FISHERIES -- Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery employees worked all night Tuesday and Wednesday to save 1.2 million fingerling salmon from debris-choked flood waters that swept down Icicle Creek.

“The last flood this bad was 2005,” said Travis Collier, Assistant Hatchery Manager. Nearly two and a half inches of rain fell, melting recently fallen snow to swell the river flows above 11,000 cubic feet.

The hatchery faced two primary problems: the volume of water, and the debris it carried, officials said.

Flood diversion channel was overwhelmed with water and water in the natural channel swelled to dangerous levels.

“We don’t know exactly how much water came through (the hatchery) because it washed out the gauging station,” Travis said.

Logs were swept downstream, clogging the water intake for the hatchery, slamming into the bridge at the spillway, breaking through the fence, and damaging the fish ladder. Tribal fishing platforms were destroyed and the hatchery building was flooding. Staff took on the hazardous work of climbing down into the flooded structure to drag out branches in an urgent bid to get water moving again in the system, Travis said.

According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service release:

Water from the intake is piped first to a settling chamber. Because the intake was blocked, the settling chamber  was completely dry. Normal water flow in a 10 by 100 foot raceway is 900 gallons per minute. For an hour, no water was coming from the river at all. Hatchery workers switched on every well and re-used w water was available to keep water in the raceways where spring Chinook salmon are raised.

Their efforts succeeded but the hard work continues. Once the blockage was cleared the water coming into the hatchery was loaded with silt. Five inches of mud filled every raceway on Wednesday and must be cleaned out as the flood subsides. Exhausted employees continued to clear debris Wednesday morning, assessing what repairs will be needed.

Their hard work paid off: the salmon they have raised through drought and flood are alive today, still on schedule to be released in April, meeting the hatchery’s mission of mitigating for the impact of Grand Coulee Dam. Leavenworth Fisheries Complex Manager Dave Irving said, “Without their dedicated service, we’d have lost all the fish and had severe damage to the infrastructure. I appreciate their hard work under hazardous conditions. They have a real passion for fulfilling our mission.”