Man tries to save salmon swimming in Port Coquitlam streets during B.C. storm

Salmon are seen swimming in Hyde Creek in Port Coquitlam, B.C., on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024. (CTV News)

Many roads looked more like rushing rivers during last weekend's atmospheric river, and some fish seemed to think so as well.

Large salmon were spotted swimming on flooded streets in Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam.

Ahmet Gurses was helping neighbours whose homes were flooding when he heard screaming outside.

"People were screaming, ‘There's a salmon in the water! There's a salmon in the water!’” Gurses said.

“In the water was a salmon, in just like maybe six inches, nine inches of water, just casually swimming around."

Watching the fish swim in street made him realize he couldn’t just leave it.

"I ran over and asked for a bucket, and me and two other guys corralled the salmon into the bucket," Gurses said. "I picked him up while he was flailing around."

He ran over to dump the floundering fish into Hyde Creek, a salmon habitat.

Near the Coquitlam River, some dead salmon were spotted days after the flooding.

"Those fish would be pretty unlikely to be able to find their way back into the actual creek and then go on and spawn,” said Dave Scott, the Lower Fraser research and restoration director with Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

He expects many of the fish in the street would have died, but said the storm shouldn’t have a major impact on the current salmon population. Instead, he's concerned about the incident creating an uncertain future for the next generation of fish.

"If there's fish that had already spawned and had already deposited their eggs in the gravel, and then you have all that heavy flow coming down, that would probably disturb those eggs. That would be the larger impact,” said Scott.

He says it could take up to four years to see a full lifecycle for the offspring of any currently spawning salmon, which would allow experts to assess the full impact of last weekend's storm.