The Columbia River Is Hiding Something Nobody Talks About

In the spring of 1967 a work crew pulled up outside a house in the village of Renata, on the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia. The woman who lived there had already been paid. They had come to burn it down. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com Renata is not on the map anymore. Neither are Burton, Edgewood, Needles, Deer Park, Arrowhead or Fauquier. About a dozen communities on the Arrow Lakes were expropriated, cleared and flooded between 1967 and 1973, along with orchards that had taken forty years to bring into fruit and cemeteries that were dug up and carried uphill. Somewhere between 2,000 and 2,300 people were moved. In the summer of 1968 the old sternwheeler Minto was towed out onto the lake, set alight and left to burn to the waterline. This documentary explains what those valleys were drowned for, and it starts on the other side of the border. On 30 May 1948 the railway embankment holding back the Columbia opened up at Vanport, Oregon — the second largest city in the state — and by nightfall Oregon's second city was gone. Fifteen people were killed and around 18,000 were left with nothing. That flood is the reason the Columbia River Treaty exists. The Columbia rises in British Columbia. Only about 15 per cent of its basin is Canadian, but that 15 per cent supplies roughly a third of the river's annual flow and far more of the spring peak, and the narrow deep valleys where that water can be banked are almost all north of the border. So under the 1964 treaty Canada built three dams — Duncan, Hugh Keenleyside and Mica — holding 15.5 million acre-feet of storage. Duncan and Keenleyside went up with no turbines in them at all. They are not power plants. They are tanks. The film covers what Canada was paid: one cheque for US$64.4 million covering sixty years of flood protection, plus the Canadian Entitlement, half of which British Columbia pre-sold to American utilities for roughly US$254 million — the money that financed the flooding of its own valleys. It covers General Andrew McNaughton, who chaired the Canadian section of the International Joint Commission and argued against the whole premise while it was being negotiated, and Premier W.A.C. Bennett, who held up an international agreement until Ottawa let him sell the power south for cash. It covers Libby Dam in Montana, whose reservoir backs 42 miles into British Columbia for no Canadian benefit at all. It covers the Sinixt, declared extinct by the Canadian government in 1956, whose territory was flooded eight years later and whose rights the Supreme Court of Canada restored in 2021. And it covers 10 March 1957, when the gates of The Dalles Dam closed and Celilo Falls — the greatest Indigenous fishing site in North America, worked for something close to 11,000 years — disappeared in four and a half hours while at least 10,000 people watched from the high ground. Then it explains how the river actually runs today. Canadian reservoirs are drawn down through the winter to make space, they absorb the spring surge before Portland ever sees it, and they release it downstream on a schedule through the American summer. The Columbia basin carries around 29 gigawatts of hydroelectric capacity and has accounted for roughly 40 per cent of all hydroelectric generation in the United States. Grand Coulee is the largest power plant of any kind in the country. None of those machines were designed to run on a wild snowmelt river. Finally, the current dispute, stated accurately — because almost everything circulating about it right now is wrong. The Columbia River Treaty has no expiry date and has not been cancelled. The ten-year termination notice has been available since September 2024 and neither country has filed it. What expired, on 16 September 2024, is the sixty years of pre-planned flood control the United States bought in 1964, which converted automatically into "called upon" flood control. Negotiations ran from 2018 to an agreement in principle on 11 July 2024, and the United States paused that agreement in March 2025. Sources named on screen and in the narration include the Province of British Columbia's Columbia River Treaty materials and the published Agreement in Principle, the Columbia Basin Trust's own history, HistoryLink on the closing of The Dalles gates in 1957, The BC Review on the clearing of the Arrow Lakes valley, A.G.L. McNaughton's own 1963 article in International Journal, the US Energy Information Administration on Columbia basin generation, the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Desautel, and CBC, OPB and the Washington State Standard on the March 2025 pause. Where official sources disagree — on the number of people displaced, on the hectares flooded — both figures are given on air rather than averaged. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.