Capture Station

After the nationalization of the private electricity companies in the early 1960s, Hydro-Québec began efforts to restore salmon habitat on many rivers in Québec. The Metis River was one of the first to benefit from a program to regenerate the salmon population. Because the 1947 Mitis-2 dam was an insurmountable barrier for the migrating salmon, a system was devised to capture salmon in a large cage and lift the cage and the captured salmon into a waiting tanker truck. The salmon were then transported and released upriver. The same system has been functioning ever since. The system has been modified and improved to accelerate the rate the salmon are captured and transported. The rock face of the falls was re-shaped to diminish the number of salmon killed as they come back down the river and over the falls and the dam.

The population of salmon on the Mitis River has been fairly consistently on the rise over the past fifty years, rising from a paltry 24 in 1964 to a record number of 1,456 recorded during the summer of 2015.