The Salmon River Enhancement Society is a citizens group formed in 1995. Several founding members of the group had been active in the Langley Environmental Organization and as citizen members of the Salmon River Watershed Partnership. There was a need for a separate citizens group which could work with the government agencies but would also increase public involvement and lobby the government agencies when appropriate. While the Langley Environmental Organization had been active in this role it was felt that stream stewardship works best with groups that are devoted to specific watersheds.

The goal of the Society is to increase public awareness of the natural values of the Salmon River and its watershed. We have had good public involvement and media coverage of Society events such as tree planting, Rivers Day and our Annual Open House with DFO during the spring trapping and tagging program of juvenile salmonids. Coming educational projects include a manual for new home owners to promote good environmental stewardship and the erection of roadside signs to advise people when they are entering and leaving the watershed. In addition, the society functions as a "watchdog" over the watershed and has an ongoing 2-year program of water quality testing in the Salmon River and tributaries.

The Society works in conjunction with SRWMP UBC and with LEPS and other local environment groups. We believe that we are making progress but there is much more to do to educate residents and to encourage them to become personally involved so that they will "buy in" to the importance of preservation and protection of the watershed.

question asked........Floodplain issues Are you in favour of the Township buying land in the Fort Langley floodplain to protect the Salmon River or are you in favour of dredging the Salmon River to dry out land that has traditionally been subject to flooding? Would you revisit the decision slipped through in the middle of last summer (but not yet presented to DFO) to dredge Yorkson Creek and its floodplain?

a) The Salmon River/Fort Langley floodplain has traditionally flooded when heavy rains come down the river. In fact, prior to the dykes being erected after the 1948 floods the entire floodplain would have been under water for several weeks every spring when the Fraser River peaks during spring freshet. The floodplain has, therefore, been a good area for growing hay but not a good area for higher value crops.

Farmers have lobbied for the floodplain to be dried out so they can plant these higher value crops. They claim that flooding has increased due to development although there is no proof of this as the Salmon River watershed has escaped urban development.

i) Opportunity SRES has advocated that the Township buy up the land that floods as the environmental, heritage and recreational values of this area are extremely high. Purchase of the land would still allow the Township to lease the land back to the farmers to grow their traditional crops while retaining land along the Salmon River for nature walks and establishment of a proper riparian area along the stream.

This sort of project would fit very well with the idea of eco and heritage tourism in Fort Langley . Walking paths in the floodplain would complement the Fort to Fort trail and eventually the Trans Canada Trail as it will pass through Fort Langley . There are also agribusiness opportunities that would arise from the traffic that would pass along these paths. Since the recreational and environmental values of this area are so high there would likely be interest and funding from land conservation and other groups that might be used to help complete the purchase.

ii) The risky alternatives The alternatives to this sort of solution are and have been very risky. An attempt was made to decrease flooding in 1994 when pumping was increased at the mouth of the river (heavy flows coming down the river after rains have to be pumped up into the Fraser in the spring when the Fraser is high and the floodbox at the mouth of the Salmon River is closed to keep the Fraser out of the floodplain). This did not satisfy the needs of the farmers and acrimony resulted.

It is questionable whether the floodplain can ever be dried out enough for high value crops as the water table in a floodplain is too close to the surface. Also the type of dyking, dredging and/or bypass channels that would be needed to try to dry the floodplain out would be very expensive and has a big downside. One of the lessons from New Orleans is that when you interfere with normal sediment and water flows in a floodplain you end up causing the floodplain to subside and become more subject to flooding. This is the reason that parts of New Orleans are well below sea level. They didn�t start out that low but without the steady flows of sediment refurbishing the floodplain and without the floods that �fluff up� the land the floodplain compacts and settles. This compacting and settling is that much worse if the land is tilled so these areas are best left for the growth of hay.

A final worry with attempts to dry up and grow higher value crops in the floodplain is that the Fort Langley floodplain is the recharge area for the Fort Langley water supply (aquifer). More intensive agriculture with increased use of fertilizers and pesticides might compromise the water supply.

Suggestions (see Yorkson below) that we can �just do a little bit of dredging� or have a small bypass channel may be compared to suggesting that one just be a �little bit pregnant�. The history of floodplains in North America and the history of the Salmon River/Fort Langley floodplain is that a little bit of something (like the increased pumping in 1994) just leads to more problems and demands for more interference with the river with increasing long term consequences. .

The trend in North America is to recognize that floodplains are difficult and risky to dry up and that the more economic and sensible course of action is to purchase the land. Langley has gone against this trend with the proposal slipped through in the middle of this summer to dredge the Yorkson River . While the proposal would see part of the land that floods purchased dredging is proposed to keep other parts drier.

There is a problem in Yorkson due to development in Willoughby as the new development only uses some of the mitigation techniques outlined in Question 1. There will be an increase in flooding in Yorkson over the next few years. Nevertheless, the problems that will be caused if the normal sediment flows in the river are interfered with (see above) suggest that it makes much more sense to leave the river alone. DFO has already expressed the opinion that dredging etc. will have serious negative effects on the floodplain ecosystem. This letter will be sent to you in a separate E-mail.

The environmental community asked the Township to set aside time to review the environmental side of the Yorkson issue before it was voted on but council voted the engineering department proposal through and opted not to hear those views.

http://www.obiecorp.com/perspectives/09-07-05-new_orleans.htm talks about the subsidence of the land around New Orleans due to drainage projects. Although New Orleans will be rebuilt they present arguments that we should not be interfering with floodplains

Your letter of April 20, 2005 outlining the drainage options that you propose Associated Engineering investigate contains many items that we oppose for the Salmon River . We are opposed to any lowering of pump start and stop elevations, dredging of any sort in the channel and new drainage channels that might interfere with fish migration and rearing.

The more important concern, however, is that the floodplain task force was put together to develop a management plan for the floodplain. The Township is failing to live up to this promise made to us at the start of the process.

Clearly developing a management plan should involve looking at all the relevant data and all the options for the floodplain, not just looking at a few drainage options. It is important to note that there are existing agreements that should govern management of the floodplain (i.e. the agreements made in the negotiations of the early 1990�s culminating with the works on the pumphouse and Davidson Ditch).

In order for this process to continue in a fair and equitable manner it is necessary that:

1) The terms of the 1990�s agreements should be honoured. This would include operating the pumps in a manner consistent with the intent of the 1990�s agreements. Promises from Township staff to deal with this issue nave not been honoured. In addition, Belmont is pursuing flood relief on its property illegally.

2) A review should be presented at the next meeting of the environmental compromises made (for instance dropping the water level in the river) and corresponding promises to the environmental side in the 1990�s agreements. We have heard ad infinitum from the farmers as to what they claim that they were promised in the 1990�s but the Township seems to be ignoring promises made to the environmental side many of which have not been honoured. (For example the way the pumps are operated, a riparian strip along Davidson Ditch/Creek etc..).

3) Before money is spent to look at the drainage options we should reconvene the group to look at the other options in the floodplain such as buying land that does not meet ARDSA standards.

4) The group should be given the needed data to determine what is really going on in the floodplain. The township has flow data from the 72^nd Street monitoring station. Why has this not been brought forward for the meeting to discuss? This would be important data to determine whether there is actually more flooding that before or whether the 1990�s increased pumping has kept up with flows.

Given that this task force was put together to develop a management plan for the Floodplain it is clear that the above issues need to be addressed (and the meetings need to be run in a better manner as addressed in our letter after the last meeting) for the task force to retain the credibility it needs to deal with this issue.

We would like to congratulate you on your appointment as Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and on your recent move to protect enforcement activities in B.C.

I have attached a copy of a 2002 letter from us to a previous minister re enforcement. It is not just the Fraser River fish runs that require effective enforcement. We are seeing a steady erosion of prime fish habitat due to a lack of enforcement personnel and a lack of resolve to pursue issues that do come to light. If habitat continues to be lost then fish stocks will go into a permanent decline across the region.

The lack of adequate enforcement is crippling us as our volunteers see no point in continuing if DFO is not going to do their part. Frequently volunteers will telephone issues to the DFO reporting line but they often don�t receive a call back nor is the issue addressed. This is especially troubling as DFO held extensive consultations with the volunteer community in about 2000 and were told in no uncertain terms by the community that the priority issues were education and enforcement. As you can see from the 2002 letter you really cannot pursue education without enforcement.

Since 2000 DFO has committed more and more resources to the bureaucracy while consistently cutting field positions and thus enforcement resources. Consulting the volunteer community and then doing the opposite of what the community asks has led to widespread cynicism and rapid declines in volunteer spirit and activity.

Your bureaucrats tell us that we are needed to create a �community ethic� that will reduce habitat violations but they show no understanding of how a community ethic works. There is ample literature showing the way to change the community ethic.

New York has used the �broken window� approach and has dramatically reduced crime rates there by hiring more enforcement people and diligently pursuing even the smallest violations. DFO is going in the opposite direction as they reduce field personnel and pursue only the most egregious of infractions (the total number of prosecutions in the last five years in the Pacific region is a pitifully small 50 or less). This embarrassing lack of effort encourages even those who would otherwise be compliant to be destructive as they see everyone else getting away with it. More effective enforcement would stop those who are truly destructive and encourage the others to come to the table to negotiate things that are good for the resource.

We are sensitive to your concern that throwing money at DFO is not the answer especially as we have seen so much funding disappear into more bureaucracy, more studies, more procedural and paperwork demands etc. The excessive numbers of bureaucrats and the games that they play often get in the way of the field personnel doing what needs to be done. There is money to be saved and efficiencies to be realized by reallocating funds from the bureaucracy to the field.

We encourage you to maintain your course and restore enforcement to the place where it belongs. If you do nothing else this will earn you the respect of what is still a large and watchful volunteer community in B.C.

Floodplains can be very productive land for growth of hay as hay can stand being under water for longer periods of time than higher value crops. Higher value crops die if they are under water. Even if the surface is dry the roots will rot if the water table is too close to the surface.

Since floodplains are delta like regions they tend to be very flat and the water table is close to the surface for long parts of the year. The only way to grow higher value crops is to lower the level of water in the river so the water table drops. In the Salmon River situation the proposal is to drop the water level by more than 2 feet in addition to the one foot drop that was already enacted by the Township in the 1990�s.

Clearly this would cause major damage to the river (you don�t have to be a fish biologist to know that dropping the water level by more than 3 feet is not good for the ecology) so it is apparent that higher value crops in the floodplain area are not practical.

If the Fort Langley floodplain is engineered to prevent flooding the land will sink as it did in New Orleans and has done everywhere this has been done. Floodplain land is not like farm land elsewhere as its soil is relatively loose and unpacked. When you stop or reduce flooding:

1) There is less silt deposited so there is less new soil added to the surface very year.

2) The yearly floods tend to �fluff up� the soil and decompact it. This effect is lost or reduced if flooding is reduced.

3) Tilling the land for higher value crops tends to cause compacting of the soil.

4) Tilling brings the organic matter to the surface where it decomposes which also gradually leads to loss of soil.

All these effects tend to cause the soil level to fall over time. This eventually makes the flooding worse unless even more drastic drainage measures are enacted.

These problems have certainly been seen around New Orleans as some areas have settled/subsided several feet and trying to keep these areas dry has led to massive and expensive engineering schemes which are prone to failure and which destroy the local environment.

Keeping floodplain areas in hay allows them to be productive without going down this long, expensive and damaging path.

The Fort Langley floodplain is particularly valuable to the community and thus not suitable for the sorts of drainage engineering that have ruined the Serpentine and many other areas in B.C.

1) The Salmon River is the most important coho river in the lower Fraser. Drainage such as has been done on the Serpentine has decimated the coho stocks there.

2) Greenhouses on the floodplain (as might occur if dikes are erected for drainage reasons) would be anathema to the Fort Langley community and damaging to its image as a heritage and ecological destination.

3) Dikes and drainage projects are particularly inappropriate due to the rich heritage and past history of the Fort Langley area. The proposal to put a large drainage ditch and a noisy pumphouse alongside the National Historic Site makes no sense.

4) Recreational use of the river (it is widely used by the Fort Langley Canoe Club and others) would be drastically affected by dropping the level of the river.

See also the article about the Salmon River Watershed for the rich history of this area.

Intensive agriculture in the floodplain would compromise the Fort Langley water supply as much of the water that finds its way into the wells that supply Fort Langley comes from the floodplain.

Buying the lowest parts of the floodplain and leasing much of it back for hay production would make more sense for a variety of reasons:

1) It would be cheaper to buy these lands than to drain them. The land would then be a public asset which would justify taxpayer expenditure rather than the taxpayer having to pay large sums for no real benefit to the community at large.

2) Drainage projects would cost the Township large sums of money yearly for maintenance, power to run pumps etc. In contrast purchase and leasing back much of the land to farmers would bring money back to the Township for its investment.

4) If some of the land were retained around the river we could naturalize the riparian zone. Presently the river does not have the usual tree and shrub cover along its banks that would improve its ecological health.

5) There would be an opportunity to retain some land along the river for public uses such as walkways, parks etc. Walkways, wetlands etc. could be part of the heritage and ecological assets of Fort Langley and might be an attraction for visitors to the area. This would fit in well with the fort to Fort Trail and the Trans Canada Trail.

AGM press release

The Salmon River Enhancement Society (SRES) will be celebrating another successful year of partnership with the Environmental Studies Department at Trinity Western University when SRES holds their AGM this Thursday.

�We have been very fortunate to work with Trinity Western and with LEPS to develop Salmon in the Valley field trips for Grade 4 and 5 students.� says SRES Director Doug McFee . �Salmon in the Valley is meant to reconnect students with nature and educate them about streams and the environment� continues McFee. Several classes have attended field trips funded by SRES and by the Township of Langley as part of the Township�s Waters Week Program which celebrates Rivers Day each fall.

Christopher Hall of Trinity Western organizes the field trips and says �The feedback we have received from teachers has been excellent so we are planning to offer an increased number this spring.� He adds, �We have had a lot of interest from teachers but the uncertainty over funding created by the recent court case over extra curricular programs has held teachers back from committing their classes. Although we do not think that the field trips fall under these restrictions we are looking for funding to pay for as much of the expenses as possible.�

Teachers interested in the environmental field trips can contact Christopher.Hall@twu.ca.

Trinity Western is an ideal location for environmental education as the Salmon River passes through the campus and creeks feeding the river run through an environmental reserve on campus. Students learn about water, insects, fish and fish habitat during the one day field trips. �The new Grade 5 program teaches students what affects the environment and streams and what we can do to protect the ecology�, says Doug McFee

SRES has also distributed books to elementary and secondary schools in the Salmon River Watershed as another way to help teachers and students with environmental education. Retired Langley school teachers Mary and Malcolm Bailey helped organize and distribute the books to schools in the last year. A list of books in the �Salmon River Environmental Library� along with much more information about the Salmon River is available at WWW.salmonriver.org. .

�We invite anyone who is interested in education programs or any of the other issues affecting the Salmon River to attend our AGM� says McFee. The meeting will be held Thursday, January 18 at Harmsworth Hall, 7170 232^nd Street (across from the Chevron Station at the 232^nd Street freeway entrance) starting at 7:30 pm.

Congratulations on your editorial [Experts offer flood strategy, May 1 Opinion, Langley Advance], which recognizes what many editorials in Vancouver papers have not. We have increased flood risks by the way we have altered rivers and their floodplains.

The Fort Langley floodplain is a great example: prior to the diking of 1948, it served as an overflow area for the Fraser. During spring floods, the Fraser would back up into the floodplain for weeks at a time, relieving flooding in other areas and delivering valuable sediment to replenish the soil in the floodplain.

We have lost most of these buffer areas in the Lower Fraser, as we have diked and altered most of the floodplains and marshy areas.

Fortunately, although the Fort Langley floodplain has been diked where it enters the Fraser, the floodplain remains close to its natural state in most other regards.

You point out that walling off floodplains and marshes for development restricts the river to narrow channels that invariably overflow at some point in the future. This was made abundantly clear by the great floods on the Mississippi in 1993 and again after Hurricane Katrina. The more you narrow the channel and the fewer overflow areas you preserve, the bigger the flood when it eventually happens.

Walling off the river also prevents sediment from being deposited in floodplains and marshes during spring floods. Sediment then is lost as it travels down the river and out to the sea.

Some of the big city papers seem to think that the answer is to dredge the river. Does anyone really think that the length of the Fraser can be dredged enough to make up for the massive way that we have interfered with sediment flows? Dredging gravel from the Chilliwack area is not going to do much in the long run to help flooding in rest of the Lower Fraser.

In areas such as Holland , the pendulum is swinging, as streams and floodplains are being restored to their natural state where they work better, not just for nature, but for us. Similar ideas are being considered for the Mississippi after looking at the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been lost in floods that we have aided and abetted by our misguided interference with natural systems.

We should look to these new examples that hold some promise of working, rather than stick to the dredging and diking paradigm that has been shown not to work.

Reclaiming portions of flood plains as forested river corridors would reduce societal subsidies for flood control, emergency response, and post-flood reconstruction that allow homes to be developed and businesses to operate in areas prone to flooding. Creating salmon sanctuaries and public open spaces along river corridors also would help preserve the regional quality of life. A salmon sanctuary need not be a wilderness. Integrating the remaining non-urban river valleys into a system of salmon sanctuaries could be modeled after the San Francisco Bay area's network of public open spaces that include an extensive network of recreational trails.

Doug McFee

The News Tribune - Tacoma, WA

Monday, December 8, 2003

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They run through rivers

DAVID R. MONTGOMERY;

When you think of salmon, your mind probably conjures images of the Pacific Northwest. But not so long ago, salmon also filled rivers in New England, and before that in Great Britain.

The stories of declining salmon runs are remarkably parallel throughout the English-speaking world, yet the similarities are not well known. What happened?

Salmon are in trouble, but not because people didn't know about the impacts of human actions on salmon runs.

Forty years ago in Seattle, in his opening speech to the Second Governor's Conference on Pacific Salmon, Washington Gov. Albert D. Rosellini said: "We are presently faced with a desperate situation on salmon. ... The ugly truth is that if we continue as we have during the past few years, our salmon stocks are doomed to extinction."

Ignorance was not the primary problem; neither was an incomplete knowledge of the natural history of salmon.

The King of Fish is not in trouble because people don't care about salmon. The biggest problem for salmon lies elsewhere. It lies in the slow accumulation of little changes into large impacts that over time radically alter natural systems. Under human influences, the landscape gradually evolved right out from under salmon.

Many writers over the past century and a half have remarked that the development of the landscape by modern societies must inevitably banish salmon to shrinking refuges uninhabited by people.

But salmon and civilization can co-exist, if we so choose. It would be tragic to lose wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest because we failed to learn the lessons of Europe and New England.

Rivers across northern Europe were once full of salmon. By the mid-1800s continental stocks were so depleted that the French government instituted an aggressive (though ultimately futile) restoration program based on hatcheries.

Up to a quarter of a million salmon were caught each year from the Rhine before 1900. By 1960, salmon were extinct in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Today salmon have been all but exterminated from the rivers of Spain, France, Portugal, Denmark, Finland and the Baltic States.

Attempts to recover and restore English salmon stocks date at least as far back as a 1712 act passed during the reign of Queen Anne. The act provided for regulating fishing on the Thames River with the intent of reducing overfishing so that "salmon may become very plentiful and common ... as they were formerly." Two years later, George I extended Queen Anne's salmon protection law to prevent blocking salmon from their spawning grounds in 17 English rivers.

The Thames River salmon protected by Queen Anne were among the first to disappear altogether. The story of the Thames then played out across the British Isles as salmon caught in the countryside flowed into the cities, while dams and habitat degradation shut salmon out of one river after another.

By the 1870s, only a little more than a third of the rivers protected by George I remained accessible to and usable by salmon. Now an expensive luxury, salmon no longer fed the masses. The King of Fish had become the fish of kings.

Moving to our own nation, it was in New England where the impact of land-use changes first began to deplete the New World salmon. As the colonies prospered, small dams erected to power mills began to block salmon from their spawning grounds.

Concern over preservation of the river fisheries motivated the colonial legislature in 1709 to enact the first of a long series of laws to protect salmon and other river fish. The act forbade the construction of new milldams and other obstructions to fish passage.

It also granted counties the power to regulate fishing for the public good. The law, however, exempted existing milldams, starting an ongoing pattern of periodically legalizing existing impacts and only regulating future impacts.

Although there were laws designed to protect salmon, civil authorities were generally unwilling or unable to enforce them. The fishing populace blatantly abused or circumvented the rules, and there was no pretense of enforcing fisheries laws.

Fishways were required for milldams in the British colony of New Brunswick, yet none of the more than 800 milldams in the colony in 1851 possessed provision for fish passage.

Illegal netting operations also remained widespread. Frustrated sport fisherman Campbell Hardy, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, sarcastically quipped that it seemed "the man would be loudly applauded who was discovered to have killed the last salmon."

Salmon are resilient, robust animals that can rapidly colonize new environments. Even so, we have driven them to the verge of extinction across much of their range.

The Pacific salmon are gone from a third of the area they inhabited just 150 years ago in California and the Pacific Northwest. Now, a decade after the first Endangered Species Act listings of salmon, we are still heading down the road traveled by Europe and New England.

If we are to keep wild salmon, then rebuilding wild salmon runs - rather than just slowing the rate of decline - must be the goal. This means that any credible strategy must prevent further increases in the net negative impact of the Four H's - habitat, harvest, hydropower, and hatcheries.

While progress is being made in habitat protection, and there is hope for meaningful hatchery reform, history shows us that we must get ahead of the curve of landscape change if we are to retain strong salmon runs.

How can this be done and still accommodate the needs and economic desires of a growing human population? What can be done to reverse current trends and increase salmon abundance around Puget Sound in the face of the projected doubling of the region's human population in this new century? These are the questions we must address if our western salmon are to avoid the fate of their eastern cousins.

Flood-plain restoration presents our best opportunity to provide salmon with sanctuaries where their interests would not be sacrificed to human interests over the next century. Letting rivers and their flood plains revert to a more natural state may sound radical, but this strategy could be implemented through a gradual flood-plain buyout program, a ban on development within historically active river corridors, or by simply stopping direct and indirect subsidies for levee maintenance and controlling bank erosion.

Degradation of the Pacific Northwest's rivers and salmon occurred progressively over 150 years because of both deliberate choices and inadvertent side effects of various policies - none of which were intended to harm salmon.

River restoration could take even longer. Over time, rivers will restore themselves if flood plains are reforested and channels are allowed to flood and swing back and forth through forested corridors across their valley bottoms.

Ultimately, the degree to which society is willing to give space back to rivers will define the degree to which rivers can once again support thriving runs of wild salmon.

People have the freedom to change their behavior. Fish do not. If we are to save wild salmon, then some people will have to forgo the opportunity to make money or the ability to do things they wanted to do where they wanted to do them. But we all lose if we lose the salmon.

David R. Montgomery is a professor of geological sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is author of a new book, "King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon," published by Westview Press.

(Published 12:01AM, December 7th, 2003)

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