Talk of Demolishing Dams Yields Torrent of Debate

The river workhorse begins here in the northern Idaho farm belt, slicing a canyon through the rolling grasslands of the most productive wheat fields in the nation.

Here, the Snake River takes 722,000 tons a year of wheat and barley on its back and carries it down through the confluence with the Columbia River and on to the sea--465 miles of what was once the wildest river system in the West.

Woody Guthrie celebrated the taming of the Columbia in what remains one of the nation’s premier engineering achievements: the construction of eight massive dams on the lower Columbia and Snake rivers--edifices of concrete, gravel and grace whose power plants opened up the development of the Pacific Northwest and transformed Lewiston, once an arid outpost of grain elevators and storefronts hundreds of miles from the ocean, into a seaport.

Now, in an unprecedented turnaround for the federal agency that has made its living boot-strapping nature to the whims of men, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking another look at its creations on the lower Snake River. In a study due to wind up next year, the Corps is thinking about demolishing four dams along the lower Snake--at an estimated total cost of $500 million to $800 million--and making the river wild once again.

That such a study is being done at all says much about the frustration of political leaders in the region, which has spent $3 billion trying to restore fabled salmon runs only to find the fish--one of the last remaining legacies of a truly wild West--still plummeting toward extinction.

Of all the reasons suggested for the decline of the salmon--changing ocean conditions, overfishing, denuding of the river banks by urbanization and logging--none has imposed a more visible threat than the 100-foot-high walls of concrete that kill thousands of salmon each year in their migrations between the rocky streams of the inland mountains and the sea. A wild Idaho salmon must negotiate eight dams on its way to the sea as a juvenile, and the same number on the way back before spawning.

Now even the Bonneville Power Administration, the agency that markets hydropower from federal dams in the Northwest, is beginning to ask: If fish and wildlife costs associated with the dams are averaging $252 million a year, might it be cheaper to pull them down?

It is a question that, five years ago, wouldn’t even have been asked, especially in a region whose economic evolution was fueled with federal hydropower. But that was before officials began looking at dams all over the country, asking new questions about what the miracles of modern engineering had wrought.

Flood of Dam Removal Projects Being Debated

Last month, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt cleared the way for the removal of the Edwards Dam in Maine, which had blocked 17 miles of prime fish-spawning habitat for 160 years. On Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, the administration has budgeted $86 million for removal of one of two dams blocking salmon passage on the Elwha River. Other dam removal projects are under consideration from Michigan to California. But taking out the Snake River dams would dwarf everything else.

“It’s amazing. It’s like the pope talking about [allowing] abortion. . . . But what happens in almost any field of endeavor is when things get desperate, you look for radical solutions,” said Brian Gorman of the National Marine Fisheries Service, which must make a decision on the Snake River dams by next year.

“I think there’s a general feeling that we have spent an enormous amount of money on nickel-and-dime fixes to the river system and don’t have a hell of a lot to show for it,” he added.

Indeed, while salmon are a dwindling commodity up and down the Pacific coast, none is in as perilous a decline as the inhabitants of the Snake.

These inland fish are the ones that earned the salmon their reputation as finned miracles. After completing several circles of the northern Pacific, the Snake River salmon find their way back to the mouth of the Columbia, climbing upstream through four dams on the river’s main stem and four more on the lower Snake before spawning, sometimes in high desert lakes 900 miles from the sea, in the gravel beds from which they hatched.

The dams have fish ladders to help the hardiest adult spawners make their way up and across the concrete edifices, and about 90% to 95% successfully complete each crossing. Far more formidable is the passage for the 3-inch smolts, the yearling fish that travel downriver to the sea. Up to 15% are killed in each dam’s swirling turbines, and the others are weakened by the miles of predator-infested slack water standing between the dams.

In an attempt to alleviate the dams’ lethal effects, the Corps of Engineers in recent years has collected many of the smolts and barged them down past the dams, a process that deposits nearly all of them alive at the mouth of the river. But critics say it renders them vulnerable to unrecorded deaths by trauma and disease.

Moreover, there are indications that barged fish may lose their bearings, said Scott Bosse of the environmental group Idaho Rivers United. “If these fish can’t imprint on the way out, how do you expect them to find their way home? It’s like taking the crumbs away from Hansel and Gretel.”

Snake River coho salmon became extinct in 1985. Redfish Lake, the legendary spawning ground of Idaho sockeye, didn’t see a single fish return this year. Even the once-plentiful spring Chinook run saw just 1,429 wild spawners swim past Lewiston last year.

Biologists Bicker Over Ways to Guide Salmon

For years, biologists have bickered over what was best: barging the young fish, building surface collectors to help guide salmon safely over the dams or tagging the young migrants with radio chips. And a growing chorus has arisen over the last year to consider simply breaching half the dams, returning the Snake--and perhaps parts of the Columbia--to a free-flowing river.

“We’ve concluded that in terms of fish recovery efforts, the only drawdown option that provides you the kind of biological performance that you need is a natural river,” said Greg Graham, project manager for the Corps of Engineers study.

“It’s a major action,” he said. “But I think we need to look at the analysis, the economics, the engineering, the biological effects to salmon and look at all the potential environmental effects before we draw conclusions about how farfetched things are.”

To understand just how huge a political undertaking is at stake, remember that every resident of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana pays lower electricity bills than almost anyone in the nation, thanks to water churning through the dams.

Then there are the powerful electricity-dependent industries that have sprung up along the rivers, and the evolution of the river itself as a maritime highway--carrying millions of dollars’ worth of grain and timber products from 36 ports along the two rivers to what has become one of the major exporting centers in the West at Portland, Ore.

Total exports off the Columbia-Snake system last year totaled more than 28 million tons.

Breaching the dams would mean an end to cheap upriver barging, not only for farmers and loggers, but for companies like the Potlatch Corp., whose huge Lewiston mill and production facility barges 90% of its manufactured paperboard down the Snake River.

To be sure, no one is talking about bringing down workhorses like Bonneville and Grand Coulee--the Depression-era behemoths on the Columbia that generate the majority of the power for the Bonneville Power Administration’s delivery system.

4 Smaller Dams Are Focus of Corps Study

The current Corps study focuses on the four relatively smaller dams built last, after the Snake River branches off from the Columbia in eastern Washington: Ice Harbor, completed in 1962; Lower Monumental, completed in 1970; Little Goose, completed in 1970; and Lower Granite, completed in 1975.

Those dams generate only 4% to 7% of the region’s power. Their reservoirs irrigate only 13 farms. Yet they, many biologists believe, are the key, the most important thing that stands in the way between Snake River salmon making it or not.

Biologist Steve Pettit of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game said there is strong agreement within the department that listing of the salmon and steelhead populations in the Snake River as endangered is directly linked to development of the dams.

“Our stocks were coasting along pretty well with the four lower Columbia River projects in place,” he said. “The people in the Snake River basin enjoyed excellent fishing for both salmon and steelhead through the ‘60s, and . . . when the four Snake River dams were completed by 1975, there’s just this rapid and precipitous drop. It was sort of like the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.”

In a development that stunned the region last year, the Idaho Statesman, the state’s biggest and most influential newspaper, came out with a massively researched set of editorials that called for breaching of the Snake River dams. River-dependent industry geared up for a fight.

Bruce Lovelin of the Columbia River Alliance said industrial and agricultural users of the river fear the region will spend millions to breach the dams without knowing whether it will be enough to save the fish.

He is not alone. Bonneville Power says breaching the Snake River dams, plus an associated proposal to lower the reservoirs on the Columbia’s John Day and McNary dams--opening up more than 100 miles of new salmon habitat--could cost the agency a full 25% of its electricity.

Talk of Breaching Dams Is Debated

Since electric ratepayers largely fund salmon recovery in the Northwest, Bonneville officials fear that breaching the dams could come at the expense of other badly needed wildlife programs.

“We’re the goose that lays the golden egg,” Bonneville spokeswoman Darcy Mulhar said. “If you slay the goose, you’re not going to have any more golden eggs. We will have a limit to what we can pay and still be viable in a competitive market.”

Others say that proponents of keeping the dams fail to look at the savings that could be realized if salmon were no longer an endangered species, a listing that requires the Bonneville Power Administration to fork out hundreds of millions of dollars a year on salmon recovery. One study commissioned by the Oregon Natural Resources Council estimated that retiring the dams could save $87 million a year.

Then it becomes a debate over whether taking down the dams will really restore the fish. In Bonneville’s view, the case hasn’t been made.

For one thing, said Bob Lohn, the agency’s fish and wildlife director, dam breaching proponents who point out that Snake River salmon populations crashed with the building of the dams forget that two other important things happened at the same time: a massive introduction of hatcheries, which mixed a genetically weaker and more disease-prone stock into the rivers, and a cyclical change in ocean currents that decimated the coastal plankton upon which young salmon normally feed.

In Lewiston, a town whose port would die without the dams, the feeling is mostly one of frustration over events well outside the control of a small town.

“There’s 250 dams in the Pacific Northwest. We’re going to take out four of them and bring about salmon recovery? I think that’s a pretty naive view of what it’s going to take,” said David Doeringsfeld, manager of the Port of Lewiston.

Joe Stegner, whose family for years ran one of the biggest grain elevator operations in Lewiston, said he estimates farm families will have to pay $6,000 a year more to ship their grain by rail--if the already overloaded system could even take on the job.

“It’s not that we’re against fish,” he said. “We just don’t think it’s an intelligent use of the assets of the region to devote all of them to a single use.”

But Charles Ray of Idaho Rivers United, sees things differently.

“People are now beginning to realize that some of these dams were mistakes,” Ray said. “More importantly, people are beginning to realize that it’s not only possible, but it’s desirable, to correct some of the mistakes of the past. And if we succeed in doing this on the lower Snake River, it’ll be a worldwide benchmark of environmental restoration.”