Sept 12, 2016 – The fish ladder on the Puntledge River that allows migrating salmon to make it over the impoundment dam and into Comox Lake.
I spent the morning helping with some work on the Puntledge River Summer Chinook being held at Rosewall Creek Hatchery before ducking out and meeting up with the Hydro Fisheries Biologist up on the two dams that cross the Puntledge. One, at this location, holds the water back at the lake to provide a low head.
The other, the diversion dam farther downstream, diverts a portion of the river through the penstock and down to the power generation plant.
Both are barriers to fish moving upstream, and the diversion dam presents a survival challenge to juvenile fish migrating out of the system in the spring.
The impoundment dam is less of an issue because of this fish ladder, which allows the adult fish moving upstream to bypass the dam and move around the barrier through a series of flowing water filled steps that the fish can move up. It may not look like much, but this is a very important highway for salmon.
The diversion dam isn’t so easily bypassed for the juvenile fish and there are significant mortalities associated with it, that was what much of the discussion today was about.
This is work. Even though it was a sixteen hour day, it’s still pretty tolerable.
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