Salmon being transported past dams

LEWISTON – Federal fish and water managers have started trapping young salmon and loading them into trucks to haul past dams, attempting to help them survive low water levels in the Snake and lower Columbia rivers this spring and summer.

As the number of juvenile salmon in upstream waters increases later this month and in May, the officials will start using barges for the downstream transportation project, said Ed Mosey of Bonneville Power Administration. The fish are released below Bonneville Dam, the last dam before the Columbia River reaches the ocean.

Because of the dry winter, planned water spills will be halted at four dams: Lower Granite, Little Goose and Lower Monumental dams on the Snake River and McNary Dam on the Columbia River. Instead, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will trap as many of the juvenile fish as possible and ship them down river.

Water will still be spilled at other dams that lack fish-trapping facilities. Environmental organizations, fishing groups and Indian tribes want the government to continue spilling water at all Snake and Columbia River dams, saying it will improve fish survival.

“Given that there are going to be very poor conditions (in the river) and very high mortality, we think it’s going to be very important to do as much as possible to try to make the mortality sort of bad instead of disastrous,” said Pat Ford, executive director of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition at Boise.

Ford’s group has joined with Indian tribes, environmentalists and fishing groups in a lawsuit against the government’s salmon plan. If they win, a judge could order water to be spilled at all the dams.

A hearing in the case is set for April 27, but a decision by a judge on whether to grant a preliminary injunction to require more spilling and less barging isn’t expected until May, said attorney Steve Mashuda of the environmental law firm Earthjustice in Seattle.

“It seems awful early for them to be transporting, and we’ve been arguing the past five years that the practice of taking fish out of the river and putting them in trucks and barges every year violates the Endangered Species Act,” he said.

During years with normal river flows, the federal salmon plan calls for water to be spilled at the dams and for juvenile salmon to be trapped and transported on barges. Known as the “spread-the-risk” policy, the plan is designed to give threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead the best chance at surviving their journey to the ocean.

However, that policy is abandoned when forecasts call for spring and summertime flows less than 70,000 cubic feet per second at Lower Granite Dam, about 35 miles west of Lewiston on the Snake River. This year, the corps has estimated the average flow at Lower Granite will be 50,000 cubic feet per second.

In the life cycle of salmon, eggs are hatched in inland streams, sometimes in high mountain creeks. After a few months of growth, the young fish head downstream to the Pacific, where they will live for years before returning inland to spawn and die.

Salmon fisheries are worth millions of dollars, and the fish provide spiritual and physical sustenance for many Indian tribes.