Recent Items – 1999
June 10, 1999, By Kelly Henschel, Daily News Staff
From nearly 4,000 feet in the air, the Kiskatinaw River looks like a watery snake, slithering in and out of densely forested areas and at times almost doubling back to meet itself. While it’s a breathtaking sight, the water still appears to be a little murky, a normal occurrence when taking turbidity into account, says Don Howard, manager of operations for the city of Dawson Creek.
“Turbid” means unclear or murky because of stirred up sediment, and that’s what happens to the river in the spring when run off occurs. Since much of the river has steep, clay banks and valley sidewalls, it is generally susceptible to slope failure and small sections occasionally slide into the river, especially during spring breakup. From its headwaters at Bear Hole Lake (east of Tumbler Ridge) the river flows north about 40 kilometres to Arras where the water is pumped to the Dawson Creek reservoirs about three miles west of the city. Since the Kiskatinaw watershed supplies about half a billion gallons of water to Dawson Creek, Pouce Coupe and Rolla, quality has been an issue, Howard says.
“You always have people who are concerned,” he says, especially regarding the possibility of contracting Giardia, (Beaver Fever) from contaminated water.
“That’s usually the biggest concern people have,” he says, but when water is pumped from the river, it undergoes a thorough treatment process before it ever reaches city taps, he says.
“The type of treatment that we do which is full filtration and sedimentation is the only type of system where Giardia doesn’t go through,” he says. If the river gets too full of sediment during spring run off, the city uses a backup reservoir which contains enough water for one to one and a half months.
Natural causes aside, some residents are also concerned that some man-made problems such as logging are depleting the quality of the watershed. Many people may be unaware what the Ministry of Forests, along with operators such as Canfor or Chetwynd Forest Industries, is doing to protect the area from which the city receives its water supply, says Carl Jahn with the Dawson Creek Ministry of Forests.
“People may get the impression that when you’re logging, you’re logging right up to the creek or right across the creek,” he says.
That’s not the case, says operations manager Paul Gevatkoff, as the Ministry of Forests follows strict harvesting guidelines and regulations such as those outlined in the 1998 Land Resources Management Plan (LRMP) and the older Kiskatinaw Integrated Watershed Management plan.
“Encroachment on the river is really minimal,” he says, as not much logging is being done right along the river. If harvesting does occur, it is closely monitored by enforcement and compliance personnel from the forestry services. What some residents may not realize, Gevatkoff says, is while the Ministry of Forests manages crown land, private landowners operate under different regulations, and can harvest right up to the edge of the river at times.
“From the forestry’s point of view, we’re bound by the legislation in the Forest Practices Code to ensure that we’re not doing things like harvesting close to creeks,” Jahn adds.
“For the Kiskatinaw River, the closest we could harvest legally would be 50 meters from the river, that is if we wanted to.”
The headwaters of the river at Bear Hole Lake is actually a protected area, Jahn says, which means the area is essentially a park and is closed to any type of harvesting or oil and gas activity.