U.S. Salmon Plan Could Lead to Removal of Dams

With most of the West clamoring for energy generated on the massive Pacific Northwest hydropower system, the Clinton administration Thursday launched a $352-million-a-year plan for recovering salmon, which does not rule out taking down dams to halt the fish’s plunge toward extinction.

The long-awaited strategy--aimed at balancing energy demands with the Columbia and Snake river dams’ deadly effects on wildlife--will require as much as $190 million in additional funding next year, the White House said.

“We’ve done so many things wrong to these fish. [Now] we have endless opportunities to start doing things right,” said Donna Darm, acting administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service. “We’re confident that the region can and will pull together to do what is necessary to ensure this Northwest treasure is here for future generations.”

The fates of four dams on the lower Snake River--part of a network of two dozen dams in the Columbia River system--were a key environmental issue in the presidential campaign. President-elect George W. Bush has said he would oppose dam removal, although conservation groups, Indian tribes and many independent scientists believe it is the only way to halt the demise of some salmon stocks within the next few decades.

The program unveiled Thursday by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Bonneville Power Administration and seven other federal agencies involves major habitat and hatchery improvements. They are aimed at increasing survival rates both before and after the salmon navigate past the dams on their way from their spawning beds to the sea.

The new recovery strategy--beefed up from a draft plan unveiled over the summer--sets firm goals at three years, five years and eight years. Failure to meet those markers could trigger moves to bring down the dams, federal officials said.

The strict recovery levels and timetables, environmental groups said, will make it easier to hold the next administration to the dam-removal strategy.

“They have made a political judgment call that there is neither the scientific justification nor the political support . . . [for] dam removal,” said Bill Arthur, head of the Northwest chapter of the Sierra Club.

But, he said, the expensive recovery plan will force a conclusion on whether the dams will have to come down.

“To some degree, [federal administrators] have kind of called the region’s bluff: Pony up and deliver and show us we don’t need to take the dams out,” Arthur said.

In a last-minute appeal, 215 federal, state, tribal, university and independent scientists from 27 states urged breaching the dams. “The weight of scientific evidence clearly shows that wild Snake River salmon and steelhead runs cannot be recovered under existing river conditions,” the scientists said in a letter earlier this week to President Clinton. The evidence cites the dams as “the primary cause” of the sharp decline in Snake River stocks over the last several decades, they said.

Native American tribes in the Columbia River region already have signaled their opposition to the plan. Rather than seeking full recovery of the fish, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission said, the strategy attempts merely to prevent a severe decline. Tribes are likely to be limited to “token” harvests while a decision on dam breaching is postponed for years, it complained.

But officials with the federal marine fisheries service said their own scientists concluded that simply removing the dams would not be enough to save the salmon. They found that it was more important to address salmon mortality in upriver tributaries, before they traverse the dams, and in the estuary at the mouth of the Columbia River where they prepare to swim out to sea.

“The problem with that sort of tunnel-vision focus on the dams is, it ignores all of the other insults to these fish and their habitat that need to be addressed if we’re ultimately going to recover the fish,” Darm said.

Without drastic measures, the federal agencies that backed the new plan concluded, there is a 100% chance of virtual extinction of nine of 11 salmon and steelhead species in the Columbia and Snake river system.

Most of the funding for the recovery plan comes from ratepayers of the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets electricity generated from the federal dams. The Bonneville agency already budgets $250 million a year for salmon restoration, and increased costs are likely to average an additional $100 million a year, acting administrator Steve Wright said.

The Bonneville agency has made substantial cuts in operation of the hydropower system since 1995, sacrificing some electricity generation to help provide increased river flows for the salmon. Combined with additional measures envisioned in the new plan, the dams will sacrifice about 900 megawatts per hour of electricity, or about 10% of the system’s capability, Wright said.

Breaching the four dams on the lower Snake River would cost the system an additional 11% of Bonneville’s production.

It also would dismantle the system of locks and barges that carry wheat and other commodities from inland ports in Idaho to Portland, Ore.

Shawn Cantrell, a dam-breaching proponent with Friends of the Earth, said the potential power loss is not an important factor in the present Western power shortage because it probably wouldoccur long after the present crisis.

“If we were to decide today to do dam removal, it’s at least seven to nine years out before the power from those dams would disappear from the grid. We have huge amounts of planning and implementation time to be able to come up with resources to offset that fairly small loss of generation that would be represented by dam removal,” he said.