Utility floats an idea for salmon

BAKER LAKE, Wash. – Since February, crews here have been working on a floating engineering puzzle – the first of its kind in the world, they say.

Constructed on a cove in Baker Lake at the end of a temporary causeway, the 26-foot-tall structure is Puget Sound Energy’s latest method for getting the fish from Baker Lake down the 312-foot-high hydroelectric dam and out to the Skagit River.

The utility hopes the new $40 million fish passage system and $112 million total in other improvements in the works will quadruple current numbers of Baker River sockeye salmon returning to the watershed to spawn.

“We’re really enthused to see it under construction and about to go into effect,” said Stan Walsh of the Skagit River System Cooperative – a group representing the fisheries interests of the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes.

Walsh said the old fish passage system has had its downsides for salmon.

“A lot of juvenile sockeye and coho just don’t make it out of the reservoir,” Walsh said. Seven years have gone into the design of the new facility, he said. “Hopefully (the fish) will want to use it.”

The new fish passage system is part of the agreement Puget Sound Energy made with a number of government agencies, environmental groups and tribes as part of its application for a new license to operate the dams.

The agreement provides for a number of projects to make up for the impacts of operating the dams. The total cost to PSE for those projects was estimated at $360 million in funds and lost power over 30 years, according to PSE spokesman Roger Thompson.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is still in the process of deliberating over that application.

Cary Feldmann, manager of PSE’s resource sciences, and agencies that helped develop the floating surface collector – including the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service – hope to see increases in returning salmon continue.

“They did a great job of recovering and putting in artificial spawning beaches and brought up the runs to higher than they’ve ever been in known history,” said Arn Thoreen, a former commercial fisherman and founding board member of the Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group.

But Thoreen said in addition to the floating surface collector and other PSE plans for fish improvements upriver, he and others hoped the utility would also implement downstream habitat improvements.

Those improvements were part of the settlement agreement PSE made, Thoreen said, but then the federal agency reviewing PSE’s application for a new license deemed the downstream improvements unnecessary.

PSE has said it will implement the agreed-upon downstream projects even if FERC throws them out.

The new floating surface collector currently under construction will take over for an aging machine that Puget Sound Energy people call “the gulper.”

The gulper creates a current to attract and then capture the fish from the lake so that the juvenile fish can be trucked in tanks below the dams for their migratory journey out to sea.

The new gulper is bigger and better.

The barge’s hull was made in Montana and shipped to Baker Lake in 25 loads, said Jim Fillis, a senior project manager for PSE. Crews are working now on completing the barge while it floats in the lake.

The barge, designed to operate unmanned most of the time, runs on a system of pumps. It posed an engineering problem because it has to work in an environment where the water levels continually fluctuate.

The 130-foot by 60-foot barge will be deployed Oct. 1 right next to the face of the dam.

In it, four Swedish-made, 145-horsepower pumps can altogether generate a current of about 1,000 cubic feet per second. That’s about as fast as the Baker River itself this time of year.

Fish swim toward the current, instinctively looking for a way out to the ocean when they’re ready to leave their native freshwater.

The current starts out slowly, at one-tenth of a foot per second, then quickly speeds up to 8 feet per second.

“You don’t want to have anything abrupt because the fish will sense a change, and they’ll turn around and leave,” Feldmann said.

Once the fish are caught in the gulper, the water then has to decelerate gradually so they aren’t injured against the screens through which the water flows. The current drops them into a large pool so the fish can rest.

The openings in the screen are small enough to hold back – like a colander would – even the smallest fish in the region.

The fish collector will be powered with 1,500 kilowatts of electricity – enough to power a good-size neighborhood, said Fillis, the senior project manager.

PSE plans to start operating the new fish passage system next spring when juveniles are ready to migrate.