With the Sunshine Coast Regional District’s (SCRD) Chapman Lake expansion project not likely to start until summer 2017, local officials with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) are urging the province to require much-needed rehabilitation work on Chapman Creek be done at the same time.
Grant McBain, a community advisor with DFO’s Ecosystem Management Branch, told Coast Reporter that DFO is talking with provincial officials in an effort to convince them to make the rehabilitation project a condition of the new water licence the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources (FLNRO) wants the SCRD apply for.
According to McBain, low water flow in the creek during dry spells isn’t the only thing that can cause problems for fish. The way the channel runs from the area near the Chapman Creek Hatchery to the mouth of the creek at Mission Point is also an issue. McBain said it goes back decades, to the blocking off of a natural overflow channel and the installation of the bridge over Highway 101 to replace one washed out in the mid-1950s. The problem with the lower section of Chapman Creek is that artificial rip-rap “armouring” has been diverting the water away from the direction it would move naturally.
“What we’ve got is a creek that can’t behave normally because it’s trying to move rocks it physically can’t move. So you end up with an awful lot of material getting deposited in areas where those low flows won’t work,” McBain said.
DFO did work in the ’90s to stabilize the creek habitat in the area around the hatchery, and upstream it remains mostly in a natural state.
McBain said DFO has been asking the SCRD – which controls the outlet from Chapman Lake – to maintain a flow of at least 300 litres per second, but it dropped to 100 at one point during the 2015 drought.
McBain calls the SCRD’s new water licence application the one chance to do things right. “This is pretty much the only time the regional district’s going to be asking for more water out of this source [Chapman Lake]. This is the opportunity to step in and do the work at the lower end, and the fortunate thing is the federal government has money for this – 50 per cent funding covered under the Recreational Fisheries Program, and they’ll fund habitat work to restore natural function to increase sport fishing opportunities for the public.”
McBain said it’s difficult to give a cost estimate for the project without an updated engineering study, but the work isn’t likely to be very complex or costly. McBain describes it as “flipping” the current meander of the river to stop the formation of gravel bars and straighten the course the creek follows as it goes under the bridge.
“It’s essentially going in and rearranging the rip-rap that’s negatively impacting the creek, to positively impact the creek,” he said.
Meanwhile, the SCRD’s infrastructure services committee was expected to recommend an increase to the Chapman Lake expansion project budget at its meeting July 7. A staff report prepared for that meeting said $123,425 would be needed to cover the additional environmental assessment work BC Parks wants to see before evaluating the regional district’s application to go ahead with the work, as well as studies to satisfy FLNRO’s requirements for the new water licence application.
An Alternative Approval Process on the SCRD’s plan to use a long-term loan of $5 million to fund the expansion closes at 4:30 p.m. on July 26.
