With the tunnelling under the dam complete, the cofferdam is shown mostly removed in October 2017. The floating walkway holds the two
silt curtains in place to protect water quality.
In addition, the land where three pipelines used to be is
being re-forested, reducing BC Hydro’s environmental foot-print
in the area.
“We are working adjacent to a provincial park and there
are certainly high standards and guidelines for environmen-tal
protection, so we made sure that we have a really good
environmental management plan,” Watson said.
Part of that plan involved taking steps to protect at-risk
wildlife species that turned up on the jobsite, such as Pacific
sideband snails and Northern red-legged frogs.
“We have removed and returned to the wetland about 150
red-legged frogs from the entire project site since we started,
and so those are the kinds of nuances that have made it suc-cessful,”
Watson said.
HATFIELD ENVIRONMENTAL
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
PILING CANADA 45
