A Battle of Fish and Power Rages on Columbia River : Nature: Salmon spawn fewer smolt but more debate. Plan to overflow dams tests the Endangered Species Act.

In the still waters of a lake suspended 6,500 feet up and more than 900 miles from the sea in the Sawtooth Mountains, the sockeye salmon each year complete their primordial underwater ballet.

Answering a call from somewhere deep inside, the sockeye make their way from the sea into the Columbia River and swim relentlessly up through Oregon, Washington and Idaho--finally showering their red eggs in the old gravel of Redfish Lake before they die.

When Lewis and Clark roamed these spindly mountains, the salmon were so thick that native legend said you could walk on their backs. Some 16 million salmon pumped their way each year through the Columbia and the Snake, the most productive salmon river system in the world. In 1991, four sockeye adults completed the trip back to Redfish Lake. Last year, one.

As the smolt make their way out to sea this year, the eight massive hydroelectric dams that have been their biggest killers along the way are for the first time in recent years spilling healthy flows down the river, aiding the tiny salmon and representing a reassessment of whether one of the nation’s most important hydropower systems will be managed for electricity or fish.

A $550-million recovery plan for the Snake River salmon, launched by the Clinton Administration this spring, represents a final effort to save one of the Pacific Northwest’s most beloved symbols.

The plan, which in some cases places the needs of fish above demands for power generation, poses a watershed test for the Endangered Species Act and its ability to influence a generation of development that brought cheap power to the Northwest by harnessing its greatest wild river, the Columbia.

“We’ve got a river that’s got eight walls of concrete in it, and we’ve done a crappy job of figuring out how to get the fish around them,” said Will Stelle, regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is taking comments on the draft salmon recovery plan. “We’re changing the system to make it more fish-friendly, and this is a fundamental change.”

Key Recommendation

Heavy snow runoff from the mountains has allowed early implementation of one of the plan’s key recommendations: spilling water flows over the dams during juvenile salmon migration to make the river operate more like a river.

Industry advocates who depend on the power generated by the Bonneville Power Administration say federal officials should be focusing more on unfavorable ocean conditions, arguing that the flow augmentations will cost the BPA and its clients millions of dollars without substantially producing more fish. On the contrary, they say, spilling water over the dams could hurt more than it helps by poisoning the smolt with nitrogen gas, which permeates the water when it goes over a dam or waterfall.

Throughout the region, public utilities and river-dependent industries are pushing Congress to place a cap on the huge outlays being asked of the BPA for salmon protection. They argue that it is foolish to spend millions of dollars saving the last few runs of wild fish in Idaho when millions of healthy salmon could be produced with less money by farming them downstream.

Environmental groups have fought bitterly to save the wild fish in their native runs but are equally critical of the Clinton plan, complaining that instead of allowing the fish to swim in a river that acts like a river, it relies too heavily on a 20-year-old program to trap the fish and barge them around the dams.

The salmon debate promises to shape the future of the Endangered Species Act, as a Republican majority in Congress rolls up its sleeves to consider a law that has generated more ire in the West than nearly any other federal regulation. A region bruised by the brawl over protection of the northern spotted owl against logging interests now finds itself squarely in the middle of a fight over a fish that, as Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Ida.) recently pointed out, can be bought in a can on the supermarket shelf.

Yet the salmon of the Northwest is not the spotted owl. Not to residents of an area where salmon for millennia have been a cultural and economic mainstay, and not for anyone in the world who has ever contemplated the miracle of a fish’s return to within 100 yards of its birthplace in distant spawning rivers.

“If you’re looking for proof of the life force, God, the creator, you can find no better evidence than these sockeye salmon. How did Adam and Eve sockeye get to this lake?” Sierra Club spokesman Jim Baker pondered.

The sockeye is considered the most endangered of the Snake River salmon. The coho is already extinct. Chinook were added to the endangered list last year. Salmon of all kinds are dwindling every year throughout the Columbia basin.

Why Are Fish Dying?

What’s killing the fish? If there were agreement on that point, there would likely be less controversy over what to do about it.

Overfishing certainly was responsible for the early salmon declines. Even in the 1930s, before the first dams were built, salmon runs were down to 5 million or 6 million a year on the Columbia and Snake. Today, some scientists have pointed the finger at commercial fishermen’s gill nets, warming ocean waters because of the El Nino condition and predators, such as squawfish and sea lions.

But a broad spectrum of environmental groups, Native American tribes and state and federal fishing agencies have placed most of the blame on the eight massive federal dams on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers that the fish must cross twice in their migratory cycle.

These are dams with names like Bonneville and Ice Harbor--national treasures of engineering that hark back to the days when President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved to democratize electricity and open up the deserts of western Washington and Oregon to new cities.

Fish ladders aid the return of adult salmon migrating to their birthplaces. But the concrete structures and the slack, overheated reservoirs behind them act as fatal traps for the smolt, some 15% of which die at each of the dams when forced to dive through the churning electrical turbines on their journey to the sea each spring and summer.

A key element of the fisheries service’s recovery plan is to continue the barging, a large-scale taxi service that gathers up the smolt at collection points on the four dams of the Snake River and barges them down to the Columbia mouth.

The Army Corps of Engineers says about 98% of the smolt are released safely near the river mouth.

But environmental, tribal and sportfishing groups have been highly critical of the barging, saying it is too stressful for the young fish and leaves them susceptible to disease and predation that would likely kill them off shortly after their arrival at the sea’s door.

The fisheries service plan meets some of those concerns, calling for spring migration spill over the dams. But the plan is only an agreement to study the idea of drawing down the reservoirs behind the dams, a move that the environmental groups say is crucial to making the Columbia and Snake run like rivers again.

And the groups were furious this spring when, before finally agreeing to begin spilling water over the dams, federal officials watched and did nothing as a huge migration of smolt poured into Lower Granite Dam at the top of the river, overwhelming the barging program. And an estimated 52,000 wild chinook died in the turbines before dam operators opened up the spillway on May 3.

‘A Barging Plan’

“It’s not a recovery plan; it’s a barging plan,” complained Mitch Sanchotena, director of Idaho Steelhead and Salmon United, a sportfishing group. “The Endangered Species Act doesn’t say fix the habitat you want to fix and put the rest in barges. When the environment is so lethal you have to take the fish out of the river and put them in tanker trucks so you can keep [transporting] grain on the river, that is in our opinion a violation of the Endangered Species Act.”

The coalition of industrial users and utilities on the river, the Columbia River Alliance, hasn’t been much happier. Spilling water over dams means higher electrical rates from the BPA.

“The Snake River runs are less than 1,000 adult fish this year, but you have to ask yourself: ‘Why are we also having declines up and down the Washington and Oregon coast, on undammed rivers, pristine rivers?’ ” said Bruce Lovelin, executive director of the alliance.

Key Republican lawmakers, who have led the debate over the Endangered Species Act in the West, warn that the costs could run high to save a fish that is endangered in the Snake River, dwindling in the lower Columbia but plentiful in Alaskan lakes and streams.

Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), who has proposed making the Endangered Species Act more responsive to the political process and less answerable purely to science, says the goal of boosting runs from 2,500 salmon now to 30,000 in the next 10 to 50 years means ratepayers will foot a bill of $20,000 a fish.

“I ask you: Using that amount of money, using half that amount of money, could we not recover the salmon much better if we were permitted first to determine how important this resource is, how much we’re willing to pay and how much action should be taken?”

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Just up the Clearwater River from Lewiston, along 40 miles of wooded hills and streams, the town of Orofino is fuming. Orofino hasn’t seen a sockeye as long as anyone can remember.

But the huge reservoir at Dworshak Dam that draws tourists to the tiny logging community is one of the mainstays of the salmon recovery effort. Each summer, just when the boating and camping season is at its peak, water management officials draw down the lake--110 feet last year--to send extra water down the river to flush juvenile salmon through Lower Granite Dam.

When the lake draws down, it leaves 50 feet of miserable mud on its banks, leaving the area a virtual ghost town. Boating companies have closed. Sportfishing operations are hurting.

The Orofino Chamber of Commerce estimates that the community of 3,000 has lost $15 million in the last three years of draws. To add to the assault, some 100,000 kokonee salmon, a non-migratory species, died as they were flushed out of the reservoir last year. Trout eggs were stranded on shore.

“We’re feeling the major pain for a species we don’t even have,” said James Grunke, executive director of the local Chamber of Commerce.

“There’s a whole lot wrong with this thing when I can go to the local supermarket here and buy sockeye salmon for $3 a pound and I’ve given up my business to save the sockeye salmon,” complained Jerry Olin, whose boat business has been closed since September, 1993.

“To me, a sockeye salmon’s a sockeye salmon. I think we ought to be more concerned about the fish we got,” Olin said.

The question of whether a species should be declared endangered when it is disappearing in only a few places is one of the most hotly debated aspects of the Endangered Species Act.

Biologists say it’s crucial to protect a species in the entire range of its habitat, wherever it represents an “evolutionarily significant unit.” They say the nearly extinct Snake River sockeye, genetically, is fundamentally different from its plentiful counterpart in Alaskan lakes and streams.

Just as important, they say, the disappearance of salmon in a river means the river and the forest around it are unhealthy.

Salmon are one of the only ways that important nutrients make their way back from the sea to the forests, in the bodies of the fish that die after planting their young.

Could it be, wonders Shawn Cantrell of Friends of the Earth, that there are fewer grizzlies and wolves in the West because they no longer have salmon to eat? What about the fertilizing effects of salmon carcasses on the forest floor?

Cantrell has been working for nearly a decade on a plan to remove two hydroelectric dams on the Elwha River near Washington’s majestic Olympic National Park.

It is a prospect that was once thought impossible even to discuss, and yet environmental and tribal organizations finally persuaded Congress in 1992 to authorize acquisition and removal of the dams.

Although funding for the project, which may cost up to $203 million, is jeopardized by the belt-tightening mood in Congress, Cantrell and the Elwha tribe leaders are confident they will prevail because of the unprecedented nature of the agreement they forged: The dam owners, the paper mill that gets its power from the dams, environmentalists, tribes and federal parks and fisheries officials all agree that if the salmon are to be saved, the best solution is to spend the money and dump the dams.

These two dams, built in the early part of the century and providing minuscule amounts of power, are not Grand Coulee and Bonneville. Yet Cantrell said he believes that they could provide a model for how the nation preserves natural resources.

“Never have dams been removed for fish on the scale of the Elwha, but if there’s a precedent in the Elwha, it’s not so much that dams are going to be removed, per se,” Cantrell said. “What we see as the precedence of Elwha is we can go back and correct some of our past mistakes.”

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Troubled Waters

Young salmon born in central Idaho must pass through eight massive federal dams on their way to the ocean. Eventually, they will return upriver to their birthplaces to lay eggs. Other dams throughout the region have blocked vast areas of salmon habitat.

Sources: Northwest Power Planning Council, state of Idaho