Energy - Castlegar, BC - Signs of History on Waymarking.com

ENERGY

Hydroelectric development on the Canadian Columbia was made possible by the Columbia River Treaty, ratified in 1964. Two Treaty storage dams were built on the Columbia: Hugh Keenleyside (1967) and Mica (1973). The former, located at the foot of Lower Arrow Lake, provided only water storage and flood control until the Arrow Lakes Generating Station became operational in 2002. Generating capacity on the Kootenay has been optimized by two newer plants: Kootenay Canal (1976) and Brilliant Expansion (2007). The modern new plants essentially double the generating capacity of the earlier dams.

The Columbia still supports a vast lumber industry, much as it has done in the past. The Yale-Columbia sawmill at Westley was lost to a fire in 1909, and was replaced when William Waldie relocated the Edgewood Lumber Company to the abandoned site of Sproat's Landing in 1910, in order to have railway access. The river supplied the water for the boilers, a mill pond for log sorting and storage, as well as a means of easy transport of huge log booms from upstream locations. The family-operated sawmill was the major local employer. In 1952 it was sold to the Canadian Celanese Corporation (Celgar); the new owners secured a huge timber-harvesting licence (TFL 23) and built a new sawmill and a pulp mill at Westley, 6 km upstream from Castlegar. The pulp mill was upgraded and expanded in 1993; it and the adjacent sawmill still support a large fraction of the local workforce.

The Lower Kootenay River drops 117 meters as it rushes toward the Columbia. Much of this potential was tapped by the West Kootenay Power & Light Company with the construction of six hydroelectric plants over nearly half a century. The first was the original plant at Lower Bonnington Falls (1898) and the last was at Brilliant (1944). Most of the output of the pioneering electrical company fed the early mines and smelters in the Kootenay and Boundary districts. Located just upstream from the confluence, Brilliant was essential to the war effort as its power output was dedicated to expansion of capacity by Cominco in the production of metals, explosives, and heavy water.
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