Calculus of Drought, Power Crisis to Prove Deadly to Salmon

In a ritual as old as the coming of spring, today marks the official beginning of the chinook salmon’s fabled migration down the Columbia River to the sea. Because of the West Coast’s electricity crisis, many of them will die.

Severe drought and the need to feed water through the massive hydropower turbines along the river have brought about a long-feared collision between electricity needs and the endangered salmon that are an icon of the Pacific Northwest.

Under an emergency order issued last week--expected to be extended Friday to cover much of the rest of this year--the Bonneville Power Administration has ordered power generation to take precedence over water flows needed to carry young salmon safely across eight hydropower dams to the Pacific Ocean.

The result, federal biologists said, is that a large number of salmon will be sucked down into the deadly generating turbines at each dam, producing major mortalities in fish that already are threatened with extinction.

“Unless nature does something strange, it’s going to mean very little spill, very little flow augmentation for the fish,” Doug Arndt, chief of fish management for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Monday. Combined with drought conditions all over the Columbia basin, he added, “I’m very concerned that mortality is going to be very high.”

In another symptom of the West Coast electricity crisis’ spiraling dimensions, the BPA on Monday called for a two-year shutdown of the Pacific Northwest’s aluminum industry and substantial voluntary conservation measures to avoid rate hikes in the region that it said could reach 250% or more.

“The summer drought is only the immediate crisis. We are becoming increasingly concerned about power supply for the coming winter,” said acting BPA administrator Steve Wright. “We’re going to have to take immediate and aggressive steps to shrink the electricity demands on BPA. It requires significant--and I mean significant--contributions from all customer groups.”

The federal power agency markets 8,000 megawatts of power from 29 dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, providing some of the nation’s cheapest electricity to Washington state, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. The BPA also exchanges power with California.

The dams have always represented a significant threat to salmon that spawn along the Columbia and its tributaries. The federal Endangered Species Act has required the BPA and the Corps of Engineers to spill water over the dams in the spring to help flush young salmon down the river on their crucial migration to the sea.

However, every drop of water spilled over the top of a dam is water that cannot be used to drive the turbines that make electricity. In a typical two-week period, the BPA gives up about 1,000 megawatts of power to help spill fish through the dams--enough to power 660,000 homes.

Although the actual spring migration began in mid-March, today is the legally designated date for launching spring spill operations on the lower Columbia River dams--a target date that will pass virtually ignored because of the BPA’s declaration last week of a hydropower emergency.

“This was a very painful, difficult decision, but the drought has so depleted water supplies that the reliability of the region’s electricity system is in peril,” Wright said in making the emergency finding.

Although the initial declaration extends only two weeks, Arndt said it is likely that the long-term strategy to be unveiled Friday will not allocate much water for salmon through the rest of the year.

Instead, he said, federal officials plan to remove as many fish as possible from the river and barge them around the dams. Although the vast majority of young fish survive these trips, many believe that barging leaves young fish highly vulnerable to disease and predation soon afterward. In addition, barging is thought to interfere with the imprinting process in which salmon remember their way home to their spawning grounds. Barged fish return to spawn at only half the rate of fish left in the river.

“Instead of a spring migration, a spring massacre is what we’re going to have this year,” said Shawn Cantrell of Friends of the Earth. He added that some biologists estimate the coming mortality as high as 95%, resulting from the drought, the no-spill policy and the barging of fish.

Brian Gorman of the National Marine Fisheries Service said the no-spill regime alone is expected to increase mortality rates by about 15%, although no one knows how many fish perish at the dams under optimal conditions.

A key threat to salmon this year is not just the stepped-up hydropower operations, but a near-record drought. Small mountain streams well above the dams are so dry that many salmon won’t get washed down even to the first dam, Lower Granite near Lewiston, Idaho.

“Idaho Fish and Game is estimating roughly half the migrating salmon won’t even get to the first dam. They’re going to stall out in Lower Granite reservoir and die there,” said Pat Ford, director of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition in Idaho.

As summer approaches, adult salmon making their way back up the river to spawn could be killed by rising water temperatures brought about by low river flows, biologists said.

A coalition of conservation groups has urged the BPA to acquire rights to additional water flows from irrigators in Idaho, a solution they say would keep power turbines turning but provide water for fish as well.

“If the region is indeed in a power emergency, then the BPA must implement emergency conservation measures that lift some of the burden off endangered salmon,” the group said in a letter to federal agencies.

The BPA is spending about $24.7 million this year buying water generating capacity from farm irrigators in Washington state at about $330 an acre, a project that will free up as much as 100 megawatts of electricity.

“It ought to be happening in Idaho, but it’s not happening, because of Idaho politics,” said Ford, referring to the state’s powerful farming lobby.

BPA’s own economic crisis makes it impossible to spend large amounts to buy back water for power generation. Already, the agency is 3,000 megawatts short of meeting its power needs for the next five years. Wholesale electricity prices have risen so steeply that the agency could go broke buying power to meet its obligations.

That was the reason the BPA announced Monday that it would ask the Northwest’s major industrial customers that use about 2,100 megawatts of its power--about a dozen factories, most of them aluminum smelters--to voluntarily close down for two years until electricity prices diminish. A number of factories have already shut down, reselling about 1,800 megawatts into the grid.

Wright said the BPA would help pay lost wages to idled workers. He also called on residential utilities to cut their power demand by 5% to 10%.

But industrial users warned that thousands of jobs would be at stake with a shutdown.

“The industry’s more than willing to step up and do what it can to help the region through this difficult time, but what we’re concerned about is that we may be signing our own death warrant here,” said John Arthur Wilson of the Northwest Power Alliance, an industry group. “We don’t think the solution is to target one industry and simply tell them, ‘We’re going to pitch you overboard, and the thousands of people who depend on you for jobs.’ ”

Gorman said the pinch--to power users, and to salmon--will likely be short-lived, a year or two at most.

“One bad year doesn’t mean the end of salmon,” he said. “We’ll get through this. These fish are very resilient. It’s only a steady drumbeat of doing really stupid things over years that will drive them to extinction.”