Tell The Dam Truth (TTDT) is a California based non-profit with initial funding from outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia. TTDT’s aim is to protect and restore free-flowing rivers by educating people about the impacts of river-destroying projects. The group promotes decommissioning of existing dams.

It is ten years after BC Liberals gave the go-ahead for Site C, and 6 1/2 years since BC NDP declined to end the project. British Columbia would be wise to skip directly from construction to decommissioning. Wind and energy storage systems can be operational in about two years.

The megaproject in northeast BC has achieved its primary purpose of enriching influential people. Why go further? Write off $20 billion but avoid environmental and cultural damages that would result from operations. The turnaround ought not to be hard for the Eby government since most NDP MLAs opposed the dam before the Horgan coterie forced their silence.

We have wasted billions of dollars on the damn dam. If opened, Site C will produce electricity at 4x to 5x the cost of less harmful alternatives. While the project has damaged provincial finances and is hurting individuals who lived on affected Peace River lands, the worst is yet to come. That will follow if 83 kilometres of this magnificent river valley are flooded.

TTDT asserts:

• Dams block rivers, and not just a river’s water but also its fish, sediment, and nutrients;
• Dams slow rivers which changes a river’s ecology, water temperature, sediment flow, and aquatic habitat;
• Dams always make a river’s water quality different, and usually make it worse;
• Dams can cause the extinction, and local extirpation, of fish and other forms of aquatic life. In fact, freshwater species are disappearing at a much faster rate than terrestrial or marine species across the planet;
• Dams harm, and often significantly reduce, riverine and local ecosystem biodiversity;
• Dams have flooded hundreds of millions of acres of land across the planet, destroying forests, drowning biodiversity, and causing the loss of carbon sequestration in now-flooded ecosystems;
• Dams can make river-bank and floodplain flooding worse;
• Dams exacerbate coastal flooding, beach erosion, and sea level rise.

Over the last few decades, dam, reservoir, and hydropower facilities have come under increasing scientific scrutiny because of the greenhouse gases they emit. More than 760 peer-reviewed scientific studies since 1974 describe GHGs from dam and reservoir projects, including those generating hydropower. Projects built primarily for hydropower production sometimes can emit even more GHGs than coal-fired power plants producing an equal amount of electricity.