CHRIS HANNAY: A year after nearly vanishing, British Columbia’s sockeye salmon are back.
Twenty-five million sockeye are surging up the Fraser River this week, as fishermen scramble to make up for lean years during a 32-hour window.
Some are saying this may be the Fraser River’s best salmon run in nearly 100 years.
As we’ve previously reported, last year less than 1.5 million sockeye swam through the river – that being about one-tenth of the expected 11 million sockeye.
This was also the first time in four years that commercial fishing has been permitted.
Of course, this abundance of sockeye was much more than fishery scientists expected.
Most had predicted a salmon run of closer to 10 million, but there was less than a 1-in-5 chance that 25 million fish would return.
Experts are saying that this was an unusually good year for the salmon, but that it is unlikely this many will return next year. [ index ]

JESSE ROGERSON: NASA is reporting a chunk of ice roughly the size of Bermuda broke off the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf located on the northern coast of Ellesmere Island. Using satellite imaging, NASA believes the fractured ice to have fallen off around August 18th.

The Arctic waters have already seen two other chunks of notable size fall of their respective ice shelves this summer, one off the Petermann glacier and another off the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, both located on the coasts of Greenland.

The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has been eroding for years with very notable cracks arising in 2002. It is also just one of the multiple ice shelfs along the island coast that have been consistently eroding over the past few decades. Large cracks run directly down the centre of the glacier, indicating that even the strongest and densest portion of the ice shelf are subject to this erosion.

The season for ice loss is not over for one more month and in this time further erosion of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf may occur, specifically on eastern side of the glacier. [ index ]

CHRIS HANNAY: British Columbia has a clear vision for protecting its ecology, but lacks the proper plans and policies to carry through on that vision, according to B.C.’s Auditor-General.
Auditor-General John Doyle released a report this week saying BC Parks has claimed more and more land for conservation, but remains underfunded and disorganized.
BC Parks runs the province’s conservation areas and provincial parks and is set to celebrate its 100th anniversary next year.
The Auditor-General points out that many North American animals have lost habitat across the continent, and that British Columbia is one of their last refuges.
For example, 17,000 grizzly bears live in B.C., making it the second-biggest home for the beasts aside from Alaska, while California has lost all of its 10,000 grizzlies.
The Auditor-General does have some praise for the province.
Amongst other things, he says that 14 per cent of the province’s land is under the purview of BC Parks – the highest percentage of any province in Canada.
B.C. Environment Minister Barry Penner has defended BC Parks. Penner has said B.C. is one of the best provinces at preserving natural habitats and that the Auditor-General’s plans would cost too much money at a time when the province is strapped for cash. [ index ]

JESSE ROGERSON: The International Joint Commission has warned provincial and state governments that the vast network of oil and mineral pipelines surrounding the Great Lakes is vulnerable to spills. The commission blames substandard monitoring of the pipelines, poor spill detection, and poor cross-border communication for the vulnerability.

In 2006 the commission released a report on spills in the Great Lakes and gave recommendations to the governments on how to avoid such catastrophes. The commission’s Canadian Chair Joe Comuzzi and his U.S. counterpart have recently urged their governments to act on these proposals.

The commission has sprung to life again after the Enbridge spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River earlier this summer. The spill was the result of corrosion on the pipelines, something the 2006 report warned against. Since 2006, the Canadian and U.S. government have shown little initiative on solving the problems highlighted in the report.

The Great Lakes provide water to countless homes and industry in both the U.S. and Canada, along with providing irrigation for 25% of Canada’s agriculture production. [ index ]

CHRIS HANNAY: Sustained budget cuts have slashed away at the effectiveness of Environment Canada’s weather services, according to an internal government report.
The report was released through an Access to Information Request filed by the Pembina Institute, an environmental group based out of Alberta.
Among the problems faced by Environment Canada are inaccurate automatic sensors for measuring precipitation, lack of quality control and climate data just not being gathered because of lack of resources and personnel.
Accurate weather data is useful for most people’s day-to-day life, but is also crucial to understanding how climates may change, how and where to build sewer systems and how farmers should plan their crops, among other uses.
The government report places the blame squarely on a lack of money.
It says: “It is clear that the Meteorological Service of Canada no longer has the ability to be all things to all people. Over a decade of sustained funding cuts has seen to that.” [ index ]

JESSE ROGERSON: The British Columbian Environment Minister, Barry Penner, has approved Greater Victoria’s plans to overhaul its sewage treatment system, including the construction of a new treatment plant in Esquimalt. The revamp will cost upwards of $750 million and is expected to handle all sewage treatment needs through 2030. Until the construction of this treatment plant is completed, Victoria will continue to pump raw sewage directly into the Pacific Ocean, a practice that has been criticized for years.

The overhaul will also feature large overflow tanks to prevent overflow from being directly pumped into the ocean as before, updating of sedimentation tanks, and an 18-kilometer transportation pipeline designed to remove and transport solid waste direct to a landfill.

Two thirds of the project will be funded by the federal and BC governments leaving one third left to be handled by tax paying property owners, who should expect an extra $500 dollars a year. The plant is expected to prevent the release of over 18 000 tonnes of Carbon and heat into the atmosphere. [ index ]

BRYANT BOULIANNE: A U.S. investigation into the cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion held hearings this week to determine the course of events that led to the worst maritime oil spill in U.S. history. The panel has been trying to determine the cause of the mechanical failure and, importantly, who was in charge.

The question of who was in charge is a costly one, because the companies involved – British Petroleum, which leased the oil rig, Transocean Ltd., which owned the rig, and Halliburton, which poured the cement around the well – are all too aware that whoever is found responsible will be liable for damages in the billions of dollars.

This has led finger-pointing among lawyers for the three companies. With so much conflicting testimony, the chairman of the panel admitted this week that they still have no clear idea who was in charge on the oil rig at the time of the disaster.

British Petroleum, which publicly accepted that the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill was its responsibility, maintains that the responsibility for the explosion which led to the disaster rests with Transocean and Halliburton for not properly installing safety and failsafe mechanisms. [ index ]

BRYANT BOULIANNE: A tiger cub was found in the check-in luggage of a Thai woman who was apparently trying to smuggle the animal out of the country. The woman was trying to check her bag for a flight from Bangkok to Iran on Sunday, when an X-ray of the luggage revealed what appeared to be a cat inside.

When authorities opened the bag, they found a sedated tiger cub among a number of toy stuffed-tigers. The cub is now being cared for by the Thai Department on National Parks, who are trying to determine if the animal was stolen from a zoo or caught in the wild.

South Asian tigers are an endangered species, whose body parts are sought after on the black market for traditional medicine and exotic meat. [ index ]

BRYANT BOULIANNE: Authorities in Kenya have seized over two tonnes of illegal ivory at the international airport in the capital, Nairobi. The ivory was packed in boxes labelled as avocados and included both elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns.

It is one of the largest illegal ivory seizures in the country in a number of years. Kenyan authorities believe the tusks were from elephants that had died of natural causes, though trade in such ivory is still illegal.

The African elephant is an endangered species threatened by poachers who can make a tidy profit selling their ivory on the black market. Kenya has amassed a sizeable stockpile of seized ivory over the years and sought permission earlier this year to sell it. That scheme, however, was scrapped when it was determined that the sale would likely serve to legitimize demand for the illegal product. [ index ]