Without Permits, BC Fracking Company Must Drain 2 Huge Earthfill Dams; More Than 50 Built Illegally
The provincial government has ordered Progress Energy to drain virtually all of the water trapped behind two massive dams the company built in violation of key provincial regulations. The company was told on October 31 to drain all but 10 per cent of the water stored behind its Town and Lily dams near the Alaska Highway north of Fort St. John by Chris Parks, assistant director of compliance and enforcement with B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office (EAO).
The order comes after Progress Energy filed an extraordinary application this summer with the EAO asking the provincial environmental regulator to retroactively “exempt” the two dams from required environmental assessments. Both dams are higher than five-storey buildings. By law, Progress should have filed its exemption applications well before the projects were built, not after. Progress built its Town dam in 2012 and its Lily dam in 2014.
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Both dams are among more than 50 large earthen structures built by energy companies on Crown or public lands in northeast B.C. that are also subject to Treaty 8, the 1899 agreement reached between the Crown and the region’s First Nations. Most or all of the dams were built without the companies first obtaining key provincial authorizations such as water licences. In addition, engineering specifications appear to never have been submitted to and approved by provincial authorities before the dams were constructed.
Dam safety and water licensing officials with the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations are also investigating additional fracking dams that have been built on private lands, including farmlands within the provincial Agricultural Land Reserve. B.C.’s ALR was created in 1973 to preserve farmland. It now falls to B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission (OGC), which allowed the dams to be built without the proper permits first being obtained, to retroactively review dozens of pending water licence applications, and to assess the health, safety and environmental risks posed by dams that may not have been built to proper engineering standards.
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https://www.desmog.ca/2017/11/10/fracking-company-ordered-drain-two-unauthorized-dams-b-c-s-northeast