office’s decision to order Progress to drain most of the water from its two largest dams is unknown.

If the company's application for exemption is ultimately denied and the two dams are finally subjected to a full provincial environmental assessment, the answer to that question and more may finally see the light of day.

Even so, this case drives home why B.C. needs a full public inquiry into fracking activities.

Image: The Lily Dam wa built by Progress Energy without a provincial environmental permit. Photo: Progress Energy

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.

The B.C. Oil and Gas Commission describes its vision as providing “oil and gas regulatory excellence for British Columbia’s changing energy future” and lists its values as “respectful, accountable, effective, efficient, responsive and transparent.”

Carrying out those lofty goals is difficult, however, when the commission’s main public accountability portal for its more than 43,000 kilometres of pipelines — an online ‘incident map’ — has been offline for more than a month.

DeSmog Canada notified the Oil and Gas Commission that the incident map had been down for over one week via e-mail on September 7. A message posted online in lieu of the interactive map — which is meant to provide up-to-date and historical data related to pipeline incidents including accidents, ruptures and releases — said the site was down for maintenance.

On September 20, a representative from the commission notified DeSmog Canada the site was undergoing “AMS [association management software] implementation” and could not say “at this time when it will be back online.” A follow up email from the commission noted the pipeline incident map could be down for "a few months" and that requests for specific information can be made through the website's contact portal.

According to the commission the purpose of the incident map is to provide “timely, factual information on all pipeline incidents” as a part of ensuring “companies respond effectively and that the interests of British Columbians are protected through a 24/7, 365 day per year incident response program.”

The pipeline incident report is one of the few ways members of the public, including researchers and journalists, can learn of spills, pipeline ruptures and other major accidents.

For residents living near a pipeline spill or accident, the pipeline incident report is often their only way of accessing up-to-date information on spill volume, environmental impact, human health risks and cleanup measures.

BC's Pipeline Incident Map Quietly Went Offline Over a Month Ago https://t.co/mtHvOIInNA #bcpoli #oilspills #nothingtoseehere @carollinnitt

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 13, 2016

According to an Oil and Gas Commission report released this summer, there were 45 pipeline incidents in 2015, an increase from the previous three years. That works out to approximately one incident for every 1,000 kilometres of pipeline in the province.

Two of those incidents involved sour gas, an extremely deadly toxin, and another 17 involved either natural gas or crude oil.

B.C. received attention in 2013 for having the highest rate of pipeline incidents across Canada since 2000: 279 out of 1,047 incidents nationwide.

In Alberta, the provincial energy regulator regularly releases information on not just pipeline incidents, but any reported incidents involving oil and gas wells and related facilities.

Since the beginning of September, the Alberta regulator’s incident reporting page lists 20 pipeline incidents, two of which required emergency response.

If the same is happening in B.C., the public would currently have no way of knowing.

Image: Emergency responders inspect oil spilled from a ruptured Enbridge pipeline in Minnesota in 2002. Photo: MPCA Photos via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0

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.

By Ben Parfitt for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Efforts by BC Hydro to ban potentially destructive natural gas company fracking operations in the vicinity of its biggest dams fall well short of what an Alberta hydro provider has achieved, raising questions about why British Columbia isn’t doing more to protect public safety.

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives show that BC Hydro officials have feared for years that fracking-induced earthquakes could damage its dams and reservoirs.

Senior dam safety officials with the public hydro utility even worried for a time that natural gas companies could drill and frack for gas directly below their Peace River dams, which would kill hundreds if not thousands of people should they fail.

“The Montney gas field has vertical stratification of subsurface [natural gas] rights, so there may actually be a number of different owners laying claim under our damsites,” BC Hydro’s director of dam safety, Stephen Rigbey said in an April 2012 email released in response to the FOI.

No Mandated Frack-free Zones Near Dams

Yet, after years of discussions with B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission (OGC), which regulates oil and gas industry activities in the province, BC Hydro has obtained only modest commitments to prevent fracking near its two Peace River dams — the massive WAC Bennett dam, which impounds the world’s seventh-largest reservoir, and the smaller Peace Canyon dam downstream.

The restrictions, which BC Hydro’s director of dam safety Stephen Rigbey describes as “an understanding,” also apply to a third dam on the river, the controversial $9-billion Site C project, currently in pre-construction.

Both BC Hydro and the OGC say that the understanding is that “there will be no new tenures” issued to companies wishing to drill and frack for natural gas within five kilometres of BC Hydro’s dams. However, companies holding existing rights would not be prevented from doing so.

“If future activity related to the existing tenures is planned, we will work closely with the Oil and Gas Commission to put restrictions in place to effectively manage any risk,” Rigbey said in an email response to questions.

What those measures would be remains the subject of ongoing discussions. No restrictions are presently in place around any of the massive reservoirs impounded by BC Hydro’s Peace River dams or the lands that could one day surround the Site C reservoir.

In an email response to questions, the OGC said that at this point in time, the Ministry of Natural Gas Development “is not accepting any new requests for subsurface [natural gas] rights within 5 kilometres of the Site C construction area.”

The Commission went on to say that “there are no active hydraulic fracturing operations” within the five kilometres of BC Hydro’s Peace River dams but that there are “a small amount of existing subsurface rights issued within the 5 km buffer zone around Site C.”

“These were issued prior to the creation of the buffer. Any applications in that area, or elsewhere, go through a strict review process before permits are issued. The Commission is also talking with BC Hydro about any additional permit conditions that would be required to protect public safety and the environment in the area specifically, before construction occurs on Site C.”

The measures to date in B.C., fall well short of what Alberta hydro provider, TransAlta, has achieved. In interviews and correspondence with the company, TransAlta revealed that it has effectively shut down all fracking within five kilometres of one of its dams and also around the entire dam’s reservoir as well. And it has succeeded in imposing restrictions on potentially destructive fracking operations in a zone up to ten kilometres away from its damsite.

But, as is the case in B.C., there is nothing in writing to reassure members of the public — no regulation or government statement — banning natural gas companies from fracking near sensitive infrastructure such as hydro dams and reservoirs. Both provinces appear reluctant even to suggest that fracking is inappropriate in certain cases where public safety is concerned, perhaps fearing the precedent such an admission would represent.

“At this time there is no regulated/government mandated exclusion areas near critical infrastructure in Alberta,” says TransAlta’s chief media spokesperson, Stacey Hatcher. Rather, Hatcher says, an “agreement” has been reached to exclude some hydro dams and reservoirs from fracking zones.

Christy Clark’s Conflicting Agendas

BC Hydro’s modest achievements to date come as the Christy Clark government pursues two at times conflicting agendas. On the one hand, the government vows to push its Site C hydro dam, the most expensive infrastructure project in B.C.’s history, “past the point of no return.” On the other, it continues to aggressively push for Malaysian state-owned Petronas to invest billions of dollars to build a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) processing plant near Prince Rupert and to tarnish all those who oppose the project. Should such a plant be built, natural gas drilling and fracking near the Peace River and its hydro facilities would significantly ramp up.

In an April 2012 email, Rigbey likened potential fracking in the Peace to “carpet bombing,” and added that much of the anticipated fracking in future years would occur across the “well-established” regional stress regime.

Even if no such plant materializes in B.C. — an increasing likelihood given the recent announcement that another LNG proponent, Shell, appears ready to scrap its bid to build one — an upswing in natural gas prices would almost certainly result in increased gas drilling and fracking operations, including on lands alongside the reservoir that would be created by the Site C dam, which would flood more than 100 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries.

Documents filed by BC Hydro with a panel that reviewed the project for the provincial and federal governments noted that, even in the absence of fracking, nearly 4,000 landslides are expected to dump debris into the reservoir as a result of the Site C dam being built. The 676-page report that discusses those landslide risks makes no mention of additional risks to the reservoir should earthquakes be triggered nearby.

Martyn Brown, a former chief of staff to Premier Clark’s predecessor, Gordon Campbell, says the province’s conflicting agendas underscore a troubling aspect of the government’s regulation of oil and gas industry operations near critical infrastructure. From the outset, Brown says, the OGC has both promoted and regulated oil and gas industry activities. Limiting where companies drill and frack is simply not part of the OGC’s mandate or culture.

Brown likens the OGC to the National Energy Board. “It has a dual role as a proponent of oil and gas development, but also its regulator. And I think there is a fundamental conflict with that,” Brown says. He adds that “political oversight” of the OGC is also problematic because two Cabinet ministers — Energy and Mines Minister, Bill Bennett, and Minister of Natural Gas Development, Rich Coleman — are effectively there to “promote oil and gas activity.”

Concerns for public health and safety should mean that when tensions between the province’s publicly owned hydro utility and the natural gas industry arise it falls to a neutral ministry to determine what activities will be allowed or disallowed near critically important public infrastructure like dams and reservoirs, Brown said.

“Clearly what you need now is an independent voice in cabinet, the Environment Minister, to make broad determinations in an independent way,” Brown said. “The promoter should not be the regulator of oil and gas activities.”

Fracking-induced Earthquakes Cause Alarm

Documents released in response to the FOI request show that in both Alberta and British Columbia hydro providers have become increasingly alarmed at natural gas company incursions onto lands near their dams. The concerns have escalated as distinct clusters of earthquakes in confined areas over short periods of time have occurred in lockstep with fracking operations.

In one email, Rigbey notes that there are “no regulations to stop” oil and gas companies “from injecting into a pre-existing fault” in the rock. In other words, there is a risk that induced fractures could be forced into geologically unstable areas triggering or setting the stage for earthquakes. While gas companies might not want to tap into such faults, Rigbey noted, “accidents can happen.”

In its public pronouncements, however, BC Hydro has been more muted in its concerns. In a 551-page report filed with the joint federal-provincial panel that reviewed the Site C project for example, BC Hydro devoted less than two pages to discussing “petroleum industry-related” earthquakes and it downplayed their threats.

“The Oil and Gas Commission is now establishing procedures and requirements for monitoring and reporting of induced seismicity,” BC Hydro reported to the panel in January 2013. “Each case of induced seismicity will be evaluated on the basis of its unique site-specific characteristics, but it is proposed that hydraulic fracturing would be suspended upon detection of an earthquake of magnitude M4 or larger. It should be noted that earthquakes less than about magnitude M5 do not release enough energy to cause damage to engineered structures.”

In response to written questions, the Oil and Gas Commission said that as a result of discussions with BC Hydro the province “has established a five kilometre buffer area around the WAC Bennett, Peace Canyon and Site C dams.”

Graham Currie, the OGC’s executive director of corporate affairs, added that the Site C dam location is squarely within the Montney Basin, which contains large quantities of shale gas. Gas from dense shale rock formations can only be coaxed from the earth by extensive use of fracking.

Gail Atkinson, an expert on induced earthquakes and a professor in earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), says induced earthquakes can be hazardous because they occur much closer to the earth’s surface than do natural earthquakes. If such events happen near dams or other surface structures, the ensuing shaking can be much worse than would be the case with a naturally occurring earthquake of the same magnitude.

The higher the number of fracking-induced earthquakes near dams, the greater the risk that one of them might be sufficiently strong enough to exceed what the dams are engineered to withstand.

“If the frequency of experiencing earthquakes near a dam increases, then the level of expected ground motions at the 1 per cent in 100 year likelihood level will increase,” Atkinson said. She warns that the risk will be greatest “in areas where the hazard was initially low because there is little natural seismicity.”

Atkinson added that even earthquakes of a “moderate” strength could damage dams or other structures if they are induced “at close distances” to such structures.

Such risks are not something that BC Hydro talks about publicly, however. In an on-line video on dam safety, for example, Rigbey talks about the threats to dams from naturally occurring earthquakes but never once even mentions fracking or the increasing number of tremors associated with it.

Alberta’s TransAlta ‘Concerned’ About Fracking Earthquakes Near Dams

Atkinson’s work has clearly influenced TransAlta’s thinking. The company is one of three organizations that funds Atkinson’s fully endowed research chair on hazards associated with induced earthquakes at UWO. The other two are the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Nanometrics, a maker of seismic monitoring equipment. TransAlta also pays for some of its engineers and dam safety officials to be part of an ongoing multi-disciplinary research effort known as the Canadian Induced Seismicity Collaboration or CISC.

The CISC’s website notes that fracking-induced earthquakes are a “pressing problem” in Western Canada and in British Columbia and Alberta particularly. “There is a significant (though very small) possibility that triggered events could be large enough to cause significant damage,” the CISC’s scientists say.

According to Hatcher, TransAlta has secured agreement from natural gas companies operating in Alberta that they will adhere to a special “traffic light” system in a zone between five kilometres and 10 kilometres from its Brazeau dam and the shorelines of the dam’s 13-kilometre-long reservoir. “The traffic light system works in a similar manner to other traffic light systems for hydraulic fracturing, with a Green (proceed)/Yellow (pause and monitor) and Red (stop) protocol,” Hatcher said in written response to questions.

“TransAlta is concerned about the potential impact of fracking induced earthquakes and continues to work with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), Alberta Environment and the oil and gas operators to ensure that hydrocarbon development occurs in a safe manner that doesn’t create unnecessary risk to existing infrastructure,” Hatcher added.

In the much more sensitive zone immediately beside the dam and reservoir and extending out five kilometres, TransAlta has effectively shut down all fracking operators after filing a number of “statements of concern” with the AER, Alberta’s equivalent of the OGC.

Hatcher said that TransAlta could not release the documents and referred questions to the AER. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has filed a second Freedom of Information request to obtain copies.

Documents released by BC Hydro in response to the first FOI show that BC Hydro was prompted to call for frack-free buffer zones around its dams after learning what TransAlta had achieved in Alberta. BC Hydro’s Peace River dams are not only the biggest power sources in the province’s hydroelectric network (the Bennett dam furnishes one-quarter of the province’s hydroelectric power), but also in the region of the province with the richest natural gas reserves.

Special Consideration Given to Underground Gas Storage Reservoir

Only one other highly sensitive, yet little known, infrastructure project in B.C. is currently the subject of special operating guidelines as far as fracking is concerned.

BC Hydro learned of those guidelines in email correspondence with the OGC.

The infrastructure in question is a massive underground storage reservoir capable of holding 77 billion cubic feet of natural gas. It is near an area called Pink Mountain, where Progress Energy, a subsidiary of Petronas, is actively engaged in building roads, well pads, freshwater and wastewater holdings ponds, compressor stations, pipeline corridors and other infrastructure integral to the gas-drilling and fracking process.

The company also has plans on the books, which the provincial government has exempted from BC Utilities Commission review, to have a privately owned and operated hydro transmission built to the Pink Mountain area from the Peace River’s hydroelectric facilities. The new line would allow Progress to burn less natural gas in compressors by switching to hydroelectricity, thus increasing the profitability of its fracked gas.

The underground gas storage facility consists of two underground storage reservoirs and is about 1,400 metres below the ground. Since the late 1980s, natural gas has typically been pumped into the reservoirs in the summer months when gas demand is low and then pumped out as needed in the fall and winter months.

Fortis Inc. announced that it was purchasing the facility from Chevron in 2015 at a cost of approximately US$266 million.

At the time of its purchase, Fortis noted that the facility could become critical in the event LNG went ahead in the province. “The facility — which is the only underground gas storage facility in B.C. offering storage to third parties — is also uniquely positioned to benefit from the completion of proposed LNG export projects, where it could provide balancing services to suppliers and LNG exporters.”

In an email response to questions, David Bennett, Fortis BC’s director of communications and external relations, said that “successful meetings” were held between the company, the OGC and the provincial Ministry of Natural Gas Development. Those talks resulted in new rules that “ensure current and future drillers and well operators are aware of the facility and operate in such a manner to maintain the integrity of the underground storage reservoirs and ensure that new well production is not taken from the ACGS [Aitken Creek Gas Storage] reservoirs.”

In a follow-up phone conversation, Bennett said that Fortis had no fears that fracking into the reservoir could result in a cataclysmic event such as an explosion. The main concern, he said, is to avoid someone taking gas out of the reservoirs by fracking into them. “We don’t want anyone interfering with the reservoir,” he said, adding Fortis wants Progress Energy and any other companies engaged in fracking “to stay away from the reservoir.”

Documents released through the FOI show that the OGC has “conditions for permits” in place in proximity to the gas reservoirs. The conditions do not include an outright ban on fracking or gas drilling in a buffer area around the reservoirs. On maps supplied by the OGC, the buffer area is irregularly shaped but in most cases extends less than five kilometres out from the reservoirs.

In email correspondence, the OGC said that any company holding a permit to drill and frack for gas near the reservoirs “must not conduct any drilling completions or well operations” that have “a material adverse impact on the integrity or safe operation” of the facilities.

How this is monitored and enforced is not clear.

Natural gas companies operating in the zone are also required to notify Fortis when a well is about to be drilled and fracked. They must also notify the company when they resume drilling following “a temporary suspension” of such operations.

The special permit conditions, which BC Hydro has a copy of, do not specify what would lead to a “temporary suspension.” But earthquakes induced by fracking are among those events that have triggered stoppages in previous fracking operations.

Like the arrangements that have been worked out with BC Hydro, the special operating conditions at Aitken Creek are not common knowledge. Neither the OGC, nor the Ministry of Energy and Mines, nor the Ministry of Natural Gas Development has issued a press release stating that the special permit conditions, such as they are, are in place in the Aitken Creek area.

Much like the silence surrounding buffer zones around B.C.’s biggest hydroelectric dams, the government seems to be of the view that the less said, the better.

– Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC Office and author of Fracking Up Our Water, Hydro Power and Climate: BC’s Reckless Pursuit of Shale Gas, a research report published in 2011 that called for frack-free zones.

Image: A sign indicates underground cables at the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. Carol Linnitt/DeSmog Canada

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Toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, barium, cadmium, lithium and lead, are flowing unchecked into the Peace River following a series of unusual landslides that may be linked to B.C’s natural gas industry fracking operations.

The landslides began nearly two years ago and show no sign of stopping. So far, they have killed all fish along several kilometres of Brenot and Lynx creeks just downstream from the community of Hudson’s Hope.

As plumes of muddy water laced with contaminants pulse into the Peace River, scientists and local residents are struggling to understand what caused the landslides and why they have not ceased.

Hudson’s Hope mayor Gwen Johansson is also worried about a broader question raised by the ongoing pollution. The toxic metals are entering the Peace River in a zone slated to be flooded by the Site C dam. That zone could experience nearly 4,000 landslides should the dam be built and the impounded waters begin to rise in the landslide-prone area.

The landslide estimate is contained in a voluminous consultant’s report to BC Hydro, which under the direction of Premier Christy Clark is rapidly advancing work at Site C in an effort to push the project past “the point of no return.”

“If this much damage can result from tiny Brenot Creek, what happens to the reservoir if we get thousands more landslides?” Johansson asks.

No definitive cause has yet been identified to explain what caused the Brenot Creek landslides. But one possibility is that they were triggered or exacerbated by natural gas industry fracking operations, in which immense amounts of water are pressure-pumped deep underground with enough force to cause earthquakes. Fracking is known to cause unanticipated cracks or fractures in underground rock formations, allowing contaminated water, natural gas, oil and other constituents to move vast distances undetected.

Such brute-force operations happened frequently in the years immediately before the first slides were noted at Brenot creek in August 2014.

Between July 2010 and March 2013, a dozen earthquakes ranging between 1.6 and 3.4 in magnitude occurred in the Farrell Creek fracking zone, about eight kilometres away from Lynx and Brenot creeks. (A small number of other fracking operations also occurred closer to the creeks, but do not show up in the seismographic record.)

Requests to B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission or OGC, and information gleaned from non-redacted parts of Freedom of Information requests to BC Hydro, indicate that by March of 2013 both the provincial energy industry regulator and the Crown-owned hydro provider were increasingly concerned about “events” at Farrell Creek.

“Right now our focus is on getting the improved seismographic network up and running. We will continue to monitor and study all cases of induced seismicity [earthquakes] in NEBC [Northeast British Columbia],” Dan Walker, the OGC’s then senior petroleum engineer wrote in an email to Andrew Watson, BC Hydro’s engineering division manager, on March 7 of that year. The email was written two days after the last of the 12 earthquakes occurred at Farrell Creek.

By the time of that earthquake, Talisman Energy, the biggest natural gas company then operating at Farrell Creek, knew that wastewater was disappearing below one of four massive “retention ponds” that it had built to store millions of litres of highly contaminated water from its fracking operations.

A detailed investigation subsequently paid for by Talisman and conducted by Matrix Solutions, an environmental engineering firm, notes that Talisman’s “leakage management system” detected that contaminated water was escaping from between two liners that were supposed to trap and prevent Pond A’s toxic brew from polluting the ground and water around it.

Pond A had likely leaked for five months beginning in January 2013. In June of that year, Talisman drained Pond A and confirmed that the leaks had, indeed, occurred.

The wastewater ponds and gas reserves in the region are now owned by Progress Energy, owned in turn by Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned petro giant that the provincial government is eager to see build a liquefied natural gas terminal at Lelu Island near Prince Rupert. The Oil and Gas Commission, which regulates B.C.’s oil and gas industry, subsequently ordered Talisman to drain the remaining three ponds. At that point, it was discovered that Pond D was leaking toxic wastewater too.

Among the toxic substances found in water samples collected from groundwater sources underneath Talisman’s faulty storage pits were arsenic, barium, cadmium, lithium and lead, the same hazardous compounds that are found in the billions of fine sediments that continue to turn the waters of Brenot and Lynx creeks a muddy brown and enter the fish-bearing Peace River.

The Matrix Solutions report released in May 2015 noted that the release of toxic metals into the environment was predictable. By digging the huge pits and exposing massive amounts of unearthed material to the air, “surface and groundwater acidification” were potential risks, Matrix said.

“The primary concern for receiving environments related to acidic groundwater is the potential for release of trace metals,” the report warned.

Whether or not the fracking-induced earthquakes or the failures at Talisman’s waste ponds played any role in events at Brenot and Lynx creeks is unknown. To date, no studies have been done in the region to determine how and where water moves below ground. In its report of more than 2,200 pages, Matrix noted a troubling lack of such information. “Flow direction is not documented,” the Matrix report said. However, the report went on to say that groundwater generally moves from “topographic highs toward topographic lows.” In other words, it moves downhill.

Below the Farrell Creek fracking zone, the waters of Lynx and Brenot creeks continue to be so full of contaminants that a person’s finger placed just a millimeter below the surface disappears from view. The pollution caused one local farmer to quip at the time that his “cows are not supposed to chew the water.”

Martin Geertsema, a geomorphologist with the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations in Prince George, says he has never seen anything quite like what has occurred at the slide site since August 2014.

“We’ve got a camera pointed at the landslide. I’d like to install a few more to try to figure out what the heck is going on. It’s very unusual. There’s nothing quite like this,” Geertsema said in an interview.

“At other slide sites the water flows finished in a few days. The difference here is it just keeps going. Water is coming out of the base and because the water is eroding soil from the base it leads to cliff collapse. And the cliff is composed primarily of sand and some clay. And when it collapses, the debris just flows.”

Geertsema notes that the region is known for naturally occurring landslides, many of which show signs of “considerable antiquity.” However, today’s slides are occurring in a region with some of the most extensive and intensive industrial land-uses anywhere in B.C., including two major hydroelectric dams and reservoirs and water-intensive natural gas fracking operations that the OGC has concluded triggered clusters of earthquakes in various locales in northeast B.C.

When the slides at Brenot Creek first began, the District of Hudson’s Hope advised local residents not to drink the water. The advisory was followed by a similar one issued by the provincial government. The town’s council later paid a hydrogeologist and consulting water expert, Gilles Wendling, to collect and test water samples at the slide site to determine how toxic the water was.

Mayor Johansson remains disturbed by the event’s duration, its origins and most of all its timing. At the time that the first landslide was discovered, the region had endured weeks of extremely hot and dry weather. A water-triggered landslide in August was, Johansson felt, highly unusual.

In January 2015, Johansson wrote an article in a newsletter published by the District. During a recent interview she said her views remain unchanged.

“I have contacted MoE [B.C.’s Ministry of Environment] to ask what further steps they are planning and to find out when the advisory might be lifted. The MoE representative said they have no plans to do anything further, other than file a report. He said he expected that eventually the creek would cleanse itself.”

“That seems pretty inadequate. Test results show levels of exotic metals such as lithium, barium, cadmium, and others to be significantly above guidelines. They are not normally found in shallow ground or surface water. They have not shown up at those levels in any previous testing in the area, and I am not aware of similar readings being found anywhere in the northeast of the province. Some of the metals are toxic. They pose a risk to human and animal health.”

The OGC, which visited the site shortly after the slides began, concluded that the contaminants in the water were commonly found in the soils in and around the creek and that a natural spring was the source of the groundwater.

“The 2014 landslide appears to be entirely natural, and is one of a number of similar landslides that have occurred along Brenot and Lynx creeks over the last few hundred years, resulting from natural geomorphic processes,” Allan Chapman, the OGC’s hydrologist reported in November, 2014.

Chapman added that the “landslide deposited a moderate volume of fine-grained silt into Brenot Creek and Lynx Creek. I would anticipate that these deposits along the stream channels will continue to release the elevated metals into the stream water, affecting the stream water quality, for an extended period of time.”

Wendling, however, has questions. For one, the slide was not a singular event. Slides continue to occur there regularly. In an interview from his Nanaimo office, Wendling said the only way to understand whether the presence of toxic metals in the water is natural or not would be to dig deep into the ground around where the slides have occurred and to see whether the metals are found there. If they are not, and are being carried into the creek by groundwater, then where is the groundwater flowing from and why does it continue flowing in such intensity so long after the first slides?

Such test wells might shed light on whether or not major changes to the landscape such as the nearby giant Williston reservoir and/or natural gas drilling and fracking operations played a role in altering the direction in which groundwater flowed, Wendling said.

Wendling, an independent professional hydrologist, works closely with First Nation governments in the northeast who are concerned about the gas industry’s impacts on water resources. He said the high volume of groundwater entering Brenot and Lynx creeks, the contaminated soils being carried in that water, and when the slides began are all of concern. Typically, he said, such events occur in the spring months following periods of intense rain and snowmelt. But this one appears to have occurred in the middle of a drought, he said.

Shortly after the slides began, Wending says he walked the area and was struck by the dramatically different water levels upstream and downstream of where Brenot creek enters Lynx creek. Upstream, Lynx creek was virtually dry. Downstream, the creek had 50 times the normal water discharge.

“Why do two similar steams have such a difference in flows?” Wendling asked, adding that it was “important to investigate” all possible explanations for “the discharge of larger flows of shallow groundwater in proximity to Brenot creek.”

However, no one is expecting any such investigations any time soon. Neither BC Hydro, the Oil and Gas Commission, provincial ministries such as Environment, or the natural gas industry have groundwater flow monitoring wells in place: a fact that Geertsema laments.

“I think it would be very useful to characterize groundwater flows,” Geertsema said. “It would help me and it would help the mayor whose backyard is where the problem is.”

It would also be extremely useful in light of another uncomfortable truth about earthquakes and their potential to alter groundwater flows and trigger landslides.

Hydroelectric reservoirs themselves can and do induce earthquakes. After the massive Three Gorges Dam was built in China, for example, more than 3,400 earthquakes were recorded between when the dam’s reservoir began to fill in June 2003 and the end of 2009. The frequency of earthquakes in the region during those seven years was 30 times greater than before the dam’s reservoir began to fill.

A network of groundwater testing wells would go some way to helping people in the region understand what might occur as the Site C dam goes from concept to potential reality over the coming years.

The reservoir that would be created by the dam would flood nearly 110 kilometres of the Peace River valley and side valleys.

Should the Site C dam be completed, steadily rising waters impounded by the dam are expected to cover ground vegetation that will react with the water to contaminate it with methylmercury, a substance that continues to poison fish in the massive Williston reservoir nearly 50 years after the first dam on the Peace River, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam, was completed in 1968. First Nations people and anglers are warned not to eat fish from the artificial lake, whose shores continue to erode and slide into the reservoir, causing further contamination.

Johansson’s worry is that any one of a number of other landslides like those at Brenot creek could occur in future years, leading to a steady increase in the amount and variety of other waterborne toxins that could one day accumulate in the Site C reservoir. Toxic water impounded by the future dam would have to be released to power the dam’s hydroelectric turbines, meaning that such water would then flow downstream toward the wildlife rich Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the world’s largest freshwater deltas and a critically important staging area for migrating birds.

Meanwhile, as Site C construction activities accelerate, members of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee are about to conduct a study into the impacts that the dam could have on Wood Buffalo National Park, a World Heritage Site. The investigation was prompted by a petition from Alberta First Nations concerned about the potential downstream impacts of the $9 billion hydroelectric project. The committee has asked the federal government to ensure that no irreversible work on Site C takes place until it has completed its mission and report.

This article originally appeared on Policy Note.

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Three environmental organizations are taking aim at what they call the “systemic” contravening of British Columbia water usage laws in favour of the province's natural gas industry.

A lawsuit (PDF) recently filed in the Supreme Court of BC alleges that the BC Oil and Gas Commission has been violating the provincial Water Act in its granting of licenses to natural gas companies engaged in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the province. The suit is being brought by environmental law charity Ecojustice on behalf of the Wilderness Committee and Sierra Club BC.

“Given that water is an increasingly scarce and precious resource, and that in a climate changing world we need to be managing it carefully, the first step is for the government to do what they are legally required to do by their own laws,” Caitlyn Vernon of Sierra Club BC told Desmog in an interview.

Currently, companies can be granted 24 month permits for water use as a short term arrangement (that's up from the 12 month limit that was in place until last spring). These permits come with little review and are meant for short-term, low-impact projects. For longer term undertakings that will last several years – such as oil and gas extraction – companies are supposed to apply for a water usage license, which involves a more rigorous review and monitoring process. The lawsuit alleges that the commission has been consistently renewing short-term permits, and thereby contravening the law.

Data received by Ecojustice from the BC Oil and Gas commission which forms the basis of the lawsuit, shows that some permits have been renewed up to six times, and that some permits are granted for more than 24 months at a time. The commission's actions, they say, clearly shows a systemic avoidance of the law.

Also named in the lawsuit is gas company Encana Corp. While there are no allegations that Encana has violated permitting laws itself, the suit hopes to quash two water permits that the company was granted, on the basis that the permits last more than one term and that some exceed the 24 month limit laid out in the Water Act. While Encana is only one of many companies operating fracking sites in the province, it is one of the largest, and their situation provides clear evidence of the contravention of the Water Act, explained Karen Campbell of Ecojustice in a phone interview with Desmog.

Long-term water usage licenses require oversight necessary to preserve the province's freshwater, and especially drinking water, according to Campbell. Already there are concerns that communities in northern BC are experiencing water shortages. For example, the three organizations point to Encana drawing on massive amounts of water from the Kisktinaw River, from with the town of Dawson Creek draws their water.

Over the past three years, the company has used the equivalent of 880 Olympic-sized swimming pools – the same amount the town uses in one year.

“The more water industrial users take, the less water there is to sustain ecosystems or for people to drink,” said Campbell in a Q & A released by Ecojustice. “What’s especially concerning is that no one seems to know exactly how much water industry operations are consuming.” Those concerns were echoed by Vernon, who explained that no government official has been able to provide them with exactly how much water is being used by the natural gas industry in the province.

Video from Common Sense Canadian.

What is known is that fracking uses huge amounts of water: by some estimates 11 million litres per well. With over 7,300 wells already in operation in the province, and the BC Liberal government pushing plans to significantly grow the industry, critics say it's clear that there needs to be more oversight before a water crisis strikes.

“If we're looking at the management of water in BC, in light of all the fracking that's currently happening, we want to make clear that any focus on liquid natural gas is going to require massive increases in fracking operations, with its associated impacts to water availability, water contamination and green house gas emissions,” said Vernon. Those concerns were echoed in an article published as part of a recent series on water issues in BC, also produced by Ecojustice and published by The Tyee, which showed that water shortages in the province are more probable than many would expect.

The concern about water use is just one piece of the puzzle, though. The fracking industry in BC is one of the largest in Canada. As Campbell points out, while there are moratoriums on fracking in Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, and protests and blockades against fracking in New Brunswick, the process has been happening without contention in BC for a decade now. Beyond water usage, there are concerns about water contamination from the chemicals used, the impact that the fracturing of shale may have on local geology (studies have blamed fracking for small earth quakes in the US), and lack of consultation with First Nations on use of their unceded territory.

Public concern and opposition seems to be growing though. Earlier this month, protesters with Rising Tide Vancouver Coast Salish Territories took to BC Premier Christy Clark's front lawn to set-up a “rig” to “frack” her land. And thousands turned out to a demonstration in Vancouver against pipelines on November 16. While primarily targeting oil pipelines like Enbridge's Northern Gateway, there was also visible opposition to fracking.

“I think this lawsuit is a really important piece of increasing public concern about this industry and their practices. And I think that in some point in time we will be looking at trade-offs, and what are we prepared to trade off? Are we prepared to trade off our water for gas?” asks Campbell. “Or is our water going to be a more valuable and previous asset to us at some point down the road than gas? Certainly I think that the answer is water, myself.”

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