Plan Leaves 4 Dams High And Dry Engineers Consider Digging Channel Around Four Lower Snake River Dams
First of two parts
Frustrated by the failure to restore Snake River salmon despite colossal spending, salmon policy makers are thinking what used to be unthinkable: mothballing four dams on the lower Snake River.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking a serious look at digging a $533 million channel around Lower Monumental, Little Goose, Ice Harbor and Lower Granite dams.
The dams would become four giant white elephants, still standing but serving no purpose as the river runs freely around them.
The payoff might be a river full of salmon. But, as usual with salmon, no one knows for sure. If the fish go extinct anyway, the corps might be able to plug the channels and put the dams back in service.
The Northwest Power Planning Council, which helps set policy for the region’s hydropower system, is assembling an economic panel to assess the impact of circumventing the dams. Discussion of the issue is expected to take years.
That it’s happening at all marks a fundamental shift in the salmon debate.
For years the assumption has been the dams would stay in place. Salmon would be transported around them in barges. They would be mass-produced by hatcheries so enough fish to sustain a run could survive passing through the dams; or they could be guided past the concrete with collectors, pipes, screens and flumes.
The dams destroy crucial salmon habitat, slow baby fish on their way to the sea, and provide a warm, slackwater haven for salmon predators. Returning adult salmon have to struggle over fish ladders and endure miles of lazy reservoirs.
But idling or destroying the dams has always been outside the realm of serious examination.
Not anymore.
“Everything is on the table,” said Republican Gov. Phil Batt of Idaho. “I think that we need to discuss every possibility.”
Much of the debate is focusing on the Snake River because that’s where the most fragile fish spawn. Snake River spring-summer and fall chinook and Snake River sockeye are listed for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Salmon can cross dams and still survive, as the success of salmon in the Columbia River’s Hanford Reach shows. Those fish cross four dams in their migration.
But Snake River salmon have twice as many dams to contend with to reach their spawning grounds.
Washington’s Democratic Gov. Mike Lowry said for years the region has been asking the wrong questions when it comes to salmon.
“The way this issue is discussed so often is referring to the fish as a cost on the system, as opposed to the system being a huge cost to the fish.
“Those fish were doing fine. I remember watching the Native Americans net fish at the falls at Celilo.”
The Native American fishery at Celilo Falls was one of the most abundant in the Columbia Basin. It was drowned by construction of The Dalles Dam.
The idea of eliminating the dams faces huge opposition.
“It’s stupid, a trade-off I can’t imagine us making,” said Bud Mercer of the Lower Snake River Irrigators Association.
“We’re not going to mothball the dams,” said Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. “I don’t even know what this channel thing is. What, you dig a channel and the water all goes around it? That seems to me a non-starter.”
But the continued decline of the salmon and new scientific reports that show many recovery efforts are fundamentally flawed are reshaping the debate.
The region has thrown more than $3 billion at trying to rescue the salmon since 1980, yet many fish runs are closer to extinction than ever, The Spokesman-Review reported in a series of articles last July.
The recovery effort has been plagued by mismanagement, poor coordination and lack of accountability.
A restructuring of the energy market, meanwhile, has created affordable alternatives to hydropower. Suddenly, the Snake River dams, which generate only 5 percent of the region’s power, don’t look as necessary as before.
Instead of asking if the fish are worth saving, some officials think it’s time to look into whether the four lower Snake River dams are worth keeping.
For years, Northwesterners have been promised they could have it all: the cheapest electricity in the country from hydropower generation, inland navigation all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, and abundant salmon and steelhead.
“I think people now understand that there are real limits to what the environment can handle,” said Will Stelle of the National Marine Fisheries Services, which is in charge of saving salmon protected under the Endangered Species Act. “Would those dams be built today? My guess is no, and it’s not close.”
Changing values and the evolving economy of the region, keyed more toward quality of life and tourism than resource extraction, have also put the salmon question in a new light.
A group of conservative business owners called Business For Fish in Ketchum, Idaho, issued a report last month that concludes restored salmon and steelhead runs would be more valuable to the region than the lower Snake River dams.
The new gold mine for Idaho is tourism and a diversified economy, spurred by healthy salmon and steelhead, the report said.
Mike Field, a Power Planning Council member for Idaho, said containing salmon recovery costs is another reason to figure out whether unplugging the dams makes sense.
“People have to make a choice about which direction we are going to go because right now we are going in every direction. We can’t afford that. It’s not good for the ratepayers and it’s not good for the fish,” Field said.
Council members also say they want to make salmon spending on existing programs more accountable.
A regional agreement that commits to spending up to $435 million a year to save the fish comes with new strings attached to end conflicts of interest, require proposed programs to undergo independent peer review, and benefit fish.
Some say that’s just a matter of doing something dumb better; it still won’t work.
A new scientific review of the region’s salmon saving efforts indicates many programs won’t work because they depend too much on technological fixes instead of restoring a healthy river ecosystem.
Another study of salmon saving strategies just completed for the Corps of Engineers by a Seattle engineering firm said bypassing the four Lower Snake River dams is one of the cheapest, quickest, most effective recovery options.
The corps drew the same conclusion in a recent report on reservoir drawdowns, which lower water levels behind dams.
Drawdowns are intended to speed baby fish to sea. Permanent drawdowns - which return the river channel to its natural condition - also create important spawning and rearing habitat for fish.
Partial drawdowns take longer to implement, cost more, and are of questionable benefit to fish, the corps determined.
If drawdowns are to be pursued on the lower Snake - and that’s still a big if - the only kind worth further study is a “natural river” drawdown, or digging the dam bypass channel, the corps concluded.
“It was beyond me to think we would ever get to this point, but it’s not anymore,” said Mike Mason at the Walla Walla district of the corps.
“But why not? If it’s the will of the region and we can afford it and can effect recovery of these fish, maybe it’s something that’s legitimate.
“What’s going to be a very tough issue is if you are going to do something as radical as remove those dams you better be doggone sure they will have the necessary effect on the fish that they will recover. I don’t know if we can get anything that will ever tell us that.
“We may be faced with one large gamble.”
Ed Bowles, head of salmon and steelhead recovery for Idaho, called mothballing the dams “a no-brainer” in terms of helping the fish.
“These fish would do much better in a free-flowing river. It’s not really a biological debate.”
The corps and Power Planning Council are expected to make a decision about the dams by 1999.
“It’s a function of having tried a lot of different things, spent a lot of money based on this theory and that, and still not gotten the kind of results we want on the Snake River,” said John Etchart of Montana, chairman of the Power Planning Council.
The most controversial decision would be to stay the course, said Bern Shanks, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
“We’ve looked at dams for years as a given, when in reality we have a lot of other choices.
“The biggest controversy of all would be to do nothing, stay on the same path. The stocks jump up and down but if you plot the long-term trend we are looking at extinction.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo; Graphic: Circumventing the dams
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: COMING MONDAY A look at the costs if the four Lower Snake River dams were removed.