Troubled waters
Urban streams and wildlife that depend on them are facing multiple threats
Byrne Creek appears from nowhere.
It has no glacial snowpack or lake from which to draw its waters. They just percolate through the ground and flow through storm pipes in south Burnaby until they form a short-lived stream that barely supports spawning salmon.
That the creek exists at all surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the industrial hubbub of south Burnaby, near the intersection of Marine Way and Southridge Drive, seems miraculous.
Its beauty is no less unexpected, a 3.2-kilometre pedestrian pathway winding alongside and above the creek through a ravine thickly adorned with sword ferns and western red cedars.
The municipal park offers a rare fresh brace of nature in a sooty, fastpaced world. “It’s a beautiful little creek, an oasis in the city,” says Paul Cipywnyk, president of Byrne Creek Streamkeepers.
The problem is, one can easily be deceived by the watershed’s beauty. Byrne Creek is, in fact, a prime example of the challenges that fish-bearing streams face in an urban landscape, a waterway that ecologically limps along and remains just one careless human act away from disaster.
Byrne took a massive hit in March 2010 when a chemical — a suspected industrial cleaner — entered the creek, most likely poured down a drain on a street or in a parking lot in the upper watershed.
Streamkeepers and City of Burnaby staff counted nearly 500 dead trout, coho smolts and coho fry in less than a quarter of the creek’s length, putting the total estimate at well over 1,000 fish. The offender was never brought to justice.
Streamkeepers are often the first line of defence — often doing the government’s job — for fish-bearing waters faced with an onslaught of urban development issues throughout Metro Vancouver.
There are success stories. Local residents worked for years to raise funds for the purchase of 12 hectares in 1978 along the Little Campbell River, which runs from Langley through Surrey and White Rock, followed in 1984 by creation of a volunteer-run salmon hatchery, said Bob Donnelly, president of the Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club. “After 60 years of volunteer effort, the Little Campbell River is now regarded as the most productive salmon and trout river for its size in the Lower Mainland.”
Conservation groups are hoping for more successes like that. As the May 9 provincial election approaches, a coalition of groups, including the Outdoor Recreation Council and B.C. Wildlife Federation, representing a total of 275,000 members are urging provincial politicians to take a greater interest in stream issues.
The coalition seeks, in part: A multi-agency group to manage and assess cumulative impacts from large industrial projects in the lower Fraser River; the decommissioning of old dams no longer required to benefit fish; incorporating climate change into future decisions affecting rivers; and a program to fund stream-restoration projects, including those run by volunteer streamkeepers taking ownership of waterways in their communities.
According to Mark Angelo, rivers chair for the Outdoor Recreation Council, "British Columbians view the proper care of rivers and our water resources in general to be among our most pressing environmental issues.”
Streams such as Byrne Creek are powerful indicators of the environmental health of a community, especially in urban environments where sources of pollution and habitat degradation seem endless. Byrne starts around Kingsway and 10th Avenue and, once it reaches the south Burnaby flats, flows through a ditch to the Fraser River.
During rainy periods, the water flows fast through the hardened urban landscape and inundates the creek, carrying with it accumulated oils and other pollutants.
As a result, the creek supports relatively few bugs upon which fish can feed. Reduced flows also create warm-water conditions that are harmful to fish.
“We’ve had fish kills from contamination,” Cipywnyk said. “Their motor skills get impaired, they start spinning in circles and go belly up. We pray that coho fingerlings from a hatchery in Maple Ridge, released here every spring, get out of the system quickly.”
Last fall, chum salmon returned in strong numbers to Metro Vancouver, breathing life into even the smallest streams that navigate through industrial areas.
Scientists pointed to exceptionally good ocean survival as a key factor, but the hundreds of streamkeepers throughout the region have also done their part to ensure that the salmon have habitat to which they can return to successfully spawn. More than 150 adult chum and coho adults returned to Byrne Creek to spawn last fall — not a lot, but an improvement over just 15 chum and seven coho confirmed a decade ago. Hatchery stocking and the presence of an artificial spawning channel, built in 1999 by the City of Burnaby, improve the chances.
“It was literally a shot of life,” Cipywnyk says. “People came down, they were enchanted with the fish. You could stand two metres from a chum and watch it spawn.”
In past decades, urban streams have been covered over completely, prompting more recent campaigns to have them “daylighted” and rehabilitated.
A David Suzuki Foundation report in 2007 noted that 117 of 779 fish streams in the lower Fraser Valley had been completely lost or destroyed due to development.
Even the most productive and least altered streams are under constant threat. All it takes is one industrial accident or one thoughtless individual to toss toxins down a storm drain to destroy the aquatic ecosystem downstream, setting back volunteer efforts for years.
In September 2012, a sewage-line break in Langley township killed hundreds of sticklebacks and trout in West Creek. That same month, more than 1,000 fish — sticklebacks, coho and trout — died in Musqueam Creek in Vancouver. Aboriginal fisheries officers spotted a hose draining chlorinated pool water into a storm drain on Salish Drive.
To reduce the chances of similar events, streamkeepers operating on meagre budgets produce pamphlets, including in foreign languages for new immigrants, to hand out door-to-door and educate residents on safe environmental practices.
In January 2014, seven cars of a 152-car Canadian Pacific train operated by a CN crew on CN tracks derailed, spilling an estimated 82.8 cubic metres of metallurgical coal into Silver Creek, a fish-bearing tributary of Burnaby Lake. The coal threatened more than the water quality for fish. Turtles and their eggs were removed from the work area and a turtle beach was restored and basking logs cleaned.
Those are among the dramatic isolated events. The cumulative effects of smaller-scale pollutants also take their toll.
“There are two big issues with urban streams — water quality and water quantity,” explains Mike Pearson, an Agassiz-based biologist who has written federal recovery plans for endangered fish.
Pollutants from motor vehicles are one example of smaller-scale pollutants, accumulating on pavement until they are washed into storm drains and then into creeks. Sediments can also settle out and clog the gravels, reducing the capacity for successful spawning.
Rainwater off roof tops and roads moves very quickly, he added, as opposed to soaking into the ground in a forested setting and slowly filtering out over weeks and months to nourish fish. Rain gardens and swales are ways to capture some of that water in an urban environment, Pearson noted.
The federal government needs to put teeth back into the Fisheries Act to ensure that anyone who damages fish habitat is held responsible, he said. Postmedia News reported last year that the federal government had not laid a single charge of habitat destruction nationwide since former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper gutted the Fisheries Act in November 2013.
Pearson added that municipalities have an important role in requiring proper environmental designs and setbacks for developments. “The riparian area — the forested area by the creek — is so important in keeping the creek healthy, protecting it from too much sun, noise, pollutants, all those things. That buffer area is critical.”
In north Burnaby, salmon creeks face their own unique challenges. Burnaby streamkeeper John Preissl leads Postmedia News to a FortisBC natural gas pipeline project on a right-of-way at the interface between wooded Burnaby Mountain and an industrial area north of Lougheed Highway near Broadway and Underhill Avenue.
Preissl is concerned that by logging right up to the banks of Silver Creek, FortisBC’s contractor, WorleyParsons, has increased the chances of sediments flowing downstream.
“I’m not impressed. We’ve lost a lot of habitat here.”
The contractor has used initiatives such as small gravel “check dams” to control the sediment flow. Fish spawn on the creek a short way downstream, closer to Burnaby Lake, but not at this location.
“There’ll be a lot of silt if it pours,” Pearson predicts. “These steep ravines are very sensitive.”
Preissl is a constant thorn in the sides of government and industry in the region, forever sounding the alarm over developments undertaken in the rainy season that threaten to pour sediments into salmon streams such as Silver and Stoney creeks.
In September, the City of Burnaby issued a stop-work order at Adera’s Eastlake Campus development — just below the FortisBC right-ofway — due to sediment run-off into Silver Creek. A total of seven $500 tickets were issued for allowing leakage or contamination into a stream — four to Adera, two to an environmental monitoring firm and one to a design engineering firm. The latter two firms were not identified.
Just last month, Preissl raised the alarm again about run-off from the Adera site raising sediment levels in Silver Creek. Burnaby has launched a new investigation.
“As you have observed and documented in your photographs, the inadequacy of mitigation on site to control sediments is clear,” Christine Ensing, the city’s fisheries habitat officer, said in an email to Preissl.
Further upstream, as part of its expansion plans, Kinder Morgan proposes to divert two tributaries each of Eagle Creek and Silver Creek into new culverts to allow construction of 14 new storage tanks.
“Immediately, when a creek is culverted, you lose the bugs, invertebrates,” Preissl laments. “The creeks will never be the same.”