How the re-contouring project on Ghost Village Bay got start

Ghost Lake Spring Drawn Down on the Ghost Village Bay

The “Spring Draw Down Fish Exclusion and Removal Measures for Ghost Village Bay, Ghost Lake Reservoir.” This was the title of the study that was completed in 2008, to help get the ball rolling on the re-contouring of the Ghost Village Bay, which eventually happened 10 years later. However, it did happen and this is the main thing. Now, many thousands of fish are saved by an easier escape route out of the bay during the draw down in the spring, which is now happening in early summer by the Ghost Power operations.

The re-contouring proposal was presented by me, at the initial site inspection and meeting that I had arranged, with Roger Drury, head hydro engineer for TransAlta and also one of the best river engineers that I know of. This meeting was the precursor to contact with DFO and get them aboard, but first, we would need to complete some assessment work on the bay, prior to any proposal being seriously considered.

This was where my professional involvement came in, and as usually, the challenge was huge, but I love these types of challenges, so I am in my element here! In order to complete a successful study, you need to collect the data, and the first objective was to find out how many and what type of fish were being isolated from the main lake, every spring, when the lake is drawn down to accept the spring run-off. 

Unfortunately, when the bay is run dry, fish get trapped in small pools that dry up, and in larger pools where either a bird of prey or heat stress gets them. These huge annual loses of fish in the Ghost Village Bay, have immense negative impacts on the entire lake’s fishery, so this needed to be addressed, by Federal Fisheries Act laws.

The most important thing about the first meeting with Roger, was that this information was deeply planted and I knew that he was the man that would get the job done. We had worked together on a number of projects, so this was no prediction, it was fact.

The final out-come came to pass in 2018 or there abouts, when TransAlta finally got around to getting the re-contouring project underway and completed on the bay. The guy that got the ball rolling in this story, was the late Bob Watts, a resident of the Ghost Village Bay. 

Bob had been phoning me about the situation on fish kills during drawn down for years, and I also had fished the area for many years and was a concerned fisherman as well. It was his prompting that finally led to my taking an initiative to get some action. And we can all thank Roger Drury for that!