Breaching Would Sink Barging Economy Tied To Snake River Dams Would Unravel If They Were Removed

Ducks and trucks flock to this Eastern Washington outpost for the same reason: It’s where the bounty of the Palouse finds its way to the Pacific.

Pale wheat and darker barley go from truck to silo to barge at Almota, a cluster of towers on the river’s north bank. Widgeon and coots compete for kernels spilled into the river, the birds’ routes traced through wheat dust on the water’s surface.

Tugs push up to four barges each trip from Snake River ports to buyers in Portland. There, the grain is sold for shipment to overseas markets.

Without doubt, this is the most efficient way to get grain from the Palouse to markets around the world. It’s made possible by taxpayer subsidies.

To match on land what a single tug can ship in one trip down the river would require 536 18-wheelers or a train pulling 140 jumbo rail cars.

Either way, farmers would pay higher transportation costs.

It may come to that.

Almota and other seaports in the Inland desert are threatened by society’s efforts to undo damage done to fish runs.

The four Snake River dams between Pasco and Lewiston hamper mature salmon going upstream to spawn and immature salmon on their way to the ocean. Those dams are the foundation of the river transportation system.

Breaching the dams is the most certain way to restore the fish runs, a panel of independent scientists concluded. Crews would remove earthen portions of each, leaving the concrete structures as dry and useless artifacts.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the dams between 1961 and 1975, working its way upstream from Ice Harbor to Lower Monumental to Little Goose to Lower Granite. This year, the agency is expected to release a $20 million study that could recommend breaching.

That radical step would banish the tugs and barges that carry $1 billion worth of commodities - mostly grain - up and down the Snake River each year. About 80 percent of Washington state’s Palouse wheat crop is shipped by barge.

If the corps recommends breaching, Congress or the courts will eventually have to decide whether that’s the right course.

For people who rely on the barges, the answer is obvious.

“It’s ridiculous that we’re even discussing this,” says Gerald Druffel, a retired wheat farmer and Port of Whitman County commissioner.

“Maybe the dams should never have been built in the first place. But they were built, and we’ve developed an economy around them.”

`New Northwest Passage’

The dams were built for commercial navigation - not hydropower or irrigation.

“Slack Water To Lewiston!” the Corps of Engineers promised in pre-dam brochures. Other boosters gushed that damming the Snake would create a “new Northwest Passage.”

Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were looking for the fabled passage to the Pacific when they visited the Snake in 1805. By the 1860s, brave and foolish captains were running sternwheelers up the river, fighting logjams and boulders and fierce rapids.

In spring, riverboats anchored at Ice Harbor, a cove 10 miles upstream from the Columbia, to wait for the Snake to clear itself of hull-crushing ice. By late summer, the water was often too low for travel.

The push to flatten the rapids started before the turn of the century and gained momentum after World War II. Northwest congressional members, led by Sens. Frank Church of Idaho and Warren Magnuson of Washington, unanimously supported dam construction.

At 425 miles from the ocean, Lewiston became the most inland of all West Coast seaports. It is served by three barge companies and a growing number of cruise ships.

Speaking at the 1975 dedication of Lower Granite Dam, Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus acknowledged that the toll on nature was “horrendous.”

“But we shouldn’t wring our hands,” Andrus said. “These problems are solvable.”

Magnuson, Church, Oregon Gov. Tom McCall and a representative from the Montana governor’s office were similarly upbeat.

Washington Gov. Dan Evans snubbed the ceremony; the state had joined a lawsuit to block construction of the dam, saying it would devastate salmon runs. That left the director of the maritime museum as the highest-ranking official to attend the dedication from the dam’s home state.

We’re on a voyage

The tug Clarkston moves through the night pushing two barges of wheat and one of barley. Crew members admire the full moon reflected on the artificially placid river.

Flocks of scaup flee the rumbling, advancing island of steel, their wings flashing white in the Clarkston’s spotlights.

The river creates its own society, in which the tug’s crew is a family of four. Working seven days on and seven off, they take meals together, celebrate birthdays and discuss their private troubles.

Deck hand Bob Eddy prefers working the high seas, not knowing whether the next port of call would be Nome, Honolulu or Boston. He recalls setting adrift a bottle off the coast of Florida and getting a return from Haiti to the letter inside.

“Here, it’s back and forth, every week,” says Eddy, 49, who switched to the river last year while trying fruitlessly to save his marriage.

But the river suits co-Capt. Doug Cody.

Last March, Cody watched Hale-Bopp from the absolute darkness of the Snake, seeing the comet’s tail in a display no city dweller could imagine. He’s seen the Northern Lights reflected in the water. He’s watched mule deer swim the mile-wide river for reasons no human could guess.

“The angle of the sunlight can completely change a view,” says Cody, who’s worked tugs for 24 of his 49 years. “There’s a certain element of adventure. We’re on a voyage.”

At each dam, Cody maneuvers the Clarkston into a lock only 2 feet wider than the side-by-side barges.

As water is released from the lock, the tug and barges descend into the crypt-like vault. The lower gate opens and the Clarkston uses its 3,000-horsepower engine to goose the reluctant barges into motion.

Upstream traffic - typically carrying fuel or heavy equipment - climbs the river in the same way.

Dollars and cents

Until 1975, Palouse farmers relied on rail cars to haul most grain to market. Even after the last dam was built that year, the railroads offered competitive transportation - for a time.

But when Congress deregulated railroads in 1980, Burlington Northern and Union Pacific pulled up many low-profit lines that served farm communities.

Between 1970 and 1998, the amount of track in Eastern Washington decreased from 3,136 miles to 1,824 miles, with much of the loss in the Palouse, says Jerry Lenzi, regional director for the state Department of Transportation.

If barging ends, those abandoned rail lines will leave critical gaps in the transportation system, says Ken Casavant, a Washington State University agricultural economist. Rail car shortages also are likely, say Casavant, Lenzi and other transportation experts.

The corps acknowledges that if the dams are mothballed, those who rely on barging will need financial help. But no one knows whether the government would use public money to beef up the rail system.

Under the best of circumstances, switching from barge to rail would add about 5 cents per bushel to the cost of transporting grain to Portland, Casavant says.

But without competition from barges, railroads likely would increase their rates, he says. Casavant predicts the actual increase would be 10 to 26 cents per bushel.

That may knock Northwest grain out of the competition in overseas markets, says Glenn Vanselow, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, which represents growers, port districts and barge companies.

“Sales internationally will sometimes hinge on less than a penny a bushel,” he says.

Casavant contends that the alternative to rail - trucking wheat to Portland or Pasco - isn’t practical. It would put an additional 700,000 18-wheelers on the road each year, with most of the traffic using two-lane roads to reach Interstate 395 north of Tri-Cities.

Accidents, pollution, fuel consumption and the state’s cost for road maintenance would increase.

Hidden costs

Supporters of dam breaching say the price barge operators charge to ship grain downriver grossly underestimates the true costs of river transport.

When taxpayers subsidies are included, Almota, Lewiston and other inland ports aren’t nearly the bargain they appear to be, says Phil Lansing, a Boise economist.

In a study for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, Lansing concludes that breaching the dams would save taxpayers’ money.

Lansing contends that every dollar shippers pay in river transport costs is subsidized with $10 from taxpayers. End barging and the government would save $39.4 million a year, he says. Among the public subsidies:

A share of the $194 million the government spends each year trying to restore salmon runs. Some of those efforts could end if the dams were gone.

Taxes paid to port districts by people who live within their boundaries. For Whitman County residents, that amounts to $38 a year on a $100,000 house.

The $2.7 million allocated by Congress each year to operate Snake River locks, dredge the channel and do other work that makes navigation possible.

Barge companies are exempt from the 23-cent state fuel tax, which is paid by truckers and other motorists to help fund road repairs. Instead of paying a federal tax of 18 cents a gallon for highways, the companies pay 20 cents a gallon into the national Inland Waterways Trust Fund.

The national fund, which is overseen by appointees from the shipping industry, has never been tapped for improvements on the Snake River, the corps reports.

Early this decade, shippers fought a congressional proposal to raise the tax to 70 cents a gallon. They argued the increase would make barging noncompetitive.

Graphic: Lower Snake River dams

This sidebar appeared with the story: AT A GLANCE Will breaching restore runs? The Snake River, the biggest tributary of the Columbia River, is dammed at 22 places, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says. President Reagan in 1988 signed a bill prohibiting any new dams on the longest remaining free-flowing stretch of the river, the 150 miles between Lewiston and Hells Canyon Dam. All together, there are 221 dams in the Columbia River watershed, which includes all of Idaho and portions of Washington, British Columbia, Oregon, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. They include 106 dams that generate electricity. Nationwide, there are 75,000 dams, “the equivalent of one every day since Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt wrote in the magazine Open Spaces. Babbitt, who advocates removing some dams, has not said whether those on the Snake River should be among them. But he made it clear in the Open Spaces article that he believes society faces a tough choice. “We probably cannot have salmon runs up into the Rocky Mountains and maintain four dams on the lower Snake River,” Babbitt wrote. “We have reached the point where the arteries are so clogged that surgery to reduce the blockage may be the only hope.”