Miller Creek IPP questioned

Megan Grittani-Livingston
Whistler Question
November 27, 2008

Despite initial uncertainties, comptroller felt comfortable approving project

Biologists working for the B.C. Ministry of Environment expressed serious concerns about the impact of the Miller Creek hydro project eight years ago while the run-of-river project was being reviewed for its water licence. But their fears were overruled as the province’s comptroller of water rights felt the amount of uncertainty was small enough to proceed with a licence, albeit one accompanied by a five-year monitoring period.

The dialogue about the 33-megawatt Miller Creek Hydroelectric Station reopened recently after the release of emails about the project sent between scientists working for the Ministry of Environment. The messages, primarily from the early part of the decade, were obtained by Gwen Barlee of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee in a Freedom of Information request, as previously reported in The Question.

In an email from September 2000, Marvin Rosenau, then a referral biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Section of the Ministry of Environment, expressed concerns about the impacts independent power projects (IPPs) could have on aquatic resources, pointing to what he viewed as a lack of resources for agencies and proponents to properly review the issues.

Now an instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Rosenau said in a recent interview that he felt uncomfortable with the amount of water that would be diverted from Miller Creek and the lack of historical data to back up decision-making. He said there was a sense of frustration among some of the Ministry scientists that their concerns were going unheard.

“At that time (1999 and 2000), we didn’t have much information to go on, and so I guess we just felt decisions were made without a complete data set,” Rosenau said. “That doesn’t mean that you’re always going to be right even with a lot more information. But we were just pretty uncomfortable with where it was going.”

He said September 2007’s dewatering incident, which saw water levels dip quite low for about three hours because of a control failure, “basically was an empirical example of some of the things we were worried about.”

Current environmental consultant and conservation biologist Pamela Zevit worked for the Ministry of Environment from 1994 to 2004, and she was assigned to coordinate the review of the Miller Creek project in 1999 and 2000, working with specialists such as Rosenau to ask the necessary questions. Zevit said she felt the Miller Creek project predated full guidelines and policies for IPPs, so the government scientists were flying by the seat of their pants in terms of what they had to find out.

She said the government scientists were looking for more information about flow impacts on food and nutrients, the consequences of potential dewatering, what the project’s infrastructure components would do for sensitive ecosystems and wildlife, whether long-term monitoring would take place and how impacts could be mitigated.

“Miller Creek does sort of exemplify a lot of the issues, and so a lot of things have now come to pass in the last few years that are guiding these processes and making them a lot more stringent — but it’s still going to boil down to, ‘Is this the right project, the place for it, (and) what are the trade-offs you’re willing to make?’” Zevit said.

Jim Mattison, the comptroller of water rights for the past 10 years, said he was satisfied that enough studies had been conducted and information collected to put a plant in at Miller Creek. While he said he agreed with the biologists’ concerns about the lack of information to a certain extent, he felt “they just didn’t have anything substantiated.”

“I thought the uncertainty was small enough that we could make this decision and then monitor more to see if we had it quite right,” Mattison said, adding, “None of the decisions are totally without risk.”

Mattison included a five-year environmental monitoring period in the Miller Creek licence. He said that a report produced at the end of that period proved to him there has been relatively little change.

Mattison said he doesn’t think problems such as the dewatering incident can be directly linked with the biologists’ initial concerns.

“I don’t think those are evidence that the decision in 2000 was bad. I think they’re operational problems, and they’ve been fixed,” he said.

A Conservation Officer Service investigation is still probing the incident and whether fish were killed. But Epcor, the company that took over the plant after the licence was issued and opened it for commercial operation in 2003, has already acted to improve communications, mechanical and electrical systems, personnel, training, computer logic and parameters and procedures, Epcor Director of Environment Michael Smith said.

“We took the events of last year actually very seriously,” Smith said. He said the company put a team together to make sure everything at Miller Creek “was up to an Epcor standard — what happened was just as unacceptable to us and our organization as it was to the community and the people of B.C.”

Jay Shukin, Epcor’s manager of public and government affairs for B.C., said the Miller Creek project has been meeting the standards set by the licence terms — including the regulated in-stream flow rates — and the company has opted to commit to an extended period of environmental monitoring beyond the provincially mandated initial five-year phase.

The B.C. environmental monitoring firm Ecofish plans to at the overall health of the stream and collect statistical data that scientists can use, Smith said.

“We’re very hopeful and confident that what it’s going to show is that overall the project isn’t making any negative environmental impact,” he said.

Allen McEwan, whose property borders on the lower part of the creek, said he’s been quite pleased with Epcor’s communications and improvements.

“They’ve done their best to explain (the low-water event) to us in some detail, (and) it would appear that they’ve done an awful lot of work to make sure it never happens again,” McEwan said.

While he said he shares many of the concerns raised by scientists such as Rosenau and Zevit as applied to IPPs in general, Miller Creek’s fisheries value had been compromised before the plant, and Epcor is addressing the issue of an information deficit through its monitoring program.

Veronica Woodruff, a director of Stewardship Pemberton, said she speaks first for the concerns of fish, since that’s her passion, and she feels the Miller Creek project might not have been “one of the better projects to start with.”

But she’s been impressed with Epcor’s communications with residents and changes to make sure the possibility of another dewatering event is low.
“I feel right now that Epcor has really done their duty in regards to that project,” she said.

mlivingston@whistlerquestion.com
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