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Living Downstream of B.C.’s Gold Rush: Alaska’s Fishermen Fear End of ‘Last Wild Frontier’
No fish in the car, warned the rental car attendant at Juneau airport, with the weary tone of someone who had cleaned too many fish guts out of returned vehicles. It was a warning underlined by signs in hotels pleading with guests not to clean fish in the hotel bathrooms.
Fishing is in the DNA of Southeast Alaskans, not only as a sport and common way of filling the freezer, but also as a driver of the state economy. So it is not surprising that the perceived threat presented by a rush of mine applications on the B.C. side of the border has brought together diverse groups who want B.C. to give Alaska an equal seat at the decision-making table and to have the issue referred for review to the International Joint Commission.
“I can’t conceive of not being able to fish for salmon. The grief would be too much to fathom,” said Heather Hardcastle, co-owner of Taku River Reds who has been commercial fishing for most of her life.
“We share these waters and we share these fish. There has to be an international solution,” she said.
Jill Weitz, Trout Unlimited outreach coordinator, wonders why Canadians are not taking the risk of pollution from the mines more seriously.
“This is one of the largest king salmon runs in Southeast Alaska. How is this not significant?” she asked, looking over the side of a boat into the waters of Taku Inlet.
It is a cruel joke that, for the second time in history, the richest minerals in the world have been found in the richest salmon habitat in the world, said Lindsey Bloom, as her gillnet dried in front of her Juneau home
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Nine Months After Polley Breach, Alaskans Seek Compensation Guarantee from BC
Nine Months After Polley Breach, Alaskans Seek Compensation Guarantee from BC
Proposed northern BC mines ‘source of great angst in Juneau.’
Earlier this month, Heather Hardcastle, a commercial fisherwoman from Juneau, Alaska met in Williams Lake, B.C. with members of the Tsilhqot’in First Nation. They shared a meal of wild Alaskan salmon that Hardcastle brought as a symbolic gesture: This fish was a reminder of all there was to lose.
After lunch, Hardcastle and her team of Alaska visitors boarded a helicopter and flew 25 minutes away to the site of the Mount Polley accident, the scene of a massive breach last August of its mine waste dam near the town of Likely, B.C.
The breach released millions of cubic metres of contaminated water into Quesnel Lake, which feeds into the Fraser River.
Nine months later, Jacinda Mack, a Xatsull woman from the Soda Creek reserve and one of many residents living near the path of the spill, invited the Alaskans to Williams Lake to see firsthand the main effect of that accident.
On the Fraser River, contamination from the mine breachthreatened the run of Sockeye salmon that spawns in Quesnel Lake.
“We saw where [Mack] was raised, and where they used to fish on the Fraser where people fished for thousands of years, and they’re not fishing there anymore. It’s heartbreaking,” Hardcastle said. “It’s a stunning and gorgeous area but it was just so sad. It feels selfish to be thinking about us and our water, but it lit a fire under me. We have to do something.”
It was an eye-opening sight to Hardcastle, who lives and works in southeast Alaska, downstream from a number of open-pit mines located in northwest B.C., with more under construction and opening soon.
Hardcastle grew up in the 1970s, during which time her parents fought the B.C. Tulsequah Chief mine, located 65 kilometres north of Juneau, Alaska, which leaked acid mine drainage in 1957 and still hasn’t been cleaned up. The polluted Tulsequah River empties into the salmon-rich Taku River.
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