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.

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.

Senior BC Hydro officials have quietly feared for years that earthquakes triggered by natural gas industry fracking operations could damage its Peace River dams, putting hundreds if not thousands of people at risk should the dams fail.

Yet the Crown corporation has said nothing publicly about its concerns, opting instead to negotiate behind the scenes with the provincial energy industry regulator, the BC Oil and Gas Commission (OGC).

To date, those discussions have resulted in only modest “understandings” between the hydro provider and the OGC that would see a halt in the issuance of any new “subsurface rights” allowing companies to drill and frack for natural gas within five kilometres of the Peace River’s two existing dams or an approved third dam on the river, the controversial $9-billion Site C project. Companies already holding such rights, however, would not be subject to the ban.

But once again, none of this is public knowledge. Only after the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives filed a Freedom of Information request with BC Hydro did the Crown corporation disclose its concerns, which focus on the possibility that fracking could trigger earthquakes more powerful than some of its dams are designed to withstand.

Documents released by the Crown corporation under the FOI show that in December 2009 senior officials at BC Hydro became alarmed at oil and gas industry operations on lands near its Peace Canyon Dam. The dam is 23 kilometres downstream from the W.A.C. Bennett Dam, a 49-year-old structure that impounds the world’s seventh-largest hydro reservoir by water volume.

Of concern was an experiment underway to extract methane gas from coal seams in proximity to the Peace River. Coal bed methane extraction had never before been tried in B.C., although it had been done extensively in several U.S. states and in Alberta with sometimes disastrous results, including instances of water so badly contaminated with gas that people could set their household tap water on fire.

To extract such gas, companies drill into relatively shallow coal seams and then pressure-pump immense amounts of water into wellbores in fracking operations. Fracking creates cracks or fractures in the coal seams that allow trapped gas to be released. Typically, companies then “de-saturate” or de-water the sites by pumping water out so the gas can flow.

At the time, Hudson’s Hope Gas, a subsidiary of Canada Energy Partners and GeoMet Inc., had drilled at least eight coal bed methane wells near the community of Hudson’s Hope, which lies about nine kilometres downstream of the Peace Canyon Dam and is home to more than 1,000 people.

The company had plans to drill and frack up to 300 more wells, with at least three of those wells situated close to the Peace Canyon Dam. The plans clearly alarmed BC Hydro’s then chief safety, health and environment officer, Ray Stewart, who called them an “immediate” threat to the region’s hydro facilities.

“The production of coal bed methane from these wells involves hydro-fracturing [fracking] to increase permeability of the coal seams, followed by extraction of groundwater to de-saturate coal seams and allow methane gas to be released,” Stewart noted in a letter to the provincial Ministry of Environment’s Glen Davidson, then British Columbia’s comptroller of water rights.

“BC Hydro believes that there are immediate and future potential risks to BC Hydro’s reservoir, dam and power generation infrastructure as a result of this.”

Stewart went on to warn that the “potential effects” of such actions could be natural gas industry-induced earthquakes that were greater in magnitude “than the original design criteria for the dam.” What risks this posed to people and communities immediately downstream of the dam, he did not say.

Stewart also warned that fracking could “reactivate” ancient faults in the region, which could potentially set the stage for earthquakes. He also warned of unspecified “hydrogeologic impacts” on hydro reservoirs from fracking and the potential for site-specific areas of land to subside or sink as a result of immense amounts of water being pumped out of the earth or in the event that de-watered coal seams somehow ignited.

There are no further such letters from Stewart in the documents supplied by BC Hydro. Part of the reason for that may be that coal bed methane extraction was a short-lived phenomenon in B.C. No company in the Peace region or anywhere else in the province for that matter is currently drilling or fracking for such gas.

However, no sooner had natural gas companies dropped their pursuit of coal bed methane than they turned to another so-called “unconventional” fossil fuel — shale gas. The Montney Basin, which underlies much of the Peace River region, is rich in shale gas. But extracting shale gas, which is tightly bound up in rock formations, requires the use of even greater brute force fracking technology. More water must be pumped at even higher pressure to fracture the rock and extract the trapped gas than is the case with coal bed methane, which is typically found closer to the earth’s surface.

Big Dams & a Big Fracking Problem in BC’s Energy-rich #PeaceRiver Region https://t.co/6JslA7kIPj @christyclarkbc @maryforbc #bcpoli #SiteC

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) August 16, 2016

As fracking for shale gas became more common, senior officials at BC Hydro began to see a pattern. Earthquakes started occurring in lockstep with fracking operations. One of the most pronounced examples occurred in the Farrell Creek fracking zone, near BC Hydro’s Peace River dams. Between July 2010 and March 2013, a dozen earthquakes were recorded in the region, ranging from a low of 1.6 magnitude on the Richter scale to a high of 3.4.

The cluster of earthquakes, all in roughly the same confined region where one company, Talisman Energy, was involved in extensive fracking operations, caught the attention of Scott Gilliss, BC Hydro’s dam safety engineer in the Peace River region.

Gilliss made his concerns known to senior officials at head office. Shortly after that, he received an email from Des Hartford, Hydro’s principal engineering scientist, who reported directly to Stephen Rigbey, the corporation’s director of dam safety.

“Scott,” Hartford’s email began: “As was discussed at the Department Meeting yesterday, this is to confirm that having brought forward your concerns about hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) activities in proximity of dams and reservoirs, you have discharged your responsibilities with respect to reporting and management of this matter. It is now up to Stephen as advised by me to determine what if any action should be taken by Dam Safety with respect to this matter.”

“Fundamentally,” Hartford’s email continued, “hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) is one of these ‘new and emergent’ threats that require examination in the context of scientific and policy considerations in order that any meaningful management actions can be initiated if required.”

Hartford instructed Gilliss to document his concerns so that others at BC Hydro could “take them forward.”

Gilliss did so, pointing out in a subsequent email released by BC Hydro that “oil and gas production may have contributed to a dam breach” at the Baldwin Hill Dam in Los Angeles in 1963.

The Baldwin Hill breach, as described by award-winning investigative reporter and writer Andrew Nikiforuk in his most recent book Slick Water: Fracking and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry, occurred at a then new dam, and resulted in a “colossal rupture that sent 292 million gallons of water spilling into a residential community, destroying hundreds of homes and killing five people.”

A subsequent review of the catastrophe by Richard Meehan, a leading expert on fluid migration at Stanford University, and Douglas Hamilton, a prominent civil engineer, concluded that “fluid injection” by the oil and gas industry, combined with sinking ground around the dam had led to the structure’s sudden and ultimately deadly failure.

“This is the case study that triggered my concern over hydraulic fracturing in the Peace,” Gilliss wrote in an email to Hartford on March 17, 2013. “The Baldwin hills case appeared to have occurred following very intense [oil and gas industry] exploration and development, the likes of which we don’t have here yet. The geology of their site was also quite complex and riddled with faults. A similarity does exist in that there are two small thrust faults downstream of PCN [the Peace Canyon Dam] which dip beneath the dam. Reactivation of these small faults could be problematic for PCN. There are other north south trending fault[s] in the area.”

Gilliss ended his letter on a note of exasperation.

“In my view, which I have already shared, the province should simply add buffer zones around any very Extreme and Very High Consequence Dams, where hydraulic fracturing cannot be undertaken without a prior full investigation into the risks, and an implemented risk management plan. Why is this so difficult?”

Gilliss’s buffer zone idea was by no means new. Two years earlier, after conducting research for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, I had authored a report calling for “no-go zones” where fracking was prohibited to protect other important resources such as water. By then, there were also de facto bans on fracking in Quebec and New York State.

After writing his email, Gilliss and other top BC Hydro officials had even more reason to think that no-go zones made sense. More and more earthquakes in northeast B.C. were being triggered by fracking, including a magnitude 4.6 tremor that occurred to the north of Fort St. John last year. It was in an area then being actively fracked by Progress Energy, a subsidiary of Malaysian state-owned Petronas. The strength of that induced earthquake was the largest to date anywhere in the world associated with fracking operations.

Petronas is behind a controversial proposal to build a massive Liquefied Natural Gas or LNG terminal at Lelu Island near Prince Rupert. The raw gas for the plant would come almost entirely from northeast B.C., including the Peace River area, and would have to be fracked to be produced. This fact has led some people who oppose the project to refer to it not as an LNG project but an LFG or Liquefied Fracked Gas project.

At least some of that gas would come from lands adjacent to what could one day be a new 83-kilometre-long reservoir impounded by the Site C Dam. Like the upstream Bennett Dam, Site C would be an earth-filled dam.

This image from the BC Hydro documents shows a no-frack zone surrounding the Site C dam on the Peace River.

The Bennett dam, completed in 1967, is now almost exactly halfway through its projected 100-year operating life. At nearly two kilometres across and the height of a 60-storey building, it is one of the largest earth-filled dams in North America. In 1996, it became the subject of intense engineering and safety scrutiny when two sinkholes suddenly opened at the crest of the dam.

In an investigative magazine article written a few years after that discovery, writer Anne Mullens noted that were the dam to fail, it would unleash a torrent of water so powerful that it would wipe out the Peace Canyon dam downstream, sending an “unstoppable burst of water 135 metres high,” down on the residents of Hudson’s Hope and communities much farther downstream.

“Unlike a tsunami, the destruction wouldn’t simply peak and stop,” Mullens wrote in BC Business Magazine. “The pent-up waters of Williston Lake would just keep coming, seeking to return to its natural elevation. The waters would flow for weeks, scouring away communities like Old Fort, Taylor, Peace River, Fort Smith and beyond. The onslaught would back up tributaries and inundate the entire Peace River Basin, flooding Lake Athabasca and Great Slave Lake. The floods could devastate northern Alberta, portions of Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories all the way to the Arctic Ocean. The death toll could be high; the environmental and structural damage astronomical. Combined with the loss of generating power of the dam, the unprecedented disaster would cost billions of dollars and throw B.C.’s economy into turmoil.”

Stephen Rigbey, BC Hydro’s director of dam safety, says that in the aftermath of the discovery and repair of those sinkholes the Bennett dam has become “one of the world’s most studied and instrumented dams.” There are a number of upgrades underway at the dam, including the replacement of “large rocks on the upstream face of the dam that protect the dam from wind and wave action.”

In an interview following the release of the FOI materials, Rigbey said that Gilliss and other dam safety officials operating in the field are paid to worry, but that he himself has no concerns that fracking operations would trigger any catastrophic failure at BC Hydro’s Peace River dams.

Rigbey did say, however, that ground motions from fracking operations could cause slight alterations to “weak bedrock” near the dams and that in turn could change the way that water naturally seeps through earth-filled dams. Ground motions could also potentially knock some electrical control equipment off-line, Rigbey added. In the event that one or both happened, BC Hydro would be faced with high repair and maintenance costs.

“Would it [fracking] bring the dam down? Not a hope. Would it do damage and cost me a lot of money? Absolutely. It would cost me a lot of time and a lot of money and that’s what I don’t want to occur,” Rigbey said.

Rigbey said that for these reasons BC Hydro has sought to exclude fracking from zones nearby the Bennett and Peace Canyon dams and around the construction zone of the Site C dam.

At this point in time, the unwritten “understanding” between the OGC and Hydro is that no new tenures will be awarded to companies allowing them access to natural gas deposits in a zone within five kilometres of the three dam sites. Companies already holding such rights will, however, be allowed to drill and frack for gas. In the event that happens, BC Hydro says it will work with the OGC “to effectively manage any risk.”

“This is a work in progress,” Rigbey said. “We are working toward strengthening the current understanding.”

Graham Currie, the OGC’s executive director of corporate affairs, confirmed in an email response to questions that five-kilometre buffers are in place around the two existing dams and the proposed Site C dam. He said that the buffer zone around Site C will “prevent the sale of oil and gas rights within the buffer area.”

Currie added that the proposed Site C dam falls within the Montney shale gas zone, one of the most actively drilled and fracked zones in the province.

“Site C falls within the Montney play and will be built to a high seismic safety standard,” Currie said in an email response to questions filed with the OGC. “During construction, permit conditions on a [natural gas] well in the Montney may be used to control the timing of hydraulic fracturing operations. All wells in the Montney are double-lined with cement and steel to a depth of 600 meters for further protection.”

The email fails to mention that such protective measures do not prevent fracking-induced earthquakes. Cement casings, which are often imperfectly poured and prone to fail, are intended to prevent groundwater from being contaminated — an entirely different issue.

The “understanding” between Hydro and the OGC does not extend to the lands around the reservoirs themselves, Currie said. That includes lands around what could one day be the Site C reservoir; lands that according to a document prepared for BC Hydro could experience as many as 4,000 landslides during and after the reservoir fills. Whether or not fracking could further destabilize those lands damaging the reservoir and dam itself remains unknown.

What is known, however, is that earthquakes induced by fracking behave entirely differently than do naturally-occurring earthquakes.

Gail Atkinson is a professor in Earth Sciences, a leading expert on the effects of induced earthquakes, and holds the Industrial Chair in Hazards from Induced Seismicity at the University of Western Ontario. The chair is funded, in part, by TransAlta, a privately owned hydro provider in Alberta.

In response to written questions, Atkinson said most people would agree with the proposition that “precluding oil and gas activity such as fracking…within some radius of dams and reservoirs would prevent the possibility of induced seismicity that could damage such facilities.”

Atkinson said the big concern with earthquakes triggered by events such as fracking is that they occur much closer to the earth’s surface than do natural earthquakes. A fracking-induced tremor might be as close to the surface as two kilometres, while a natural earthquake might occur 10 kilometres down. The shaking caused by a fracking-induced earthquake may be of only short duration, but it is a stronger and different kind of shaking. The potentially “strong ground motions” generated by such shaking occur “closer to infrastructure on the surface.”

“The concern is that the potential for induced earthquakes to generate strong motions makes it difficult to satisfy the high safety requirements for critical infrastructure, if earthquakes can be induced by operations in very close proximity [to dams and reservoirs],” Atkinson said.

While there is presently “no consensus” over what constitutes a reasonable size for no-frack zones, buffer zones do make sense, Atkinson said. “A zone of monitoring beyond the buffer zone is also a good precautionary measure in my view, as it would allow low-level induced seismicity from disposal or fracking beyond the buffer to be detected quickly and any necessary measures to be taken. Enhanced monitoring would also provide valuable research data to improve our understanding of the issue.”

In a telephone interview, Rigbey said he agreed with Atkinson’s thinking that both firm no-fracking buffer zones and special management zones beyond that made sense.

Atkinson’s thinking is in keeping with ongoing efforts by TransAlta to protect some of its hydro facilities in Alberta from natural gas industry fracking operations. Those efforts appear to have effectively shut down fracking in a buffer zone around one of TransAlta’s dams and the dam’s reservoir as well. Special operating guidelines are also in place beyond the buffer zones that can force companies to cease fracking.

But, as is the case in B.C., negotiations between TransAlta and Alberta’s energy industry regulator have happened behind closed doors.

Members of the public who are at direct risk should a catastrophic dam failure occur are kept in the dark when it comes to negotiations that could have a direct impact on their lives.

Tomorrow: Alberta’s advances and questions about why B.C. may be lagging behind.

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.

BC Hydro Fracking Radius Images Select FOI

BC Hydro Fracking Radius Select FOI Materials

Image: Fracking operations in Northeast B.C. Photo: Damien Gillis/Commonsense Canadian

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Projects like the $7.9-billion Site C dam cannot be built “on the shoulders of communities,” says the mayor of Fort St. John, B.C., a city located just seven kilometres from the proposed hydro dam and its 1,700-man work camps.

Mayor Lori Ackerman told DeSmog Canada her community is holding its breath waiting for the province’s decision on the project.

“It is one of those things where we would just like the decision to be made so we know which way we’re going,” Ackerman said.

The provincial and federal governments are expected to issue a decision on the dam — the third on the Peace River — this fall.

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In her January presentation to the joint review panel assessing the project, Ackerman was emphatic that  “empowering the province should not disempower Fort St. John.”

“Many we spoke to felt the community would be run over by this project,” she said.  “Our community is at a saturation point for many of the services that our citizens want and need.”

In an interview with DeSmog Canada, Ackerman said residents recognize this dam has been on the books for decades, but “if you’re going to build it, don’t do it on the backs of the taxpayers here.”

Fort St. John is already struggling to manage the growth it has seen due to the fracking boom in B.C.’s natural gas fields — a boom that will only intensify if the province’s much-touted liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plans come to fruition. The city of 20,000 is already stretched for health care services, facing an affordable housing crisis and confronting an increase in drug and gang activity.

With an eight-year construction period and a potential for 1,700 workers living in camps near the city, the Site C dam has been the No. 1 issue for Fort St. John for the last couple of years, Ackerman said.

“It’s seven kilometres from our downtown. In between the downtown and the dam will be a 236-acre area that they will mine for aggregate and a 500-man camp,” Ackerman explained. “So all of this: the traffic, the noise, the dust, having that kind of population sitting on our doorstep, is going to impact our services.”

In her presentation to the joint review panel, Ackerman noted the project will affect the quality of life and cost of living for Fort St. John residents.

“Construction of Site C will be dependent to a large extent on the services and facilities provided by the City of Fort St. John,” she said.

Site C camps would bring 1,700 transient workers

In its report, the joint review panel noted Site C would pose “the usual health and social risks common to boom towns” — risks like the tragic beating death of Christopher Ball in downtown Fort St. John in July 2012.

Councillor Byron Stewart told the panel about that incident (both Ball and his two assailants lived in work camps) while highlighting his community’s concern that the transient workforce from the camps will put considerable strain on the city’s emergency resources and impact the safety of the community. 

While the Site C dam is projected to create about 10,000 person-years of direct employment during its eight-year construction period (or about 1,250 jobs per year), very few of those jobs would go to people in the Fort St. John area.

“The low local unemployment rate would mean that most of the project workers would come from other parts of the province and Canada,” the joint review panel’s report read.

The report also states that “the local economic upside would largely provide the resources to deal with possible problems, including those related to health, education, and housing, especially if the arrangements BC Hydro is willing to make with local authorities can be concluded.”

BC Hydro estimates that Site C would result in a total of $40 million in tax revenues to local governments. But thus far, an arrangement between BC Hydro and the city of Fort St. John hasn't been reached.

“We’re very actively having conversations with the proponent,” Ackerman said. “We want to ensure that we’re at the table with the province and BC Hydro when the decisions are made because we can be very much be a partner in this.”

Ackerman says she wants to ensure that whatever happens “the community is better off as a result of it.” That could mean everything from guarantees that local contractors will be hired to additional funding for policing.

Where will workers come from?

However, those types of promises are little solace to families who stand to lose their homes due to the dam construction. Esther and Poul Pedersen own a 160-acre farm above the proposed dam site and would have to move if the dam is built.

Poul and Esther Pedersen on their land overlooking the Peace River. Photo: Emma Gilchrist.

“They’re taking bids for work camps like it’s already been approved,” Poul said. “I’d like to know where they’re going to find the workers. There’s a shortage of workers already. Are they going to be bringing migrant workers over?”

Esther is concerned the projected positive economic impacts for Fort St. John won’t materialize.

“The workers will just fly in and fly out,” she said. “The only places that will be busy are the airports and the bars and the drunk tank.”

Fort St. John businessman Bob Fedderly echoed those concerns in an interview with Common Sense Canadian. 

“Camps aren’t the camps that they used to be,” he said. “It’s all done from outside, so when you start looking at the real spin-offs to the project, if you tear it apart one item at a time, are the spin-offs really there? Or are they cost items, lost opportunities to existing businesses?”

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It’s a sweltering 35 degrees as I pull up to a trailer housing the W.A.C. Bennett Dam visitor centre just outside Hudson’s Hope, 100 kilometres west of Fort St. John.

I’m here to see B.C.’s largest hydro dam first-hand. Damming the Peace River is back in the news this fall as the provincial and federal governments make up their minds about the Site C dam, which would be the third dam on this river.

I’m handed a fluorescent safety vest and am ushered on to a bus along with about 10 others.

Completed in 1967, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam is one of the world's largest earthfill structures, stretching two kilometres across the head of the Peace Canyon and creating B.C.’s largest body of freshwater, the Williston Reservoir. [view:in_this_series=block_1]

Two peppy young women are our guides today. They inform us we’ll be heading more than 150 metres underground into the dam’s powerhouse and manifold.

At the front of our tour bus, pictures of wildlife — grizzlies, lynx, moose, elk — are taped above the driver’s seat. Our guides enthusiastically tell us how 11 of 19 of North America’s big game species live around the dam.

My mind can’t help but wander to a paragraph I read in the joint review panel’s report on the Site C dam, released in May. It appeared on page 307 in a section titled “Panel’s Reflections.”

“A few decades hence, when inflation has worked its eroding way on cost, Site C could appear as a wonderful gift from the ancestors of that future society, just as B.C. consumers today thank the dam-builders of the 1960s. Today’s distant beneficiaries do not remember the Finlay, Parsnip, and pristine Peace Rivers, or the wildlife that once filled the Rocky Mountain Trench. Site C would seem cheap, one day. But the project would be accompanied by significant environmental and social costs, and the costs would not be borne by those who benefit,” the report read.

It’s a poignant moment of pause in a report that doesn’t provide a clear yes or no on whether the 1,100-megawatt dam should be built due to a lack of clear demand for the power, concerns about costs and considerable environmental and social costs.

The panel found risks to fish and wildlife include harmful and irreversible effects on migratory birds and species such as the western toad and short-eared owl. Given the severe effects of dam-building on wildlife, I find the pictures at the front of our tour bus a tad incongruous.

Underground, we’re kitted out with hardhats before entering the powerhouse. It’s as long as three football fields and has the dimensions of the Titanic. This dam can produce up to 2,855 megawatts of power — more than double that of the proposed Site C dam.

Just downstream, another dam — the Peace Canyon dam — produces another 700 megawatts of power. Combined, these two dams provide B.C. with one-third of its power.

Aside from already being home to two megadams, the Peace Country’s landscape is dotted with 16,267 oil and gas well sites and 8,517 petroleum and natural gas facilities, according to a 2013 report, Passages from the Peace, by the David Suzuki Foundation and Global Forest Watch.

“The Peace River region has been and is currently undergoing enormous stress from resource development,” read the joint review panel’s report on Site C.

Rancher Leigh Summer knows that stress firsthand. He was just 14 years old when his family’s ranch was flooded by the W.A.C. Bennett dam. Now Summer has three young children and his life could be disrupted again, this time by the Site C dam that would flood the last intact part of the Peace River. 

“The Peace River in British Columbia has paid her price for prosperity,” Summer says. “Why can’t we leave a piece of the Peace intact for future generations? Let them have a choice. If we flood it, we take that choice away from them, from ever seeing what the Peace River was like.”

If built, the Site C dam would flood 107 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries. BC Hydro says the power is needed to meet growing energy demand, but the joint review panel found that the crown corporation hadn’t proven the need for the Site C dam in the immediate future and has not adequately explored alternatives, such as geothermal.

Although BC Hydro has predicted power demand will balloon 40 per cent over the next 20 years, its 2014 financial reports show demand for power has remained relatively static since 2007.

“Justification must rest on an unambiguous need for the power and analyses showing its financial costs being sufficiently attractive as to make tolerable the bearing of substantial environmental, social and other costs,” the joint review panel wrote.

The Site C dam “would result in significant cumulative effects on fish, vegetation and ecological communities, wildlife,” they added.

“This is one of the last intact mountain ecosystems on the planet,” says Sarah Cox, senior conservation program manager for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. “Site C will make a major contribution toward severing that Rocky mountain chain that goes all the way from Yellowstone to Yukon.”

The Peace River is the only river to break the barrier of the Rocky Mountains between the Yukon south almost to Mexico.

“The science shows that vulnerable species like grizzly, wolverine and lynx will be greatly impacted to the extent that populations may not be recoverable,” Cox says.

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has joined forces with Sierra Club BC and the Peace Valley Environment Association to launch StopSiteC.org, dedicated to collecting petition signatures against the dam.

Although this fall is a crucial moment in the battle against Site C, it’s just one of many high-stakes moments in what has been a decades-long battle for residents of the Peace Valley.

“I’ve been living with it for 40 years. My hair went grey the first time around,” jokes Gwen Johansson, mayor of the District of Hudson's Hope. “That shadow has hung over the valley for a very long time.”

Gwen Johansson, a retired school teacher, lives on the banks of the Peace River near Hudson's Hope. Photo: Emma Gilchrist.

A flood impact sign on Gwen Johansson's gate shows how high the waters of the Site C reservoir would rise. Photo: Emma Gilchrist.

Johansson has lived in her house on the banks of the Peace River since 1975. In 1982, the Site C dam was postponed indefinitely after a review by the B.C. Utilities Commission.

“They said that Hydro had not proven the need for it and, if there was need, they hadn’t proven that this was the best way to get the power,” Johansson says.

“This time they’re going to make sure that nobody gets to examine these questions,” she added, referring to the province's decision to exempt the project from review by the independent regulator (the B.C. Utilities Commission) this time around.

Johansson has been part of a chorus of voices calling on the province to listen to the joint review panel’s recommendation to refer the project to the B.C. Utilities Commission for more in-depth analysis of costs and alternatives.

“It’s almost as though they worry that if they don’t get it done right away they won’t be able to do it,” the retired teacher says.

This week, Johansson was at a press conference in Vancouver trying to get the attention of the media and British Columbians. She brought Peace Valley watermelon, cantaloupe and honey for the crowd.  

One of the biggest obstacles for those in the Peace Valley is that their area — a 14-hour drive from Vancouver — is out of sight, out of mind for the majority of British Columbians. 

“If the decision-makers have to look out the window at the consequences of their decisions, they have to think harder about their decisions,” Johansson says.

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With a provincial decision on the Site C dam expected in September, the District of Hudson’s Hope is calling on B.C. Premier Christy Clark to refer the Site C dam project for review by the B.C. Utilities Commission (BCUC).

“Before spending $7.9 billion of taxpayers money on the proposed Site C dam and increasing the already enormous $62 billion provincial debt, the provincial government needs to do its homework to see if there are less costly alternatives," said Hudson's Hope Mayor Gwen Johansson.

Hudson’s Hope request echoes the findings of the joint review panel’s 457-page report on the Site C dam, which recommended that the B.C. Utilities Commission review Site C’s costs, develop a long-term pricing scenario, review BC Hydro’s load forecasts and demand-side management plans.

“We feel we haven’t had a full arms length, independent review,” Johansson told DeSmog Canada.  “We need to look at the cost, at the demand and at the impact of these emerging technologies.”

The Liberal government previously exempted Site C from the oversight of the B.C. Utilities Commission, which has rejected the project previously. When the joint review panel recommendations came out, Energy Minister Bill Bennett immediately threw cold water on the idea of the project being reviewed by the independent regulator.

“This project has been poked, prodded and analyzed for the last 35 years,” he said at the time. “I think subjecting it to another review after all the years it has been studied, is not a good use of public money.”

A spokesman for Energy Minister Bill Bennett declined a request for comment on Wednesday.

Hudson’s Hope, a community of 1,100 people in the heart of the Peace River Valley, would be impacted more than any other municipality if a third dam is built on the Peace River. About 600 hectares of land in the district would be flooded and another 1,400 would land inside BC Hydro’s “impact lines,” putting the land off limits for permanent structures. Hudson’s Hope is already home to the W.A.C. Bennett Dam and the Peace Canyon dam. (Map of current and proposed dams)

“It’s such a beautiful valley,” Johansson said. “One of the best things about living in Hudson Hope is to drive through the valley from Fort St. John to Hudson Hope and that would be lost.”

Johansson was in Vancouver yesterday to release a report by Urban Systems, commissioned by Hudson’s Hope, reviewing the findings of the joint review panel report.

 “Critical questions about the proposed Site C project and viable alternatives remain unanswered," the report finds. It continues:

“The evidence suggests that a commitment to this $7.9 billion public investment would be premature before the BCUC undertakes a review of the proposed Site C project costs and long-term energy pricing and re-investigates the comparative costs and benefits of potential alternatives.” With BC Hydro stating that it has generation capacity to meet demand until 2028, Johansson says more time should be taken to consider alternatives.

“Some options have the potential to save B.C. taxpayers billions of dollars while at the same time avoiding the negative impacts of Site C,” Johansson said.

DeSmog Canada’s series on the proposed Site C dam has explored alternatives to the dam — including how the province of B.C. has failed for three decades to follow up on advice to research geothermal options.

"There is no crisis.  Let's adopt the recommendations of the Joint Review Panel and allow the BCUC to do the job it was set up to do,” Johansson said.

Johansson and other Peace Country residents will gather this weekend for the annual Paddle for the Peace.

Photo: Peace Valley near Hudson's Hope by Susan Hubbard via Flickr

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.