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Sometime after construction began on the Peace Canyon Dam in the 1970s, engineers at B.C. Hydro discovered that the 50-metre-high structure was being built on top of weak rock.

The rock could “shear” far more easily than the dam’s designers originally thought, forcing dam-safety officials and engineers at the hydroelectric utility to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that they had a dam with “foundational problems” on their hands.

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Civil works are never immune to damage. But what dramatically ups the ante at the Peace Canyon Dam is that more and more earthquakes are occurring in the region where the dam is situated. The quakes are increasing in strength. And making matters worse, many of them aren’t natural but “induced” by fossil-fuel industry fracking operations.

And it’s the lives of unsuspecting residents and workers downstream that are being placed at risk.

In hundreds of documents obtained through a freedom-of-information (FOI) request by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, it’s clear that over the past decade B.C. Hydro officials have warned numerous people in the provincial government — including senior bureaucrats and unidentified cabinet ministers — that fracking near its dams could have grave consequences, including the worst possible outcome, an outright dam failure.