Friday, November 07, 2008

Sure we'll replace your lake...





Scott Hed, Director of the Sportsman's Alliance for Alaska points us towards this article via WLTribune.com that tells of one mining company's plan to replace fish habitat lost due to mining operations by building a lake.

Taseko Mines presented a new $10 to $12-million fish compensation plan for its Prosperity project to the provincial and federal governments late last week.
It calls for a brand new lake, similar in size and depth to Fish Lake, to offer fish habitat and improved fish spawning channels.


Prosperity Lake would be created using a dam, and sit roughly eight kilometres east of Fish Lake, and would be 113 hectares in size and 17 metres deep. Fish Lake is 111 hectares and 14 metres deep.

The plan is to compensate for the loss of fish habitat if the copper and gold mine is built, and Fish Lake, 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake, is drained. A dam would be built to create a tailings pond upstream of Fish Lake.

From Scott's email:

Hopefully you guys will appreciate this…especially the part where citizens of the area will get to vote on whether this newly created lake will be home to big fish or little fish.

Taseko, the mining company in this article, is a sister company to Northern Dynasty with the Pebble project. Maybe if this is successful in Canada, we’ll get to choose what kind of fish we’d like to have in Bristol Bay. I vote for really big rainbow trout and lots and lots of wild salmon. Oh yeah, that’s what is already there.

3 comments:

Capt Gordon said...

What kind of BS is this? Replace a natural fish factory like an Alaskan salmon stream with a reservoir. How do we continue to let this kind of thing happen? I am appalled as usual by Alaskan politics driven by the extraction industries as usual. I guess they figure they need to get this done before their patron leaves office in january.

tws1615 said...

Murdock,
I enjoy your blog and would like to send you updates on related issues. May I have your email address? Thanks!

Murdock said...

TWS

Sure thing - use EditoratFlyfishMagazine.com

replace the "at" with @

Lee