Panel Studies Salmon Recovery
Rivers connect everyone in the Columbia Basin, from Canada, Montana and Idaho all the way to Portland.
Measures to prevent extinction of the basin’s salmon will affect hundreds of interest groups and millions of people.
That’s why saving salmon and steelhead involves more processes than hot dogs and Velveeta.
The Corps of Engineers has its process. The National Marine Fisheries Service has one, as do the states and other agencies.
A panel of key players were pulled together Tuesday in a meeting sponsored by the Lake Roosevelt Forum to explain the latest processes. This one is designed to give even the anglers, residents and Native Americans along Lake Roosevelt a voice in salmon recovery.
I’ll get to the grim forecast for Lake Roosevelt fisheries soon. Meantime, be on the lookout for meeting notices regarding the new Multi-Species Framework Project. Check out the meeting scheduled for Monday, 1-4 p.m. at the Hotel Lusso in downtown Spokane.
Details are on the Internet at www.nwframework.org.
The project, sponsored by the Northwest Power Planning Council, seeks to promote salmon recovery while minimizing impacts on other species.
Proposals such as breaching Snake River dams will also be considered in terms of their impact on humans.
Mary Verner Moore, Colville Confederated Tribes natural resources director, applauded the effort.
“We don’t want a decision that focuses just on Snake River stocks,” she said. “Lake Roosevelt must be considered, too.”
When downstream salmon need a boost of water, upstream reservoirs are tapped, she said.
“We feel like we’re the pantry,” she said. “When somebody else needs something, they come to us.”
The framework project will look at the serious implications reservoir drawdowns have on inland fish.
“Private utilities have been benefitting (from the cheap power produced by the dams), but no one has been taking responsibility for the impacts on the resources,” she said.
The meeting was at Cavanaugh’s Inn at the Park, former site of a traditional Native American salmon fishing camp.
Jim Baker, the Sierra Club’s Columbia River salmon coordinator, said people in the Northwest have been in “denial on the biology, panic on the economics and wearing blinders on the policy” involved in salmon recovery.
Allowing the extinction of salmon would be far more costly than breaching dams or other extreme measures that would disrupt the status quo, he said.
Treaty tribes undoubtedly will sue if the fish runs vanish.
“The rest of the country isn’t likely to pay the costs of salmon extinction while we enjoy the lowest power costs in the nation,” he warned.
Donna Darm, National Marine Fisheries Service assistant regional administrator, was the key figure at the meeting.
The biology-based recommendations her agency produces will be a lightning rod for the tough political decisions Congress eventually will have to make.
“We’d be right behind you to get those dams out if we were sure it would work,” said sportsman’s representative Paul Logman. “But you can’t get the fish to the base of Bonneville Dam,” he said, pointing out that ocean conditions appear to be having a dramatic impact on salmon populations.
Darm said no one can predict what ocean conditions will be from year to year, but scientists have clearly identified dams as a consistent detriment to fish passage.
“Nobody has proposed management we can take to change ocean conditions,” she said.
If dams are the problem, she was asked, why are salmon and steelhead runs declining on undammed coastal rivers?
“Snake River stocks are declining at a faster rate than those on the coast,” she said. “The conclusion is that the dams are the cause of the steeper decline.”
What about harvest?
“Sport, tribal and commercial harvest already was cut back drastically in the 1980s, and more cuts are being negotiated. What’s troubling, is that the fish returns didn’t show any response to cutting the harvest rate from 70 percent to 15 percent (of the returning salmon). If harvest was the problem, why did the stocks continued to decline?”
What about predators?
“That’s a big problem. We have a compromised ecosystem in the lower Columbia, where the corps is dredging, artificial islands are being created which benefit fish-eating birds, shores are developed and riprapped and driftwood is being dragged out of the river channel leaving salmon no place to hide.
“We need to deal with the whole ecosystem.”
Flushing Roosevelt: Anglers should brace themselves for the runoff that likely will flush most of Lake Roosevelt’s salmon and kokanee through Grand Coulee Dam.
That’s what happened in 1997, when the lake level was drawn down to an elevation of 1,208 feet, the lowest in decades.
The lake’s net-pen project has the potential to revive the fishery fairly quickly. Last year, the lake’s lowest level was 1,255 feet. Few fish were lost, and from late fall through the early winter, the fishing for rainbows was good.
“We were hoping for two full years to get the fishery up to speed again,” said Gene Smith, who coordinates the lake’s net-pen rearing project for trout and kokanee. “It doesn’t look like we’re going to get it.”
Drawdowns as low as 1,212 occurred in the early 1980s. But the pool level remained fairly high during the first half of the ‘90s, when anglers started flocking to the lake to catch big rainbows and kokanee longer than 20 inches.
With this spring’s runoff volume forecast at 117 percent of average, the lake is scheduled to be drawn down at least to 1,220 feet by the end of April to protect the Portland area from flooding.
At this time in the flood year of 1997, the projected runoff was 123 percent of normal.