Decent salmon return at Stoney Creek—but how many will hatch?

After the season got off to a rocky start, the salmon appear to have returned to Stoney Creek in decent numbers in 2021—but questions remain about how the new generation will fare through the winter.

A total of 879 chum were counted by the Stoney Creek Environmental Committee this year, along with 151 coho.

While the coho number is small, it’s the third-best since at least 2006. In 2020, 165 coho returned, and in 2010 and 2013, the stream saw 293 and 405 of the salmon return.

In terms of the chum salmon, it’s not even among the top five years, but it’s an improvement from four years ago. In 2017, 766 chum returned to the stream. This is notable because of the four-year cycle in which chum spawn in a stream and return to it.

Still, it’s significantly lower than in 2013, when 1,713 chum returned to Stoney Creek.

In an email to Burnaby Beacon, SCEC president John Templeton noted that there were at least two days this year in which it was impossible to count the salmon due to high water levels.

‘Really, really bad’ damage to Stoney Creek

However, the stream, and the salmon that inhabit it, faced significant hardships this year due to major rainstorms that poured into Metro Vancouver.

Templeton noted in an interview with Burnaby Beacon that the damage from last month’s severe flooding “has been really, really bad.”

“Parts of the upper creek bank got completely washed away on one section [after] a high bank collapsed into one of the tributaries,” Templeton said, adding that SCEC notified the City of Burnaby of the issue with the bank in 2020.

“But often things don’t get the attention they need due to other events at city hall.”

“It’s not a good situation, and we won’t really know until the fry are starting to emerge in the spring … what has happened.”

Photo: Dustin Godfrey / Burnaby Beacon

However, he noted it would have been difficult for the city to get to the area, which is in a remote, natural space away from roads, with heavy machinery to address the issue.

“And even if they had done it, [with] the volume and velocity of water that came down, it may not have stopped that from sloughing down,” Templeton said.

The concern, now, is that more soil from the banks will fall in and block the flow of the creek, he said, causing water to build up “with enough pressure to cause a blowout.”

A lot of areas in the creek have been “scoured out,” Templeton noted, which can destroy eggs. It also deposits fine sediment on the gravel in which salmon lay their eggs.

“What that does is stop the water and oxygen [from] getting to those eggs. So even if the eggs were to survive being washed away, the chances of the fish hatching out and emerging are very, very slim,” he said.

“So it’s not a good situation, and we won’t really know until the fry are starting to emerge in the spring … what has happened.”

The sewage continues to flow

And George Kovacic, a Burnaby resident and volunteer with SCEC, said he has seen no shortage of sewage backing up in the area of the creek.

Sewage has been an issue in the Burquitlam area during rainstorms, with the system overflowing onto the streets and infiltrating Stoney Creek through the stormwater drainage system.

“We definitely had spewing sewage from North Road,” Kovacic noted. “A lot of the solids, the sanitary products and toilet paper, were vacuumed up by Coquitlam staff. They did a great job. They worked hard, 24 hours a day for multiple days.”

Kovacic counted six days of work by city staff to suck up the sewage in the area during major rain events this past couple of months.

However, he also noted there was at least one manhole, on North Road at the intersection with Rathburn Drive, that was spewing sewage, where he did not see any city crews working a vacuum truck.

“So there was toilet paper and sanitary parts that were pouring onto North Road and then onto Rathburn Drive,” Kovacic said.

“The mayor of Burnaby is extremely supportive. And if the mayor of Burnaby was in charge of Metro [Vancouver], I think you’d see a lot of different things happening. I think you’d see more progress.”

Photo: Dustin Godfrey / Burnaby Beacon

That sewage, then, made its way into storm drains, which flow into Stoney Creek—at the same time, he noted, as when salmon were returning to the creek.

“This has been a lot,” he said. “This is a long-term problem, but it’s getting worse.”

He blamed the increase in people in the area relying on the sewage system, with more highrises being built nearby, without building the sewage infrastructure to keep up.

The other side of the issue, he noted, is the increasing frequency and intensity of storms due to climate change.

Meeting with the mayor

On Monday, Mayor Mike Hurley met with, among others, members of SCEC and officials with the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm First Nation, on the issue.

Templeton said kʷikʷəƛ̓əm Coun. George Chaffee “really impressed everyone” and “was quite straight up that these problems need to be solved, that we need a timeline.”

Burnaby Beacon reached out to the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm First Nation early this month to talk about the issues facing the stream but did not receive a response.

Templeton said Hurley appeared receptive to the concerns at the meeting.

“The mayor of Burnaby is extremely supportive. And if the mayor of Burnaby was in charge of Metro [Vancouver], I think you’d see a lot of different things happening. I think you’d see more progress,” he said.

Rainy season has several months to go, and it’s unclear how much we may yet see by way of severe rainstorms.

At the tail end of the heavy rain season—around late March—the salmon fry will emerge. But the question of how many remains, with the damage done to the stream.

And it’s still unclear what effect a major fish kill from this summer—which landed the creek on an endangered streams list—will have on the fry.

An unknown substance contaminated the stream in July, causing a serious spike in its basicity—the pH level was measured at 10.8, which Kevin Ryan, president of the Mossom Creek Hatchery and Education Centre, said was “extremely high.”

Templeton said earlier this year that the fish kill also wiped out the invertebrates that the fry feed on after they hatch—and that could take a year to recover.

But yesterday he noted a flip side of the major storms this year.

With the movement of “tons” of sediment and rocks from the high waterflow, invertebrates from upstream may have been flushed into the salmon spawning areas.

“So that may be a blessing in one way,” he said.

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