A short movie showcasing the partial deconstruction of an old dam on 40 Mile Creek in Banff National Park will be featured at this year’s Banff Mountain Film Festival.
The four-minute film, titled Connectivity – The Restoration of 40 Mile Creek, will be shown as part of this year’s sold out main event on Nov. 8: along with the screening of DamNation and a talk by guest speaker Yvon Chouinard, president of Patagonia and executive producer of DamNation.
The short movie, which is sponsored by the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) Conservation Initiative and Banffite Peter Poole, will be shown as the introduction to the discussion with Chouinard.
“The work we did with 40 Mile Creek was a nice fit with the film DamNation, a documentary about promotion of dam removal, mostly in the U.S.,” said Chad Townsend, environmental coordinator for the Town of Banff.
“We had a great opportunity to restore connectivity in 40 Mile Creek for both sediment flows coming down and fish going up. Parks Canada aquatic staff will continue to monitor the location where we took out the dam to make sure it’s achieving its goal.”
DamNation is an award-winning film that explores the change in attitudes from pride in big dams as engineering wonders to the growing awareness that our future is bound to the life and health of rivers.
The documentary shows how when obsolete dams come down, rivers bound back to life, giving salmon and other wild fish the right of return to spawning grounds, after decades without access.
The Town of Banff, in a joint project with Parks Canada, removed a portion of 40 Mile Creek dam earlier this year. Built in 1946, the dam supplied the townsite with drinking water until a giardia outbreak in the mid-1980s.
The cost of completely removing the dam while it was still full of water, liability issues for the Town, as well as the environmental implications of releasing sediment into the stream, had long been a deterrent.
But the floods of June 2013 provided an opportunity to move forward on the project. During the flood, Town of Banff staff were able to drain the dam and remove much of the sediment.
The flood also washed out the access road, exposing associated pipes in the riverbed.
With the dam drained, there was a short window of opportunity – prior to the fish spawning season in May and June runoff – to demolish a portion of it and remove the exposed pipes.
Connectivity – The Restoration of 40 Mile Creek features interviews with Banff National Park resource conservation manager Bill Hunt, Banff Mayor Karen Sorensen, project manager Jeff Williams and the Town of Banff’s engineering manager Adrian Field, as well as Townsend.
Townsend said local filmmakers Mike Quigley and Mark Unrau worked with photograph and video footage, including a time-lapse camera that took a picture every 10 minutes during the $1 million partial deconstruction project.
“The time lapse camera gave us a really good sense of what was happening when the creek moved over and how the sediment moved,” he said. “We were able to tell the story of how the project happened in May and June.”
