Northern British Columbia quietly picked up an island in July. By Aug. 5, it had lost the thing.
B.C. Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer thought the first video might be fake. With generative AI all over the internet, he wasn't ready to trust footage of a forest bobbing around the Williston Reservoir. Satellite photos settled it: The island was real and floating about 100 kilometers west of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam.
Rocky Avery got the photos and video from a boater and put them online ahead of a fishing derby. People needed to know it was in their path, he said.
“It was a pretty amazing sight to see, never seen anything like that in my 40 years in this country. And I wanted B.C. Hydro to know too that it was out there.”
A satellite image from July 21 showed the island floating west of Finlay Bay. B.C. Hydro estimated it was 70 meters wide and 140 meters long, covering roughly 9,800 square meters. Trees and other vegetation were still standing on it.
By Aug. 5, it was gone.
“We’ve been taking more updated snapshots and we can’t see the object anymore. So it’s disappeared now. It doesn’t mean it’s gone to the bottom of the reservoir. It may have returned to a more sheltered area along the shoreline.”
B.C. Hydro has a working theory about how an entire piece of forest ended up floating around the lake. Gammer figures driftwood piled up along the shoreline for years, rotted, and eventually grew its own patch of forest. This summer's high water tore it loose. Wind pushed it further out into the reservoir.
Williston was full for the first time in 14 years. A heavy winter snowpack and a rainy summer did the job, and B.C. Hydro opened the spillways in June and July. The reservoir was created behind the dam in 1968 and is considered the seventh largest in the world.
B.C. Hydro checked again after the island story spread. Satellite images from two weeks ago still showed nothing, and Gammer said no one on the water had reported another sighting. The utility, a Crown corporation meaning Canadian taxpayers own it, plans to order a few more images. Gammer does not expect the island to affect dam operations.
Boaters have a different concern. Avery said high water has washed away shoreline sand dunes and pulled more trees and debris into the reservoir. Full-size logs can be nearly impossible to spot once the water gets choppy and could cause serious damage to a boat.
Nobody at B.C. Hydro is going to patrol all of Williston looking for it. The reservoir is too large, so Canada's government-run utility watches satellite images and relies on the public to report what is floating around out there, because apparently that's your job now.
At last check, British Columbia was still short one island.