The National Marine Fisheries Service is calling for big changes in the region's hydropower system, having finally decided that dams are pushing Snake River salmon toward extinction.
Fish survival will no longer take a distant third behind flood control and hydropower, NMFS regional director Will Stelle said Wednesday.
Mike Kreidler didn't vote for Snake River drawdowns. He wasn't on the Northwest Power Planning Council when it approved a salmon recovery strategy that includes dropping reservoirs and making other costly changes in river operations.
But the new council member from Washington said Wednesday that utility companies and others unhappy with such changes should learn to accept them.
"They're in denial," Kreidler said on a visit to Spokane.
That's odd, Mike Kirschbaum thought when he saw a red boat bobbing in Idaho's Clearwater River. Must be some kind of rescue practice under way.
But it was no practice. The two guys clinging to the capsized canoe on Monday afternoon were struggling for their lives.
Norm Linton and Greg Rapp lift the cover off of the underground oil recovery system that their company, Potlatch, has installed on the banks of the St. Joe River. Photo by Julie Titone/The Spokesman-Review
Norm Linton and Greg Rapp lift the cover off the underground oil recovery system that their company Potlatch, has installed on the banks of the St. Joe River. Photo by Julie Titone.
It slices, it dices. It rearranges the truth?
A TV advertisement showing baby salmon in a blender is upsetting some supporters of the hydropower system. The ad - staunchly defended by the environmentalists who paid for it - suggests that fish are pulverized by turbines as they migrate through dams.
Idaho's governor is pleading with federal officials not to list the bull trout as endangered. He wants Northwest states allowed to lead recovery efforts.
But at the same time, his state Department of Lands is opposing a proposed statewide strategy to recover the native fish. So is the powerful timber industry.
In the Northwest, no January weather predictions are more eagerly watched than those involving mountain snows and precipitation.
Things are looking great so far. In some watersheds, including the Spokane River basin, there's nearly twice as much snow as there was this time last year.
Future audiences at the Festival at Sandpoint may sit in a shoreline amphitheater and be entertained by musicians performing on a stage above the Pend Oreille River.
Representatives of the non-profit festival presented their vision of a new Memorial Field facility on Tuesday.
Before speaking to the Sandpoint City Council administrative committee, executive director Connie Bergham cautioned that the idea is preliminary.
More of North Idaho's Selkirk Mountains is being put off-limits to snowmobilers in order to protect endangered caribou.
The animals run from the noisy machines even before the snowmobilers are aware of their presence, say biologists who track them from the air.
"We don't believe snowmobilers are out there deliberately harassing caribou," Allen Chrisman of the Bonners Ferry Ranger District said Monday.
Dworshak, Roosevelt, Hungry Horse, Koocanusa, American Falls, Brownlee, Cascade.
The Columbia River Basin's upstream reservoirs are being tapped - sometimes nearly drained - to help endangered salmon reach the ocean.
If Todd Maddock and Mike Field are joining the Northwest Power Planning Council this week hoping to rewrite the council's salmon recovery strategy, they likely will be disappointed.
But the two Idaho members eventually could do what Gov.-elect Phil Batt appointed them to do: Prevent a series of reservoir drawdowns from taking place. Here's why.
The eight-member council was created to set policy for the federal hydropower system. To keep any state from dominating, voting procedures make it difficult to approve a major rule such as the salmon strategy.
