A pair of First Nations in B.C.’s Fraser Valley say a recent toxic spill may have killed up to 1,000 juvenile salmon in a local waterway.
The Cheam and Sqwá First Nations say they discovered the fish kill in the Hope Slough in Chilliwack on Monday while members were conducting routine water sampling.
“When we arrived the water was black, we couldn’t even see through a couple inches of the water, and all salmonid were dead. So the shores were lined with dead coho, trout, sculpin and the stickleback were at the surface gasping for air,” said Roxanna Kooistra, project manager on the Cheam First Nation’s Hope Slough Restoration Project.
“It’s something we only see when the water quality drops and the oxygen drops so low that all the other fish have suffocated.”
Members initially believed the spill might have been a petroleum product and called in an environmental restoration company to deploy booms.
But they now believe the material was manure from nearby agricultural operations.
Kooistra said there is no way to remove the contamination from the water, and they’re now hoping it will naturally be diluted by rain and tributary inflows as it moves downstream.
“We don’t know the extent of the damage, we don’t know how many salmon are left if there are any, how many Salish suckers died, but we do know that the data shows that there could be no salmon alive in the system for up to 10 kilometres,” she said.
The Cheam First and Sqwá First Nations have been leading a $2.5-million project to restore the waterway, which they say has special meaning to Indigenous Peoples and was once the site of multiple villages.
The nations say the spill happened weeks before chum, chinook and coho are expected to migrate past the area.
They say they’re worried the spill could have long-term impacts on this year’s coho run.
“(The spill) was very disturbing for us, because we’re salmon people, we’re people of the river, and those are our relatives,” Sqwá Coun. Eddie Garder told Global News.
“We’ve been putting so much effort into restoring this waterway with riparian work, with water quality testing, with creating ripples, doing things to increase the flow of the river so it oxygenates the water.”
Fisheries and Oceans Canada confirmed it had been notified of the incident and deployed fishery officers to the scene.
Environment Canada, which is the lead agency on pollution incidents, was also involved in the response.
The B.C. government also deployed an environmental emergency response officer but says the source of the spill remains unconfirmed.
The nations say they want to see more monitoring and enforcement of agricultural practices by both federal and provincial authorities.