• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2013 Wilderness and waterpower: how Banff National Park became a hydroelectric storage reservoir Armstrong, Christopher; Nelles, H.V. University of Calgary Press Armstrong, C. & Nelles, H.V. "Wilderness and waterpower: how Banff National Park became a hydroelectric storage reservoir". Energy, ecology, and the environment series, 1925-2935 , No. 5. University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49374 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com WILDERNESS AND WATERPOWER: HOW BANFF NATIONAL PARK BECAME A HYDROELECTRIC STORAGE RESERVOIR Christopher Armstrong and H. V. Nelles ISBN 978-1-55238-635-4 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: MAY NOT: • read and store this document • gain financially from the work in any way; free of charge; • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution • distribute it for personal use of the work; free of charge; • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; • print sections of the work for • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception • read or perform parts of the of academic usage within educational institutions such as work in a context where no schools and universities); financial transactions take • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its place. function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ CHAPTER 7 Minnewanka Redux History takes unexpected turns. It never seems to proceed in linear fash- ion. With the transfer of natural resources to the Province of Alberta and the carving of the Spray Lakes out of Banff National Park in 1930, one might reasonably expect that having been long postponed, the much- needed hydroelectric project would immediately go forward. Not so. The fateful date hints at only part of the story. While Albertans had waited during most of the 1920s for politicians in Ottawa to make up their minds about the Spray Lakes, Ottawa had waited for the political leaders of Alberta to decide whether or not the province would go into the electricity business. The decision to develop the waterpower of the Spray Lakes now lay entirely in the hands of the Alberta government. Would it finally seize this opportunity to create its own public utility to serve the entire province? Or would the task be left to the Calgary Power Company? Ironically, however, by the time the battle to open up the Spray Lakes to hydroelectric utilization had been won, the Calgary Power Company had lost interest in the undertaking. Even before the new National Parks Act had become law, the company had revived a familiar theme: the need to raise the dam at Lake Minnewanka higher so as to store more water. That proposal, of course, was even more of an anathema to the Parks Branch and their allies in the wilderness preservation movement than the plans for the Spray Lakes because it involved extensive construction within the now “sacrosanct” park itself. The election of a Conservative government, headed by R. B. Bennett, in 1930 led many to anticipate that the company’s 119 request would be speedily granted, and Calgary Power certainly lobbied strenuously. Old combatants regirded for a fight, but once again, fickle fate intervened. From 1922 on, politicians, bureaucrats, and private interests alike had assumed that if the generating capacity of the hydroelectric plants on the Bow River were to be expanded, the best means would be to dam the Spray Lakes. The first doubts were cast upon that assumption during discus- sions in Ottawa about the removal of the lakes from the national park. A question arose as to how much water would continue to flow down the Spray River and into the Bow just outside the Banff townsite once the dam had been erected at the outflow of the Spray Lakes. This was an import- ant question, because the Spray ran through the golf course that the CPR had constructed just below the Banff Springs Hotel. As one CPR official later wrote to the minister of the interior, “The company has spent many millions of dollars in our hotel, and your department has gone to great lengths to retain the natural beauty features in the district.”1 Neither the hotelmen nor the Parks Branch bureaucrats would countenance the flow of the Spray being cut off altogether, leaving an almost dry riverbed for the tourists and golfers to look at. At a meeting in Charles Stewart’s office in April 1928, the minister informed Calgary Power officials that if they were permitted to dam the Spray Lakes, they would have to release five hundred cubic feet of water per second (cfs) into the river to maintain a flow roughly equal to normal September levels.2 Managing director G. A. Gaherty replied that to release that amount of water was “utterly out of the question,” since it would use up so much water that it would render the storage capacity of the reservoir uneconomical for power purposes. Apparently Gaherty, who had origin- ally devised the Spray Lakes plan, had simply assumed that the company would be permitted to cut off the Spray River altogether and pass all the water in its reservoir through a tunnel into the Bow valley far downstream at Canmore. His solicitor observed that if so much water had to be re- leased, Calgary Power would have no interest in the development. To the annoyance of Parks Commissioner J. B. Harkin, one of the engineers from 120 WILDERNESS AND WATERPOWER the Water Power Branch concurred, arguing “that the project could not afford to have any water released from storage for scenic purposes.”3 Wrangling continued over this issue for some weeks. The mayor of Calgary, donning the mantle of hydrographic engineer, gave his opinion that between 150 and 200 cfs flowing down the Spray River in the summer would be quite sufficient to preserve its natural beauty. The Parks Branch pointed out that a flow of 500 cfs would require just 6.7 per cent of all the water to be stored in the proposed Spray Lakes reservoir. If the project was being planned with such a slender margin of error, then it ought not to be approved. The minister was evidently prepared to accept a flow as low as 350 cfs in the Spray River, but the company would agree to release no more than 200 cfs.4 Negotiations between the province and the federal government over the removal of the Spray Lakes from Rocky Mountains National Park con- tinued during the next two years until Stewart’s bill was finally passed in the spring of 1930. Ironically, however, Calgary Power seems to have been sincere in its refusal to even consider damming the Spray Lakes if it was required to release as much as 500 cfs over the dam. The knowledge that the CPR was on the side of the Parks Branch in this battle must have had its effects, too. The railway company was a much tougher and more potent antagonist that the mountain climbers and bird watchers in the Canadian National Parks Association. Moreover, Calgary Power had an alternative plan to meet its im- mediate future requirements. Outside the eastern boundary of Rocky Mountains National Park, the Ghost River flowed into the Bow River from the northwest near Radnor, Alberta, just downstream from the company’s existing plant at Horseshoe Falls. Calgary Power had acquired rights to this Radnor site at its founding in the deal with Alberta Portland Cement.

Load more

  16

Copy Link