Streamkeepers: Restoring Urban Streams In The Heart Of Greater Vancouver

Imported sequoia trees add an air of dignity to Tatlow Park, where they tower above short-cropped grass and the remains of a long-ago-tamed stream. What remains of Tatlow Creek, at point Grey Road and Macdonald Street, is a tiny trickle of water -- from a leaking water pipe -- guided by rounded rocks carefully placed along its bank.

The entombed stream disappears into a dark culvert under Point Grey Road and it is not seen again before it discharges from a pipe a half-block later into the saltwater of English Bay beyond the intertidal zone. The block-long Tatlow Park, with its small bridges carefully cut lawns and weeping willows, is a quaint picnic spot and a popular stop for local residents walking their dogs. It is also a symbol of how generations of developers, planners, and engineers filled and straightened, channelled and piped Vancouver as they carved a modern city out of the rain forest on the edge of the sea.

Once, there were at least 50 salmon and trout streams in Vancouver. Today, there are but two: Musqueam Creek and Cutthroat Creek, both running through Pacific Spirit Regional Park. Once, there were an estimated 100,000 searun trout and salmon spawning in city waters; in January, only a dozen salmon returned to spawn in the two creeks. In less than the lifetime of some local residents, the 14 streams flowing into False Creek have been exterminated, and False Creek itself has been reduced to one-third its original size. Approximately 700 kilometres of once open waterways now run under the streets of Vancouver.

Just five decades ago, schoolboys whiled away afternoons gaffing Chum and Coho salmon from China Creek, which gurgled more than 16 kilometres across Vancouver from False Creek (at 7th Avenue) to about 45th Avenue and Knight Street.

Brewery Creek began in the high marshes around what is today Mountain View Cemetery on East 31st Avenue and emptied into what is now the eastern end of False Creek, near where Science World stands on guard for technology. Trout-fishing was good above Broadway. Brewery Creek was run through a culvert many years ago, and water still flows from its source.

The fishing used to be pretty good above Broadway. Some visionaries think the salmon could come back.

Many of Vancouver's creeks once had their own race of salmon, each one preserving unduplicated genetic material. Those races have passed into oblivion, their special contribution to natural history lost forever along with the freshwater streams and wetland habitat that once supported them.

This story of industrial-era "progress" has been duplicated in urban -- and, increasingly, rural -- areas throughout the Vancouver region, the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, and other parts of British Columbia and the entire Pacific Northwest.

Today, there are only approximately 1,000 salmon-spawning streams left in all of BC, supporting some 3,000 distinct races of fish. In the 1950s, 80 percent of the Coho salmon in the Straight of Georgia came from 100 spawning streams; they now come from only 20. At least 242 salmon stocks have become extinct, mostly coho in urban streams running into the Straight of Georgia from the Vancouver region and the east side of Vancouver Island. Federal scientists have estimated that there are approximately 600 threatened salmon stocks in BC, many from rivers and streams in the mid-coast area. Along with the destruction of creeks has come an alarming decline in fish stocks, particularly Strait of Georgia Coho and steelhead. A map produced by the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO): "Lost Streams of the Lower Fraser River", has a powerful effect on the viewer. Vancouver is covered in squiggly red lines showing the former location of once-thriving streams that now exist only as drainage ditches and sewers or that have disappeared entirely as ravines were filled-in, smoothing-out the city's topography.

The red lines also crawl across the North Shore, to the suburbs and cities of the Fraser Valley, and throughout the former wetlands of Richmond and the Fraser River delta, once one of North America's most productive marsh ecosystems and the source of food for much of the fish in the Strait of Georgia.

But all is not lost.

A growing movement of urban environmentalists is also seeing red in the way this region's cities have evolved and are still being planned. A new generation of activists and neighbourhood residents are speaking-up on behalf of the remaining streams and their inhabitants. And many are purring their hands and their spare time where their hearts are: working to protect and restore long-burled streams and wetlands.

Mark Angelo hopes a planned summer restoration of Tatlow Creek will show the way for city residents, politicians, and bureaucrats who want to revive local waterways. Angelo, the head of the BCIT Fish and Wildlife Department and a nationally recognised campaigner for river conservation, hopes that his students, Tatlow Creek neighbours, and Vancouver City Hall can bring the tiny salmon creek back to life. City hall plans to soon separate storm and sewage systems in the neighbourhood, and local residents and city bureaucrats and politicians see that as a low-cost opportunity to breathe new life into the tortured creek.

lf everything goes according to plan (the largest roadblock at the moment being red tape put down by the Vancouver Park Board staff), storm water draining fro the streets in the tiny neighbourhood surrounding Tatlow Creek will soon be redirected into a special holding pond near the small park's south side. That water will then be slowly released, to provide a steady flow. Furthermore, the culvert under Point Grey Road will be overhauled to allow fish to pass through, and the long-abused stream will be freed from its concrete prison all the way to English Bay.

Once the creek is free and again experiences sun and wind and rain for virtually its entire block-and-a-half length, Angelo is optimistic that salmon will return to spawn. To Prepare for that day, BCIT students and others will widen the stream, add spawning gravel, and replant the banks with vegetation that will provide shade and a home for insects that feed fish. Soon, Tatlow Park will provide an educational focus for nearby school groups, and a chance for neighbours to interact with the miracle of the salmon cycle in their own backyards.In as little as perhaps two or three years, Tatlow Creek could become the focal point of its surrounding neighbourhood. There's a magic about fish-supporting streams that tends to bring people together and instils an optimistic sense that humans can live in some sort of harmony with their environment.

Jeffrey Addis, a sewer engineer with the City of Vancouver, sees a lot of long-term potential in Tatlow, perhaps even extending it through its surrounding single-family neighbourhood as far upstream as Connaught Pack, several blocks away. At Tatlow, Angelo's students, the park board, and city hall will have a chance to develop skills that they will then apply in rehabilitating other streams in Vancouver, starting with a creek through Hastings Park that was buried in a culvert in 1935. That project is particularly exciting, as approximately one kilometre of creek will be uncovered, rehabilitated, and reborn as a salmon stream as part of the eventual redevelopment of the Pacific National Exhibition grounds.

A revived Hastings Creek will somehow have to be uncovered from the PNE grounds. down a hill and across McGill Street to the north, through New Brighton Park, then into Burrard Inlet. Despite the obstacles, the idea has firmly captured the imagination of East Vancouver residents, and local city hall and park board politicians have, well, responded as politicians do when they face a wall of popular support for something. The stream-restoration portion of the $40-million park overhaul could run as high as $5 million. "It's going to be something sewer engineer Addis says with a laugh. "It'll even have a wetlands lake."

(The whole process of reviving once-dead streams makes economic as well as ecological sense, Angelo says. He cites the positive experiments of US cities that have restored lost streams, such as Boulder, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon, and he believes a study now underway for the federal Fraser River Action Plan will show that protecting streams results in higher property values.)

And after Hastings Creek? Angelo, among others, believes that as city hall considers developers' proposals within neighbourhoods across the city, there will be "opportunities to repair at least some of the damage that has been done."

Projects are already being considered or are underway to restore creeks in Stanley Park and Fairview Golf Course. As well, some residents around Trout Lake want to restore waters flowing into and out of that body, perhaps creating a creek through the Grandview Cut all the way co False Creek -- though that could take decades. And city hall and residents are even looking at the potential of opening up the creek that flows underground through Langara Golf Course, channelling it through a series of parks in the Oakridge area, perhaps all the way to the North Arm of the Fraser River.

Addis waxes enthusiastic about the potential for liberating the lost streams of Vancouver. "As we upgrade the sewer system," he says, "and as water quality improves over time as we resolve automobile issues and runoff pollution, we'll be able to restore three or four or five creeks."

One particularly ambitious group of people, including retired commercial fisherman Terry Slack, wants to see Brewery Creek brought back to life. Although much of the original streambed of that creek now lies under 15 metres of fill, Slack and others would like to replicate its channel atop Vancouver's human-created topography. Slack agrees that even that is a formidable task, but restoration advocates are patient people who recognize that a "piece by piece" approach Is often a key to bringing the wilds back to lands long-ago plundered and twisted.

Whereas the Tatlow Creek project will rely on urban storm-water run-off to feed the stream, Slack hopes that Brewery Creek will be fed by the marsh in its original headwaters. Bruce Macdonald of the Brewery Creek Historical Society has been spearheading the effort to rehabilitate that stream. He's optimistic that a new watercourse will be created as Mount Pleasant's neighbourhood is redeveloped. A segment of creek, at 5th Avenue and Brunswick Street could be created with recirculated as early as this year as part of an artists' live-work housing project; one developer is already on-side. At nearby 12th Avenue and Main Street, another city-block length of culverted stream 15 metres underground could be uncovered. Furthermore, Macdonald believes it is possible to close-off a section of road where the creek once ran, perhaps Scotia Street between 8th and 5th Avenues, and turn it into a park with a running stream.

Restoring local streams requires little more than "just long-term planning", he notes. Public meetings show overwhelming support for that idea and city hall can twist the arms of developers to extract stream-restoration measures as part of any development approval on lands above or bordering an old stream bed. "As long as it's a priority at city hall, it's just a matter of time," says Macdonald, who is also the author of an atlas called Vancouver: A Visual History, which shows readers how, among other things, city streams disappeared decade by decade from the 1860s onward.

Although Slack shares Macdonald's excitement over the potential for restoring urban creeks, he warns that Vancouver's two remaining salmon streams are still not adequately protected from pollution, poaching, and surrounding development. Salmon and trout have survived in Cutthroat Creek and Musqueam Creek despite development, roads, culverts, and pollution. But January's salmon run saw only six Coho and six Chum salmon return to spawn, and that deeply worries the people of the Musqueam First Nation, whose ancestors have lived near these and other, now extinct, streams for 7,000 years or more.

Willard Sparrow once worked as a fishery "guardian" and aboriginal fisheries officer for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But he says he grew frustrated with what he sees as the reactive nature of government's environmental role. Now he's in charge of habitat and restoration for the fisheries department of the Musqueam Indian band, and he pours his energies, even on weekends, into preserving and enhancing Musqueam Creek and its tributary, Cutthroat Creek.

For four years, the band has worked to restore the creeks to a more natural state. Streamside vegetation now lines significant sections of the creeks, and fallen trees are allowed to remain, creating cooling shade and a refuge for inhabitants.

They've worked with governments to trace pollution running through storm sewers and into the creeks. They pinpointed homes with toilets connected to storm sewers instead of sanitary sewers. They found a townhouse complex that was draining its swimming pool directly into a storm sewer that led to Cutthroat Creek and was directly responsible for at least on major fish kill.

Now the band is cooperating with the David Suzuki Foundation in a project that will see Native and non-Native volunteers working side by side knocking on the doors of more than 2,000 home owners living in the watershed of the two creeks. Those residents will be taught how to protect the fragile creek ecosystem by not using horticultural chemicals, not washing cars outside, not dumping used oil and paint down drains, by scooping animal faeces, and other measures.

As well, the Shaughnessy Golf Course which is on land leased from the band, will open up a culvert this summer, thus eliminating an almost insurmountable obstacle to salmon trying to spawn upstream in Cutthroat Creek. Sparrow says he would eventually like to see culverts across Marine Drive re-engineered to allow salmon to pass into the almost pristine headwaters of the two creeks, in Pacific Spirit Regional Park. That will be no easy task, as Sparrow has discovered frustratedly; he's been put through the wringer by bureaucrats in several departments and three Ievels of governments as he searches for the people who hold the key re-engineering the culverts.

Sparrow is also aware that the descendants of the remaining six coho could disappear from the streams if commercial fishers scope the remnants on their journey home to spawn or if sport fishers catch them near the creek's mouth in the lower Fraser River. You just learn to live with the feeling of helplessness, he says, and you turn your attention to restoring habitat so those that do get back have somewhere to spawn.

The 28-year-old thinks about how it was when he was a boy. "You used to be able to hear the fish before you see them. Now you have to look hard to find even one." Cutthroat and Musqueam creeks are not alone. Salmon, trout, other fish, and all species that depend on the waters, marshes, and forests throughout the Lower Mainland continue to lose ground to development, pollution, and the automobile.

"The history of urban streams in metropolitan areas across BC is a sad one," BCIT's Angelo says. "Only about 600 urban streams still exist and are free-flowing across the Lower mainland. But the vast majority are threatened and endangered by siltation from development, loss of vegetatlon, sedimentation, and urban run-off and pollution. A lot of our urban waterways are under the gun."

That threat will get dramatically worse in coming years: the Greater Vancouver Regional District is planning for a megalopolis of almost three million people by the first quarter of the next century, and renowned architect Arthur Erickson believes Vancouver will soon house 10 million people as the secret of our West Coast lifestyle leaks out to the rest of the world. Preserving salmon -- and the entire Fraser Basin ecosystem -- will be one of this area's biggest challenges in the decades ahead.

Can salmon and the Fraser River ecosystem survive this onslaught of development? The impact on local streams of doubling the Vancouver region's population in the next several decades will be severe, according to Ken Hall, a UBC environmental chmist who is studying Burnaby's waterways.

"It's going to be difficult to reconcile population growth with efforts to preserve and enhance local waterways," Hall says. His sobering perspective for residents who think it will be easy to simply carve-out a long-buried creek and send out invitationsto salmon in search of a new spawning address, but he adds, optimistically, "There's always a way to do it if there's pollitical will with money behind it."

One recent discovery by UBC graduate student Angela Prince has widespread Implications for Strait of Georgia Coho. Prince discovered that the sort of narrow and shallow streams often filled-in by farmers or built-on by developers are vital salmon habitat. Local coho move from one tiny stream to another at night to spawn in November and December, Prince found. She speculates that the multiple spawning sites ensure that at least some of their fry survive in these vulnerable waters. After these fry emerge in March and April, they move downstream into deeper water as summer approaches and their little branch heats-up or dries-out.

The implications of Prince's discovery are enormous for local coho populations. Most real estate development occurs in the summer months, when there is no sign of the young fish.

"Private landowners are not aware of the importance of these small tributaries," Prince says, adding that government must ensure it protects "a bunch" of tributaries.

There is some good news. Groups in places like Burnaby and Lake Cowichan on Vancouver lsland have had great success in protecting and restoring salmon rivers. They offer a real-world laboratory experiment with results that others hope can be duplicated on Musqueam, Tatlow, and Hastings creeks and even Brewery and China creeks.

A corps of volunteers from Sapperton Fish and Game Club have laboured since 1968 to restore the Brunette River as salmon and trout habitat. Back then, the river (barely wider than some creeks) was used as a storm sewer by Vancouver and Burnaby and as an industrial dumping ground at its New Westminster mouth.

The club's volunteers dogged local and provincial politicians and the DFO to clean-up or shut-down the polluters, and they repeatedly cleaned the river of junk and debris and built a fish ladder at the dam on Burnaby Lake. Gradually, against everyone's predictions, they brought the river back to life. Coho returned to rhe Brunette. In 1991, 700 coho, a modern record, returned to the dam where Burnaby Lake empties into the Brunette.

We didn't know if it could be done, so we just went ahead and did it," triumphant club member Elmer Rudolph tells politicians, school groups, and anyone else who will listen.

Unfortunately, the salmon population didn't appear to build on that success. Last November and December, the Sapperton volunteers set small gill nets in the tea-coloured waters of the Brunette beneath the dam. Weekend after weekend, they swept the waters hoping to catch 50 "brood stock" coho -- 25 males and 25 males -- whose eggs and milt would hatch 100.000 young fry from the river to ensure a future run. But the volunteers came up almost empty-handed: just eight fish.

It was the third straight "disastrous" year for coho return in the Brunette and Stoney Creek system, Rudolph says. On the surface, it appeared that the salmon were simply not returning to the stream that winds its way through south Burnaby and New Westminster before emptying into the Fraser River. In past years, Rudolph thought he had the cause of the small run figured-out. Lower Mainland Coho spend their lives in the Strait of Georgia. Recently that population has plummeted as sport fishers and trawlers have overfished and seiners have hauled in an "accidental" catch of coho while aiming at other fish. As well, there's an apparent decline in herring, the small fish that form the backbone of the Strait's entire big-fish ecosystem.

But now, Rudolph is not so sure that all this accounts for the drop in returning Brunette salmon. Stocking fish and restoring fish habitat is more of an art than a science, he says. Other streams and rivers on the north side of the Fraser River had strong coho returns in late 1996, including the Coquitlam, Allouette, and Stave rivers and Kanaka Creek.

The trouble is that Rudolph can't know, with any certainty, what's really happening to the fish. And that is the problem in our relationship with fish and streams, the land lying between those streams, and the entire web of life in the Fraser: River delta. We know so little, we guess about so much. At what point are we overfishing? When have we ruined too many streams? How wide must the margin of vegetation on a stream bank be?

Rudolph now suspects that he and the volunteers arrived as much as a month too late with their nets and managed to just catch the tail-end of the run. He already knows, because he saw them, that there were coho in the river in early October in reasonably good numbers. Perhaps in very good numbers. Rudolph even had a call one day from a man who had watched a huge coho actually jump over the Brunette dam, bypassing the trap the Sapperton club had built into a fish ladder.

"l think they're sneaking through," Rudolph sums-up. "Over the last few years, we've had earlier and earlier runs." But the volunteers continued to lay their nets based on past practices.

Rudolph says he has no idea how many salmon returned last year, but he's still optimistic that hundreds returned to spawn in Stoney and Silver creeks below the dam, and Eagle Creek, Deer Lake Brook, and a half-dozen other tiny creeks and streams above the dam. Though he finds it sad and troubling, the possibility that he may be wrong and that there has been a crash in coho populations returning to his adopted river serves to redouble Rudolph's resolve to provide good spawning habitat for the fish that do make it back.

To this day, Rudolph and other Sapperton volunteers will jump out of bed in the early morning hours following a phone tip. They'll pry manhole covers and take pollution samples while Ministry of Environment staff get a restful sleep.

"If you live in Burnaby and can take a walk 15 minutes from your house to a stream and see a six-inch cutthroat trout or spawning salmon swim out of a pool, catch something, and swim back, then that's absolutely worth something," he says, a big grin breaking-out on his face.

It's that vision that has motivated Rudolph, who recently retired from BC Tel, to start a "Streamkeepers" program with the support of City of Burnaby municipal council.

Stream by stream, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, Rudolph hopes to recruit a small army of volunteers to be the eyes and ears -- and heart -- of Burnaby's waterways. Some will simply walk the creek once or twice a week, looking for pollution, silt, or obstructions. Others will help create gravel spawning areas, replant banks with food- and shade-producing vegetation, or remove obstructions and make culverts fish-friendly . Already, Rudolph is training his first group of approximately 40 people.

Mark Angelo, who is also the vice-chair of the BC Outdoor Recreation Council, would like to see Streamkeeper programs established in every town and city in the Greater Vancouver region and across BC, and he'd like them to group together into "watershed councils" that speak for their local rivers, lakes, and streams.

Common in parts of the US, BC now has 19 watershed councils that will keep a vigilant eye on development, pollution, habitat restoration, and fishing issues and lobby on behalf of local rivers.

"The future of river management really lies at the grassroots level," Angelo says. "Encouraging local interest is the key. Local communities are in the very best position to save their own rivers and creeks; not all our river problems can be solved through regulation and legislation. We also need a bottoms-up approach; we need a constituency for the rivers at the grassroots level. In the past, a lot of rivers have suffered because no one was there to speak-up for them."

Angelo believes the day is just around the corner when every river system in BC is overseen by a group of concerned citizens.

He'd like to see as many as 14 watershed councils within the Fraser River Basin Management Program formerly headed by Ian Waddell who is now a backbench MLA in Glen Clark's government.

"We need to protect headwaters and restore riparian habitat, but, most importantly, we need to look at things from a watershed basis," Angelo says.

Local action will be instrumental in the race to save BC's salmon, he says. Neighbourhood streams, lakes, and rivers take on great importance when several fish species may be on the verge of collapse.

Mark Angelo points to the spot on the water of Still Creek, just east of where it opens-up into the sunlight on the Burnaby side of the boundary with Vancouver, just below the Highway 1 overpass.

"Two cutthroat trout were seen there last fall when we were taking samples to determine bacteria counts in the water," he says, beaming. It's a good sign. Just 20 years ago, Still Creek was named the most polluted stream in BC. Burnaby city hall and citizens have done much to bring it back to life. It now runs uncovered for its entire length, and almost all sewage and industrial flows within the city have been disconnected.

On a rafting trip down the creek to its mouth on Burnaby Lake, it is easy to see the benefits of Burnaby's policy of keeping stream banks covered by natural vegetation. There's plenty of evidence of an urban oasis here: nests of songbirds, an osprey circling overhead, a beaver dam that the raft must be hauled over. Angelo spots a turtle at the water's edge. Ducks and Canada geese abound, and the raft's paddlers duck as alarmed geese fly directly at them, passing just overhead. The raft passes tributary streams where coho spawn in late autumn. Burnaby Lake Regional Park itself is home to bobcat, cougar, deer, coyotes, and rare species of songbirds.

Still Creek is the largest tributary of Burnaby Lake and a major source of the water that Elmer Rudolph's salmon must swim through, but its bacteria counts are still high and the mud below its waters is contaminated. Sewage and the detritus of industry flows from Metrotown area of Burnaby into East Vancouver, where it picks-up even more pollution before flowing back into Burnaby; plastic litter that has washed down from storm sewers hangs from berry bushes lining its banks.

Vancouver and Burnaby both have a long way to go to clean-up this vitally important stream, though they've been doing important work separating the creek from sewers. Most of the upper six kilometres of the 12-kilometre stream lie in Vancouver. As Angelo says, the stream through Vancouver has "suffered the ultimate humiliation by being culverted for most of its length". Vancouver should reopen its portion to the sunlight, he adds.

"I'd like to think the upper stretch will look like this (the Burnaby section) in 15 years," Angelo says. "It's important to maintain, protect, enhance, and restore streams like this in an urban setting. people shouldn't have to leave their city to experience nature."