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Washington State seeks new dam for the Similkameen River
“Fortis proposal seems designed to avoid triggering any kind of regulatory review.”
January 19, 2015 - MVS Staff
With western North America experiencing drying conditions, Washington State is looking north into the Okanagan for solving water and hydroelectric shortages. This month the Sierra Club sent a letter to Gov. Inslee and Department Director Maia Bellon opposing Washington State funding a new dam in Canada. The state’s Office of Columbia River (OCR), the dam-building arm of the Department of Ecology, has proposed allocating $1.6 million to a private utility to study building a new dam on the Similkameen River in British Columbia. The Washington Legislature recently convened, and will vote on funding requests for the Office of Columbia River.
“Our cash-strapped state government is wasting millions of tax dollars on new dams and other water projects, this time in British Columbia,” said John Osborn, a Spokane physician who coordinates the Sierra Club’s Columbia River Future Project. “Office of Columbia River operates as a political-rewards slush fund for irrigated agriculture. The Legislature convening this week needs to account for these public funds.”
In 2013, Fortis BC, (a subsidiary of Fortis Inc. based in St. John’s, Nfld.) applied for permits to conduct studies on the Crown land required for the reservoir (12 miles long) and the dam site for a 541-foot-high concrete dam in the Similkameen Canyon, 9 miles upstream from Princeton, with a generation capacity of 45-65 megawatts. To pay for the project, Fortis approached downstream parties in the United States with interests in hydropower and irrigation.
On September 4, 2014, Fortis announced that it was not moving forward with the new dam “at this time.” The utility “may re-evaluate the viability of the project in the future based on customer demand and market conditions.” On September 17, Ecology Director Bellon submitted a request to fund Fortis to study building a new dam as part of the agency’s 2015-17 budget.
“The Similkameen River has been identified as one of B.C.’s top ten most endangered rivers. A new dam on the Similkameen will provide bulk water for American water users, without any consideration of the impacts here in B.C.” said Bob Peart, Sierra Club BC’s Executive Director. “Fortis’ proposal seems designed to avoid triggering any kind of regulatory review. It is imperative that this proposed dam undergo a full review by the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office and/or the B.C. Utilities Commission.”
The record of the United States funding dam construction in Canada shows benefits for the United States and British Columbia - while also creating a legacy of problems. For example, the Columbia River Treaty led to the construction of the three “treaty dams” in Canada, permanently flooding valuable wildlife habitat and agricultural areas while forcing 2,500 people from their homes. Controversy also arose with a dam to permanently flood the Skagit Valley in B.C. for the benefit of Seattle City Light.
In 2008, Washington began making plans to create the Shankers Bend Dam which would have backed the Similkameen River into Canada, that project was placed on the backburner even though it was largely unnoticed by either the provincial or federal governments.
“The water frontier is over,” added Osborn. “Given the over-appropriation of our rivers and aquifers, climate change, and limits to public funding, the elected officials need to insist on affordable, ethical, and sustainable solutions to water scarcity.”
That being said, major droughts are occurring in heavily populated areas, which will place political, pressure on BC to supply water. The US space agency NASA told reporters this past month that after studying water resources by using satellite data that California needs 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from its three-year drought.
The first of its kind calculation of how much groundwater would end the drought was led by Jay Famiglietti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and based on observations from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites.
California has experienced rainstorms in recent days but, while welcome, scientists warn that they are not enough to end the drought.
"It takes years to get into a drought of this severity, and it will likely take many more big storms, and years, to crawl out of it," said Famiglietti.
"Spaceborne and airborne measurements of Earth's changing shape, surface height and gravity field now allow us to measure and analyze key features of droughts better than ever before, including determining precisely when they begin and end and what their magnitude is at any moment in time.
"That's an incredible advance and something that would be impossible using only ground-based observations."
The more than 40-trillion-liter volume is a huge quantity of water, larger, for example, than the total amount held behind China's historic Three Gorges Dam.
The entire southwestern United States is far drier than normal, with groundwater levels across the region in the lowest two to 10 percent since 1949, scientists said.
Meanwhile, other NASA satellite data showed that so far this year, the snowpack in California's Sierra Nevada range is only half previous estimates.
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The 2014 snowpack was one of the three lowest on record and the worst since 1977, when California's population was half what it is now," said Airborne Snow Observatory principal investigator Tom Painter.
"Besides resulting in less snow water, the dramatic reduction in snow extent contributes to warming our climate by allowing the ground to absorb more sunlight.
"This reduces soil moisture, which makes it harder to get water from the snow into reservoirs once it does start snowing again."
The reach for water and hydro electricity by American decision makers will no doubt become a front and centre issue in a place like the Okanagan, which already has serious long-term water issues.
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