Salmon Preservation Runs Into Roadblock

For the past decade, it was one of the Northwest’s hottest issues: Should four giant dams on the Snake River be breached to help rebuild endangered runs of salmon?

But when the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers finally rejected the proposal in early December, it was hardly noticed.

Political and economic realities in the past year--primarily the election of George W. Bush and the West’s energy crisis--made it a foregone conclusion that the corps would decide to keep its dams.

Even though environmental groups insist that the fight to remove the dams will continue, the leader of a pro-dams group said it’s time to find other ways to save salmon.

“The dam breaching issue is over,” said Bruce Lovelin of the Columbia River Alliance, a Portland, Ore., group that represents business interests on the Columbia-Snake system, including bargers, manufacturers, farmers and utilities.

The dams--Ice Harbor, Little Goose, Lower Granite and Lower Monumental--are located between Pasco, Wash., and Lewiston, Idaho. They were built starting in the 1960s to provide electricity and irrigation water and to make the Snake River navigable from the Pacific Ocean to Lewiston.

Each spring and summer, millions of juvenile salmon and steelhead leave their home rivers in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and are flushed to the ocean, where they spend one to three years. Then they return to their places of birth to spawn.

Dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers disrupted the migration, exposing fish to predators, high water temperatures and electrical turbines.

Many people blame the dams for the decline in wild runs of salmon and steelhead, which were eventually placed on the endangered species list. The listing triggered studies on the best way to restore the fish runs.

Corps Looking for Other Solutions

In early December, the corps announced that it would not support removing the four dams. Instead, it will pursue technical alterations to the dams to improve the survival for migrating fish.

The fate of the dams was debated in the Northwest since the early 1990s. It pitted conservationists and Indian tribes, who insisted that the dams were killing salmon, against business interests, who insisted that ocean conditions, overfishing and other factors were more dangerous to fish.

The dams became an issue in the 2000 presidential election when Bush said he opposed the breaching.

In 1995, the corps launched a study to evaluate how endangered salmon would fare under four scenarios: existing conditions, maximum barging of young salmon, major system improvements and dam breaching.

The $20-million study drew more than 8,700 people to public hearings and prompted more than 230,000 written comments, mostly form letters.

Lovelin said the key issue for the corps was that the study failed to prove that removing the dams would restore wild salmon runs.

Last summer’s electricity crisis in the West also worked in favor of the dams, since they are cheap and efficient providers of power, Lovelin said.

Finally, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 focused the attention of many people on security concerns, and “salmon is no longer a Top 10 issue,” Lovelin said.

The bottom line is that the Bush administration is unlikely to revive this issue, he said.

But the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition insists that legislative and legal tools remain to seek removal of the four dams.

The corps’ decision “doesn’t mean that dam removal is not going to happen,” said Melissa Pease of the coalition.

Under a national recovery plan, the issue of dam removal must be studied again in 2003, 2005 and 2008, Pease said. If recovery is not occurring, dam breaching returns to the table, she said.

If the government doesn’t act, then environmental groups can turn to the courts, Pease added.

Two decades of barging juvenile salmon around the dams, installing and upgrading fish ladders, and manipulating the release of water to aid migrating fish have been a failure, conservation groups say.

Chase Davis of the Sierra Club office in Spokane said salmon runs now are only about 1% of what they were when Lewis and Clark traveled down the Columbia and Snake rivers nearly 200 years ago.

The Sierra Club believes that money from taxpayers and electricity ratepayers used for additional dam modification will be wasted, Davis said.

“It will probably end up back in the courts,” he predicted.

Bert Bowler of Idaho Rivers United, a sportsmen’s group trying to restore that state’s waterways, also criticized the decision.

“It appears they’re just attempting to gold-plate the dams,” Bowler said.

Wild Salmon Runs May Be on Last Legs

The corps made its announcement as it sent the study to other federal agencies to review. The recommendation is expected to be adopted early next year.

The corps provided barge or truck rides for 22.3 million baby salmon and steelhead around the dams this year, the vast majority of them less desirable hatchery fish.

There have also been record runs of salmon returning to the river to spawn in the past year, but nearly all of them were hatchery fish, environmentalists said.

“Wild runs are still on the brink of extinction,” Pease said.