Bridge River Power Project

The Bridge River Power Project is a hydroelectric power development in the Canadian province of British Columbia, located in the Lillooet Country between Whistler and Lillooet. It harnesses the power of the Bridge River, a tributary of the Fraser, by diverting it through a mountainside to the separate drainage basin of Seton Lake, utilizing a system of three dams, four powerhouses and a canal.

The potential for the project was first observed in 1912 by Geoffrey Downton, a land surveyor, visiting the goldfield towns in the area who noticed the short horizontal distance between the flow of the Bridge River, just above its impressive canyon, and the much-lower Seton Lake. It was fifteen years before this observation was put to task, and not until 1927 that a private company first bored a tunnel through Mission Ridge (also known as Mission Mountain), which separates the basins of the Bridge and Seton systems. This tunnel was completed in 1931, but work on the project was suspended due to the Great Depression and the Second World War. Construction of a powerhouse to utilize the diversion did not begin until 1946.

A townsite, or employees village, was built in the 1920s adjacent to the construction site. It was developed as a model community, with a community hall, a combined rink and tennis court, lavish guest houses for visiting executives, parks, a school, a private beach and a full-service hotel which served the busy travel trade over the mountain to the goldfields towns of Bralorne, Pioneer and Minto. Mostly abandoned during the 1930s, the townsite - known as "Bridge River" (although not actually on that river) - was used during the war as a relocation centre for Japanese-Canadians exiled from the Coast in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Its most notable resident during that period was Masajiro Miyazaki, an osteopath who was engaged by the provincial police in Lillooet to serve as coroner despite wartime restrictions, and stayed on as the town doctor for years after. Miyazaki was conferred an Order of Canada award for his service to that community.

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