Moran Dam

Moran Dam, also called High Moran Dam or Moran Canyon Dam, was a 1950s proposal to dam the Fraser River in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC). The structure was planned in the wake of devastating floods in a time of rapidly growing power demand, and if built, would have powered the largest hydroelectric facility in North America. After a protracted environmental battle, Moran Dam was defeated in 1972, mainly over concerns of its adverse impact on salmon populations in the Fraser River basin. The shelving of the project also influenced cancellation of other hydro developments along the river, and today the Fraser remains one of the most productive salmon fisheries on the continent.

Proposal
As early as 1934, the Moran Canyon site was identified as an excellent location for a large hydroelectric dam. During the dam-building era of the mid-20th century, up to five major hydropower projects were proposed on the main stem of the Fraser River. The largest of these, a dam near the railway point of Moran, some 20 km upstream of Lillooet, was put forth by the Moran Development Corporation (MDC). This American firm put forth US$500 million in 1952 to finance the construction of the dam, which would have been the tallest in the world. The Fraser River was favoured over other large rivers in BC, such as the Columbia or Peace, because of its relative proximity to urban centres like Vancouver.

The dam would have been 261 m high, generating as much power on average as Grand Coulee Dam and two Hoover Dams combined. Much of this energy would have been sold to the northwestern United States. It would form a gigantic reservoir 260 km long, containing some 35.4 km3 of water at maximum pool, reaching almost to the city of Quesnel. A significant portion of this capacity would be reserved for flood control as the dam had been proposed in the wake of major floods that occurred just three years before then, in 1948. The BC government gave MDC clearance to begin preliminary work at the site in 1955. However, MDC lacked the funds to build such a gigantic dam and to acquire all the lands that would be flooded under the reservoir, and a rival company, BC Electric (today part of BC Hydro), acquired similar rights to the site that same year.

Controversy and defeat
Moran Dam's tremendous height would make artificial fish passage nearly impossible, and would thus cut off a large portion of the Fraser's prodigious runs of Pacific salmon and steelhead trout. During the later 1950s and 1960s, determined opposition from environmentalists including Roderick Haig-Brown, fishermen and others stalled the project, citing that the dam would block access to over 70% of anadromous fish spawning habitat in the Fraser basin. In addition, it would cause losses of up to 50% of catches along the main stem Fraser and its delta below the dam because of sediment blockage, water temperature changes, and flow fluctuations. The defeat of the dam project, which had one of the largest power potentials of any in North America, uniquely occurred during the height of the continent's dam-building era, before determined environmentalist opposition towards dams such as at New Melones, twenty years later.

In 1970, BC Hydro released a report that predicted annual provincial rises in power consumption of over 10 percent. As a result, the proposed dam project was briefly revived, to the point at which test bores were made at the site in May of that year. After continuing concern over what the dam would do to the Fraser's salmon runs, the Moran Dam was defeated again in 1972. The downfall of the Moran project led to decreased call for power generation on the Fraser River, as Moran would have been the key facility for that matter. If Moran Dam had been built, the vast construction could open much of the Fraser River for development, to the point where it might have even ended up like the dam-straitjacketed Columbia River. Today, despite its alluring hydroelectric potential, the Fraser River remains one of the longest undammed rivers in North America and one of the continent's most productive salmon fisheries.