British Columbia’s newest hydroelectric dam has hit another key milestone.
BC Hydro said Thursday that it had completed filling the Site C dam’s reservoir, a process that took 11 weeks to complete to raise water levels by about 43 metres.
Despite the reservoir now being full, the Crown corporation is urging people to stay away from the area for at least a year, due to possible hazards such as slope instability and floating debris.
BC Hydro said it has been monitoring slope stability daily, and that reservoir shoreline and slope changes have all been within expected ranges.
It said engineers will continue to monitor the reservoir’s shores and banks over the dam’s operating lifetime.
Crews are also conducting ongoing environmental monitoring, including of fish and wildlife.
Late last month, BC Hydro announced it had switched on the first of the dam’s six generating units.
It said the dam’s five additional generating units will be activated in sequence over the course of the next year.
The complete dam will have a generating capacity of about 1,100 megawatts and produce an estimated 5,100 gigawatt hours of electricity annually, boosting the grid’s capacity by about eight per cent.