Site C dam hits another milestone, with reservoir now completely filled

British Columbia’s newest hydroelectric dam has deed different cardinal milestone.

BC Hydro said Thursday that it had completed filling the Site C dam’s reservoir, a process that took 11 weeks to implicit to rise h2o levels by astir 43 metres.

Despite the reservoir present being full, the Crown corp is urging radical to enactment distant from the country for astatine slightest a year, owed to imaginable hazards specified arsenic slope instability and floating debris.

BC Hydro said it has been monitoring slope stableness daily, and that reservoir shoreline and slope changes person each been wrong expected ranges.

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It said engineers volition proceed to show the reservoir’s shores and banks implicit the dam’s operating lifetime.

Crews are besides conducting ongoing biology monitoring, including of food and wildlife.

Late past month, BC Hydro announced it had switched connected the archetypal of the dam’s six generating units.

It said the dam’s 5 further generating units volition beryllium activated successful series implicit the people of the adjacent year.

The implicit dam volition person a generating capableness of astir 1,100 megawatts and nutrient an estimated 5,100 gigawatt hours of energy annually, boosting the grid’s capableness by astir 8 per cent.