Coastal GasLink excavators prepare a worksite at the crossing of Lho Kwa (Clore River) on Wet’suwet’en territory on Jan. 8, 2023. Wet’suwet’en chiefs and their supporters allege the company failed to prevent sediment from entering the river. It was late evening on an early January weekend when word came that potential environmental damages were underway on a remote, mountainous section of the Coastal GasLink pipeline. To get its gas pipeline across Lho Kwa, a tributary of the Skeena River on Wet’suwet’en territory, Coastal GasLink seems to have used heavy machinery to dig a holding pool and install pumps, intended to divert the river around the crossing. But according to reports and photos, the company was not preventing sediment from flowing downstream while operating excavators in the river. Getting up to the construction site at the crossing of Lho Kwa (Clore River) would have meant driving more than two hours from the town of Houston, B.C., on snowy backroads. With no guarantee that private security workers would allow access to the location, allies of the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs started calling local helicopter companies. Two days later, they were in the air. “It was alarming,” Tsebasa, a Likhts’amisyu clan chief who […]
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