If you look closely at the water trickling along Stoney Creek, you can see juvenile coho swimming among the rocks.
But the scene was very much a different one last fall, after a series of washouts along the Stoney Creek tributary near Gaglardi Way threatened the very existence of the habitat.
Fast forward nearly a year, and progress on rehabilitating the stream for the fish that call the creek home is coming along, even better than expected for local streamkeepers.
“This is a really good thing to see the habitat improved,” said John Templeton, the chair of the Stoney Creek Environment Committee.
He recently took the NOW on a tour of a tributary of the creek that was damaged by the washouts.
The way Templeton sees it, the progress is a good news story. In the last few weeks, crews have built retaining ponds along a three-quarter-kilometre stretch of the creek and put in different size gravel to accommodate the different species of fish. City contractors have also removed tons of crushed rock that filled the tributary after the mishap last fall. Meanwhile, about 400 fish have been relocated while the work, which started in early August, is being completed.
Templeton suggested when the work is done, the stream will be in better condition than before the washouts.
Along sections of the creek, coho chum were already colonizing the area on their own.
By October, the creek is expected to be full of fish.
“What we’re trying to do is to preserve, protect and enhance and improve what we’ve got here,” he said.
The situation all began late October 2015 when a construction mishap led to a series of events that eventually forced a large amount of sediment into the creek and put the fish habitat at risk.
During the rehabilitation of a culvert on a Stoney Creek tributary, an A.C. Paving employee who was maintaining a filter screen on a pump at the construction site got his boot sucked into the inlet hose of the pump.
The concern is if the returning fish’s eggs get coated in the sediment, it creates a barrier where oxygen doesn’t get into the developing eggs, essentially choking them.
The city had undertaken the project in the first place after crews and Stoney Creek streamkeeper members noticed the beginning of some creek bank erosion near the outlet of the Stoney Creek Tributary 3A culvert under Gaglardi Way in the fall of 2014.
Earlier this year, city engineers began working on a remediation plan.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada also got involved, directing the city to provide a fall/winter site management plan to ensure no further impacts to fish and fish habitat occur.
Templeton, who’s been involved with the Stoney Creek committee for more than a decade, noted that ensuring the health of the creek is important because of the 90 waterways in Burnaby, only 12 have fish living in them.
“Water is life, and if you have a creek with salmon in it, it tells you that it’s very good water,” he said. “It’s not only about fish, but it’s what people see and feel when they’re bathing in nature.”
