Early runs of Stuart and Chinook salmon were devastated last year because they couldn’t make it past a massive landslide on British Columbia’s Fraser River.
Officials with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans told a commons committee briefing on Tuesday that 98 per cent of early Stuart and 89 per cent of early Chinook were lost.
Rebecca Reid, the department’s regional director for the Pacific, says salmon survival improved later in the summer when work begun to transport fish past the slide, helping them get to their spawning grounds.
It’s believed the massive slide on the river occurred in fall of 2018 north of Lillooet, but it wasn’t discovered until last June after fish had already begun arriving.
Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan says about 60,000 fish were helped over the slide last year, while 220,000 made it past the site on their own once water volume dropped.
So far, Jordan says just two Chinook have been observed arriving this year.