Mr. Kris Murphy:

There is. The second problem is what happens when the salmon get to the tailrace, in that the volume of water that comes down through the tailrace into the hydro facility in medium to lower waters, which is when the salmon and sea trout tend to run, is such that there is an attraction into the actual hydro facility. Therefore there is more water is coming into the hydro facility. We had the EPA down in 2022 and we measured the flows down there. At medium to low water flow, 80% of the water from the river was going through the hydro facility and only 20% was going into the main channel. What happens at the bottom is that the fish decide that as 80% of the water is going that way, they need to go that way.

At the moment we have a grid in there that is old. It was put in by the facility owners. It loosely meets the 1959 fisheries Act in terms of its dimensions. It is supposed to be 75 mm. We have now redesigned the grid so that it is down to 20 mm, so it will have a huge impact on what can get in. What happens is that the fish get in and they get trapped in there. Every year IFI comes along and rescues the fish that get trapped in there because the grid is solid so it cannot be opened. When the fish go in, they are trapped. Every year towards the end of the summer and into the autumn, IFI goes in and removes the fish. The process is that they have to electrofish. They stun the fish, which go into barrels, are removed from the river, are put upstream and are released again. There is a mortality rate and a disturbance to migration. When we talk about barriers, there is a physical barrier but we also have a trap where very intrusive work needs to be done to the fish to get them out of there and back into the main channel. We have worked on that project to replace the grid.

With regard to the work that must go into something like that, we had to tender for a consultant engineer to design it.