Pressure Builds to Rip Out Rogue River Dam : Environment: U.S. says it would cost $6.5 million more to make the 72-year-old structure fish-friendly than to remove it.

With salmon and steelhead runs hurting and farms mostly a memory, pressure is growing to rip out an irrigation dam that has domesticated the Rogue River for 72 years.

Acting in partnership with environmentalists, the outdoor clothing company Patagonia has taken out ads nationwide and included an article in its catalogue arguing that the Savage Rapids Dam kills thousands of fish and must come out.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built 600 dams to make the arid West bloom, says it would cost $6.5 million more to make the dam fish-friendly than to rip it out and replace it with pumps to fill the irrigation ditches.

The 210-mile Rogue, one of the original National Wild and Scenic Rivers, ranks as one of the most popular white-water rapids and one of the most storied salmon and steelhead rivers in the West.

“I think it has become a cause celebre for the environmentalists. I think it’s going to set a pattern for all these kinds of dams throughout the state,” said Don Greenwood, a retired electrical engineer on the board of the Grants Pass Irrigation District, which owns the 464-foot-long dam.

Environmentalists argue that the dam no longer serves a compelling purpose and is doing significant damage to a resource that has already suffered from too much fishing and logging, development, pollution and agriculture.

The American Fisheries Society, for instance, is worried about the future of 213 different runs of salmon, steelhead and trout throughout the West, including coho and fall chinook salmon and summer steelhead on the Rogue.

Savage Rapids Dam was built in 1921, when wild rivers were for taming and the salmon were countless. About 120 miles upriver from the Pacific Ocean, the dam is the first that fish encounter on their spawning runs.

The dam helped to irrigate the pear orchards, gladiolus fields, hop yards and truck farms that surrounded this small town in the rugged Klamath Mountains of southern Oregon.

In recent years, Grants Pass has become a haven for retirees and a gateway to the river’s white-water adventures. Now, most of the irrigation water diverted from the Rogue goes to lawns and gardens.

Since 1968, Gary Enoch has fished the Rogue for spring chinook below the dam. While reeling in the 30-pound adults making their upstream spawning run, he regularly sees smolts floating belly up after being carried over the dam and dashed on the rocks below.

If the dam were removed, biologists estimate that fewer smolts--young fish about six inches long migrating to the sea--would be killed. That would result in an increase of 20,000 salmon and steelhead returning to the Rogue each year.

Besides killing smolts, dams block spawning runs and stop gravel from moving downstream to restore scoured-out spawning beds.

“To be fair, the Grants Pass Irrigation District has been around for 70 years, and most of that time we’ve had reasonably good fishing,” Enoch said. “But this problem is like an onion. There are a whole lot of layers to it.”

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Heavy logging has caused erosion that silts spawning beds. Owners of new riverside homes have cut down the trees and brush that keep the water cool and protect the bank from erosion. Urban growth has raised pollution levels in the water and filled in flood plains. Hobby farms suck water out of tributaries where fish spawn. Cattle grazing has eroded riverbanks.

“Look at what the guides have had to do,” Enoch said. “We’ve had to go to barbless hooks and release wild fish. We had to admit we were part of the problem. These people haven’t done that. That’s the name of this tune. We can’t deny that we are all part of this.”

Though Congress probably would appropriate the $11 million to take out the dam and install pumps, Greenwood worries that removing the dam will mean the end of the irrigation district because of the cost of electricity to run pumps.

Many of the people who want the dam to remain, whether for irrigation or summertime water skiing, have directed their anger at environmentalists and Patagonia, because of the advertising campaign.

But the big hammer hanging over the district is held by the Oregon Department of Water Resources, which controls the irrigation district’s right to draw water from the Rogue.

Five years ago, the department decided the district was taking double its share of water from the Rogue, because the acreage served had fallen to less than half the 18,000 acres considered in the 1920 water right. The agency also directed the district to make the dam less lethal to fish.

But reducing the amount of water for irrigation has proved difficult.

“That system is designed for one speed only, all-ahead full, and that’s it,” said Bob Hamilton, a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation who has been working with the district to sort out its options.

The dam does not control floods or store water. It only operates in the dry summer season, when it raises the stream’s water level. That fills the ditches and creates slack water for about five miles upstream. In the fall, when the rains come, the district takes the logs out and lets the water spill over the concrete, 39-foot-high dam.

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If the district doesn’t take action, the state ultimately could knock down the water right to a level too low for the district to operate, according to Doug Parrow, conservation manager for Water Resources.

“What we have argued is that if the federal government is willing to spend something on the order of $17 million to resolve fish-passage problems with the dam, certainly the federal government ought to be willing to spend a lesser amount of money for replacing the dam with pumps,” he said.

The irrigation district board has a December deadline.

“What started out as a dollars-and-cents business decision has become really political, and the Grants Pass Irrigation District finds itself stuck in the middle,” said Dan Shepard, irrigation district manager.