By Eric Barker
May 17, 2017

A new forecast that slashed the expected return of spring chinook to the Columbia River and its tributaries led Washington to close salmon fishing on the Snake River on Tuesday and cast uncertainty on the future of other seasons in the basin.

State, tribal and federal fisheries managers from around the Columbia River basin now expect only about 75,000 spring chinook to make it to Bonneville Dam, about half of the preseason forecast. If the prediction holds true, it could alter or upend future and present fishing seasons.

Fisheries managers had already closed fishing on the Columbia upstream of the dam, and the closure of the modest fishery on the Snake River is the second casualty of the poorly preforming run. Idaho Fish and Game officials are taking a wait-and-see approach before making any decisions about ongoing fishing seasons on the Clearwater, Salmon, Little Salmon and Snake rivers.

Brett Bowersox, a biologist with the department at Lewiston, said agency officials are concerned and will monitor the run based on counts at Columbia and Snake River dams and the detection of tracking tags many of the fish carry. He said no change will be adopted until after this weekend.

"We are going to operate on the reality of what our fish coming over Bonneville tell us," he said. "We still have Idaho-bound pit tags crossing Bonneville that is increasing the run, but we are operating at a much later run timing than we have ever seen before so it's much harder to predict what is going to happen."

Flows on the Columbia River at The Dalles, Ore., continue to be extraordinarily high, and the number of chinook passing Bonneville Dam is well below the long-term average. Monday's count of about 2,200 chinook brought the season total at the dam to 33,798. The 10-year average is 124,728. Only 234 chinook have been counted passing Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River. The 10-year average is more than 25,000.

Becky Johnson, production manager for the Nez Perce Tribes Fisheries Division, said she and other managers are monitoring the run with an eye toward ensuring enough adult fish will return to meet spawning needs at various hatcheries. She said only one adult chinook has been captured at Rapid River Hatchery near Riggins this spring.

"Typically this time of year we are trapping broodstock," she said.

Despite the extreme tardiness of the run and the downgraded forecast, some salmon managers still believe large numbers of fish are stalled in the lower Columbia River and could save the run with an upriver surge as soon as flows drop. Ron Roler of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife said there is ample evidence to back that theory.

"The recreational fishery, the test fisheries, all the indices say there is fish down there except for (fish counts at) Bonneville. Until the Bonneville counts come up it's a disastrous run."

For example, Roler said, most of the 6,900 adult chinook caught by anglers below Bonneville Dam were harvested in the last few days of the season there. The fishing conditions were poor at the time but harvest was distributed over more than 100 miles of river.
"So in order for them to catch lots of fish, there had to be lots of fish," he said.

If the run doesn't outperform the latest update, Oregon and Washington will have exceeded their shares of the available harvest even though the states implemented a 30 percent harvest buffer to guard against overfishing when runs don't live up to preseason forecasts.

Stuart Ellis of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission said there is precedence for an extremely tardy run. For example, in 1952 the peak of the run didn't hit Bonneville Dam until May 27, and in 1948 it peaked May 12.

"They do kind of point out it is possible for these runs to have some strength in the tails. I hope we get lucky and this run has some strength to it."

The Snake River fishery in Washington was open for just two days a week, with angling allowed near Clarkston and Little Goose Dam on Sundays and Mondays and at Ice Harbor Dam on Thursdays and Saturdays. Roler said anglers caught 65 fish during the three weekends the season was open. Most of that harvest was near Ice Harbor Dam, and none of it happened in the Clarkston stretch.

As of Monday, Idaho Fish and Game officials had not detected any chinook harvest on the Clearwater River.

January 1. 2016

By ERIC BARKER

LEWISTON, Idaho. Idaho's vertical geography may give salmon, steelhead and other native fish a fighting chance as climate change continues to alter their habitat for the worse.

Scientists say resident fish such as cutthroat trout and to a lesser degree bull trout will still have plenty of clean, cool water in the Gem State. The mountain spawning grounds of anadromous fish like salmon and steelhead will still be productive. But the powerful sea-run fish will face uncertain conditions in the ocean and find it even more difficult to negotiate the heavily altered habitat in the Snake and Columbia rivers.

Most climate models show future Idaho receiving about the same or slightly more precipitation than it does now. With rising air temperatures, modeling predicts more of that moisture will fall as rain instead of snow. Spring floods that flush juvenile salmon and steelhead to the ocean and help them pass dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers will likely arrive earlier and be shorter in duration and volume.

Mountain streams that depend on melting snow to feed them throughout the summer will see lower flows and higher temperatures. That effect will cascade downstream where mainstem rivers will also see lower flows and higher temperatures.

Climate scientists are less certain about what will happen in the ocean. But they say there could be less of the upwelling that helps seed the upper layers with nutrients that feed the base of the food chain. The ocean also is expected to become more acidic, a problem for many lower-food-chain species.

To get an idea of what the climate might be like for salmon, steelhead and trout, look no further than last summer. The entire Pacific Northwest saw meager snowfall, much-reduced runoff and high summer stream temperatures. Sockeye salmon were hit the hardest. Returning adults faced unprecedented high water temperatures and the run melted away as the fish stalled or perished in the Snake and Columbia rivers.

"Redfish Lake sockeye are probably the most at risk," said Lisa Crozier, a research ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Science Center in Seattle. "They are in the river at the worst time of year."

Ocean conditions were poor, which led to weak returns of fish like coho salmon.

"I think this summer in many ways was a climate change stress test on Northwest salmon habitat," said Nate Mantua, climate and fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Santa Cruz, Calif. "You could see which runs were especially vulnerable to a situation with much higher temperatures, much reduced snow pack in our mountains and about average precipitation for Northwest watersheds."

But Dan Isaak, a U.S. Forest Service fisheries biologist at Boise, said Idaho's salmon and trout may be better off than those in other Northwest states. Because Idaho is steep, ranging in elevation from 750 feet at the mouth of the Clearwater River in Lewiston to more that 12,600 feet at the top of Mount Borah in the Lost River Range, there is great hope that even if climate change shrinks the range of some native fish that enough cold water habitat will remain for the species to be viable.

"We are a really steep state, which creates a strong temperature gradient," he said. "So as things warm up the temperature isotherm doesn't shift nearly as far as it does in a flat place. That has a really dominating effect on how much the thermal habitat is going to shift."

In many cases, Isaak said cold water fish species may be able to simply move upstream, sometimes as little as a few kilometers. Fish that live in places where the habitat is on the verge of being too warm will be in trouble. But high mountain streams that are too cold today to promote adequate fish growth might become ideal in the future. For example, there are places where it is simply too frigid for cutthroat trout to thrive.

"They are going to gain (habitat) at about the same rate on the top end as they are going to lose it at the bottom end."

Bull trout also will likely find enough cold water to persist in Idaho, Isaak said. But they are likely to suffer more than cutthroat. The trout that is actually a char occur at low densities and need large expanses of cold water. They are not limited by frigid temperatures at the highest elevations. So as streams warm from the bottom up, bull trout habitat will be squeezed.

"Wherever it's warming up, they are gradually losing habitat," Isaak said.

The big problem for salmon and steelhead won't be the habitat where the adults spawn and the juveniles hatch and rear before going to the ocean. The pinch point will likely be the migration corridor when adults and juveniles will be forced to deal with less and warmer water in the dam-altered Snake and Columbia rivers.

If the unprecedented conditions of last summer become more common by the middle of the century, Mantua said some species of salmon and steelhead will be hard-pressed to adjust.

"Some salmon have evolved a calendar that has worked for many centuries. But if the climate changes the way models suggest it will in the next 50, 60, 70 years, that life history becomes difficult and maybe untenable."

Mantua said salmon have displayed great adaptive capacity over thousands of years, and given a chance that ability will help them deal with climate change.

"If we can build what people talk about — resilience — just by providing more and more options for them on the fresh water and estuary side, I think that gives them a lot of hope for dealing with a future with a lot of change because that is what they have always done."

Abysmal run of fish to Clearwater River prompts use of nets and elite anglers to gather broodstock for hatcheries

By ERIC BARKER, July 27. 2017

Idaho Fish and Game officials are taking some extraordinary measures to help ensure hatcheries on the Clearwater River aren't short of adult spring chinook.

Regional Fisheries Manager Joe DuPont said the hatcheries collectively are about 1,500 fish short of the goals for adult returns, known as broodstock. To help close the gap, department employees will use nets to try to capture spring chinook that return to the South Fork of the Clearwater River. They have also recruited help from anglers on the Clearwater's North Fork to assist with the effort.

This year's spring chinook run fell well short of preseason predictions. Returns to the Clearwater River and its tributaries were so low that biologists feared hatcheries might not make their spawning goals, and the fishing season was closed early. Although there is still time for hatchery chinook to return to hatcheries, those fears are starting to play out.

Adult hatchery chinook returning to Red River, a tributary of the South Fork, are collected at a trap on the river and later trucked to hatcheries. It is common for many of the fish to stop short of the trap and instead spend time in deep pools.

"They have done a lot of habitat work with log jams and the fish just kind of hang in there, and a lot of the hatchery fish never go up (to the trap)," DuPont said.

He said department employees used nets in those pools this week with the goal of capturing about 150 chinook. They caught 99 and will return next week for another round of captures.

On the North Fork, the department has recruited a small group of elite anglers to catch adult spring chinook. Those that are caught will be moved to Dworshak National Fish Hatchery at Ahsahka.

DuPont said it's still possible the hatcheries will meet spawning goals despite the present shortfall. Adult chinook will continue to be trapped at Dworshak Hatchery. Rapid River Hatchery near Riggins has surpassed its return goal, so some of those fish can be moved to hatcheries on the Clearwater.

DuPont said the department also is likely to trap more summer chinook on the Lochsa River than is needed for spawning. Summer chinook in the Lochsa return about a month later than spring chinook but spawn about the same time, in late August and early September. The extra Lochsa fish can take up any hatchery space left vacant by the low return of spring chinook. However, the summer chinook would not be spawned with the springers. Instead, they would be segregated within hatcheries.

"Hopefully we don't need to do that, but it's an option," DuPont said. "We'd rather have the hatchery full of something rather than nothing."

Fish counts at Bonneville Dam below that of 2016

By ERIC BARKER
July 14, 2017

By all accounts, 2017 was never supposed to be a banner year for steelhead.

The A-run is forecast to be a little better than last year's dismal return - which some biologists called a complete year-class collapse - but still well below average. The B-run is expected to be terrible.

It's too early to freak out, but counts of steelhead passing Bonneville Dam already are lagging behind those of 2016. Steelhead from the A-run, those that tend to spend just one year in the ocean, are arriving now and will be followed by the B-run in late August and September.

From June 1 through Tuesday, just shy of 4,000 steelhead had passed the dam. Last year, one of the worst on record for the A-run, more than 20,000 steelhead passed the dam in the same time period.

"If the counts don't improve and we go along for three more weeks like we have been, then it's time to start telling people this year is bad and it might be worse than we forecast, but we are nowhere near there yet," said Alan Byrne, an Idaho Department of Fish and Game fisheries biologist at Boise. "The counts could still improve. The facts of the matter are the Bonneville counts are way below what our average counts are this time of year. But we are only a couple of weeks into the run. We won't know the strength of the run until the first week of August."

The preseason forecast calls for a return of 112,100 A-run steelhead to Bonneville Dam, including 33,000 wild fish and 79,100 hatchery fish. Those steelhead will be bound for various parts of the Columbia Basin, and about 50 percent of them are expected to head up the Snake River and pass over Lower Granite Dam.

Fisheries managers are expecting only 7,300 B-run steelhead to pass Bonneville Dam, including just 1,100 wild fish. About 70 percent of them are expected to return to the Snake River, which works out to about 4,340 hatchery and 770 wild Bs at Lower Granite Dam.

"We were fully expecting a very down B-run and not that great of an A-run, but better than last year," said Joe DuPont, regional fisheries manager for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. "Now it makes me a little uneasy."

While the numbers of A-run steelhead counted at Bonneville are depressing, DuPont said there may be a glimmer of hope when you single out Idaho-bound hatchery fish. The numbers show the early part of the run is about average compared to those since 2010. But he cautioned the math is based on just two hatchery fish implanted with PIT tags that have passed Bonneville.

"What bothers me more is the big picture, when it's more than just Idaho fish, when you are looking at all steelhead, counts over Bonneville are way down," DuPont said.

It's so low that you have to retreat to 1950 to find a year with a lower to-date steelhead count. Washington has implemented special rules in the Columbia River and many of its tributaries designed to protect B-run fish returning later this year, as well as A-run steelhead destined for the upper Columbia River. Idaho is monitoring the run and is prepared to implement restrictions designed to protect B-run steelhead in both the Clearwater and Salmon rivers.

Ron Roler said the low steelhead numbers mimic other data from this year's salmon and steelhead runs. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist at Olympia said spring chinook numbers were down, the Columbia River sockeye count is well below forecast and ocean fishing indicates a poor run of coho can be expected. A-run steelhead, coho and sockeye tend to spend just one year in the ocean before returning to fresh water to spawn. Last year, the poor ocean conditions and warm water blob of 2015 were blamed for the low returns. The ocean conditions have improved some, but Roler said it appears the change wasn't fast enough to help fish returning this year.

Ocean anglers are catching good numbers of fall chinook, which Roler said may offer another glimmer of hope for fall fisheries.

Maria LaGanga, June 18, 2014.

A coalition of conservation and fishing organizations on Tuesday sued the federal agencies responsible for protecting endangered salmon and steelhead trout populations in the Pacific Northwest, charging that the agencies’ latest plan to aid 13 at-risk species falls short.

The lawsuit targets the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, asking a federal judge to rule the current plan invalid and order the government to craft one that better protects the species.

“We want the judge to tell the government to prepare a plan that complies with the law … and protects the salmon, which is what the law requires,” said Todd True, lead attorney for Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law firm.

The group wants the government to consider measures such as taking down four dams on the Lower Snake River or increasing so-called spill -- sending more water over hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers to allow juvenile fish to swim past more easily and have a better chance of reaching the ocean.

In 1991, the Snake River sockeye was listed as endangered by the federal government, which then put forth its first plan to protect and bring back the species. Not long after that plan was released, environmental and fishing groups sued, saying the protections were not sufficient.

The suing groups prevailed, said Joseph Bogaard, executive director of Save Our Wild Salmon, one of the conservation groups involved in Tuesday's lawsuit and earlier litigation. Since the first federal listing 23 years ago, he said, the number of endangered fish populations in the region has grown to 13, and litigation over government protections has been continuous.

“Not a single population of salmon listed in the Columbia Basin has been delisted,” Bogaard said. “Populations still remain far, far from recovery. You have to ask yourself what the hell we are doing. We’re spending taxpayer and ratepayer money on programs that aren’t actually helping.”
Bogaard, True and representatives from the other organizations suing the government charge that the latest federal plan to protect the salmon, which was released in January, barely differs from earlier plans that were deemed insufficient by the courts.

But the government and an organization representing utilities, agricultural groups and other river users defended the federal plan Tuesday, saying it protects fish populations and decrying the lawsuit.

“We have made clear and demonstrable progress in rebuilding salmon and steelhead runs throughout the Columbia Basin, and we fully expect this substantial progress to continue,” said Connie Barclay, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The National Marine Fisheries Service, now called NOAA Fisheries, is a division of NOAA, which is part of the Commerce Department.

Barclay said her agency was not surprised by the suit but was “disappointed at the prospect of yet another cycle of litigation, which only distracts from implementing projects on the ground.”
She said NOAA Fisheries would continue to work with regional partners “to ensure the protection and restoration of these important fish and their habitats now and well into the future.”

Terry Flores, executive director of Northwest RiverPartners, called the coalition that sued the government Tuesday “perennial critics.” And she derided the lawsuit as “deja vu all over again, as they repeat claims they’ve made for years, despite documented progress that includes the most abundant salmon returns we’ve seen in decades.”

Northwest RiverPartners is an alliance of utilities, farmers, ports and other businesses. In a statement, the group noted that the law prohibits federal hydropower dams from jeopardizing fish survival – a standard it says the current plan already meets through “fish-passage technologies and safe levels of spill.”

“The agencies have been spilling at the dams at safe levels for fish for years,” Flores said. “The litigants' demands for ever more spill could actually harm or kill the very salmon they say they want to protect.”

More media coverage on the lawsuit:

Associated Press: Latest federal plan for Columbia salmon challenged (June 17)

Los Angeles Times: Groups sue U.S. agencies, saying plan to protect salmon falls short (June 17)

EarthFix/Northwest Public Radio: Federal salmon plan heads back to the courtroom (June 17)

Spokesman-Review: Columbia River salmon plan challenged (June 18)

Lewiston Morning Tribune: Federal salmon plan contested again (June 18)

From the desk of Linwood Laughy
Kooskia, ID
January 2017
 
During the January 2013 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ open house in Lewiston (ID) on the draft Lower Granite Dam Programmatic Sediment Management Plan, long-time dam opponent Bill Chetwood posed a hypothetical question. “Suppose,” he asked a panel of Corps staff, “that one day not a single barge was traveling on the Lower Granite pool. Would you still dredge the navigation channel here?”  “Yes,” came a Corps staffer’s reply. “We are authorized to do so.”

In 1995, 1,225 barges transported a multitude of products on the Lower Snake waterway.  In 2015 that number was 358. That 71 per cent decline has been steady and well documented. The lower Snake River waterway today no longer transports lumber, logs, paper, pulp, or pulse (garbanzos, dry peas and lentils). Wheat is nearly the only commodity still barged, though wheat volumes have declined through the years as well. A principal reason for these shipping declines is the growing efficiency of rail transportation and an expanded rail network resulting from a series of public/private partnerships and investments.

Meanwhile the costs of operation and maintenance of the river navigation system continues to climb, exceeding $10 million annually. This amount does not include expenditures like major periodic dredging. Since 2005 the Corps has spent $33 million just on “sediment management” on the Lower Granite reservoir, an estimated 80% of which was required to maintain a shipping channel to the Port of Lewiston and enable a single private corporation to ship grain from its own property over its own docks. The Port of Lewiston no longer ships any freight over its only dock, extended in 2013 at a taxpayer cost of $2.8 million following a 12 year, 70% downward plunge in container volume.

Taxpayers will drop at least another $33 million for lock repairs on the Columbia and Snake navigation system over the 14-week river closure that began December 12th, 2016.  This follows a similar major shutdown with costly repairs just a few short years ago—in 2010-2011.

Below find a simple graph showing the decline in barges on the Lower Granite pool. Data on the entire Snake River Project would show similar results.

The Corps of Engineers categorizes waterways according to the number of ton-miles of freight shipped. A ton-mile represents the transport of one ton of freight over a distance of one mile. The lower Snake falls into the Corps’ category of a waterway of “negligible use.” If the volume of freight doubled, the lower Snake River would remain in this category.
 
Two reminders: the recent claims by the dams’ defenders that freight volume on the LSR project has increased over the last four years is false. This reported increase results from a large increase in petroleum products shipped to the Port of Pasco’s tank farm located two miles up the Snake from its confluence with the Columbia River in south-central Washington State. This location is 7 miles below Ice Harbor Dam—the most downstream dam on the lower Snake River. The volume of petroleum passing through Ice Harbor lock is typically zero. This traffic from the Columbia River upstream to the Port of Pasco tank farm could continue after the lower Snake River dams are removed. Claiming that this freight is part of the volume shipped through the locks and on the reservoirs of the four LSR dams is extraordinarily misleading to Northwest residents, elected officials and American taxpayers.

Secondly, whenever supporters of the lower Snake River dams speak of “the Columbia-Snake River System,” be prepared to be misinformed.  This is the same trick the agencies and special interest lobbying groups use with respect to hydropower.  The LSR dams produce less than 4% of the power in the Pacific Northwest power grid and only 6.5% of the Northwest’s hydropower. Wind energy alone now produces annually three times the energy produced by all four LSR dams. Likewise, the lower Snake River transports just 5% of the freight that travels on the Columbia-Snake River System.

Any claim or implication that the lower Snake River is a major contributor to northwest freight transportation or energy production is at best misleading. The very modest, costly services these dams provide can be replaced by salmon-friendly, taxpayer-friendly alternatives such as expanded rail and continued investments in wind and solar energy.

On May 4th, the long-awaited verdict from U.S. District Court in Portland (OR) was issued. Judge Michael Simon soundly rejected the federal agencies’ 2014 Columbia Basin Salmon Plan. While this is the 5th federal plan since 2000 to meet this fate, last month’s ruling was significantly different.

Here are a series of links to the ruling, SOS factsheets, and media coverage.

I. U.S. DISTRICT COURT RULING (May 4, 2016):

NWF et al v. NMFS et al

------------------------------------

II. SOS FACTSHEETS(May 2016):

#1: Opinion Backgrounder: What did the court do? Why it's different? What's next?

#2: Highlighted Quotations from the May 4, 2016 U.S. District Court Verdict 

#3: Climate Change, Cost, and the Lower Snake River Dams

------------------------------------

III. A PARTIAL LIST OF MEDIA CLIPS: editorials, articles and guest opinions (May/June 2016):

Idaho Mountain Express Editorial: Stop the Dance of Death(6.2.2016)

East Oregonian Editorial: Feds are running out of half measures(5.10.2016)

Seattle Times Op-Ed: Federal court decision is a critical opportunity for salmon, energy and communities(5.14.2016)

Crosscut.com: Judge: Failed salmon restoration has cost billions(5.17.2016)

Idaho Statesman Guest Opinion: Dams are damning wild salmon and steelhead in Idaho and the Northwest(5.22.2016)

Idaho Mountain Express: Middle Fork could regain role as salmon nursery. But biologist says out-of-basin factors remain obstacles(5.27.2016)

Green Acre Radio: The Great Salish Sea: Double Jeopardy - Endangered Orcas and Endangered Salmon (6.15.2016)

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Rebecca Bowe | rbowe@earthjustice.org | 415-217-2093

Court to Consider Immediate Measures to Bolster Salmon Survival
Plaintiffs seek increase in spill and a halt to spending on dam infrastructure that may soon be retired
 
The U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore. will hear arguments on March 9 concerning Earthjustice’s motion for injunction seeking short-term measures to improve salmon survival rates. The requested actions will better provide safe passage for juvenile salmon navigating the heavily dammed Columbia River Basin during the spring migration season, and help ensure a level playing field as federal dam operators consider the possibility of dam removal on the lower Snake River.

Plaintiffs seek an increase in water releases over spillways at the four lower Snake River and four lower Columbia River dams, to improve survival rates for endangered juvenile salmon bound for the ocean. They also request a moratorium on tens of millions in capital spending on projects that would extend the life of dams on the lower Snake River that may soon be retired. Federal agencies are currently in the process of conducting a NEPA/EIS Review in the wake of a May 2016 ruling that rejected a previous salmon protection plan as illegal under NEPA and the Endangered Species Act. Agencies must consider lower Snake River dam removal as an alternative under that analysis.

WHO
Earthjustice, together with the State of Oregon and with support from the Nez Perce Tribe, is representing a host of fishing groups and conservation organizations including the National Wildlife Federation, Save Our Wild Salmon, Pacific Coast Federation of Fisheries Associations, Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, Idaho Rivers United, and more. WHAT:
U.S. District Court of Portland hears motion for injunction. WHEN:
Thursday, March 9, 2017. 10 a.m. WHERE:
Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, Room 1327
1000 Southwest Third Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97204-2944 REPORTER RESOURCES:

• Background on fight to save wild salmon
• Reply memo in support of Motion for Injunction
• Declaration of Kevin Lewis, executive director of Idaho Rivers United

By Lee Rozen, for the editorial board

May 26, 2017

Debate has been flowing back and forth for decades whether the four dams along the Lower Snake River produce more value in facilitating navigation and producing electricity than they cost in maintenance expenses and dead fish, especially wild salmon.

Fleets of experts on both sides argue their case articulately and passionately.

We - and the courts - have tended to look with greater skepticism at the arguments of dam proponents as barge traffic dwindles on the Snake, other sources of electricity come online and dam maintenance costs rise sharply. And the fish continue to die. skepticism finds some fishy arguments in another case that involves salmon, but no dams.

A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Washington state - to comply with its treaty obligations on Indian fishing rights - must fix or replace hundreds of big concrete or steel pipes that carry streams under highways, but do so in such a way that they block migrating salmon.

The state says this could cost $2 billion, some of the culverts won't ever see a fish, treaties with Indians don't require this and precedents could be set affecting many other states. As a result, it wants a rehearing before more of the 9th Circuit court.

It seems the arguments against helping the salmon here are much weaker than those over the Snake River dams. Culverts produce nothing. They just get water from one side of a road to another so the road doesn't dam up a stream or wash out in a rainstorm.

If in the process they stop salmon from migrating upstream or down, that seems like a solvable problem.

In 2013, a trial judge gave the state until 2030 to fix the problem - 17 years. If the $2 billion cost estimate isn't inflated, that's $118 million a year. The state Department of Transportation is already spending roughly $215 million a year on highway construction and maintenance. Obviously, there's not $118 million in there just to fix culverts.

The state and tribes would be better off - as would the salmon - if they were trying together to create more financially reasonable solutions one highway, one river system at a time, rather than spending another day in court.

By The Editorial Board

July 4, 2016

There are two recent pieces of welcome news affecting the Pacific Northwest’s beleaguered salmon populations — battered by dams, habitat loss, timid government agencies and global warming.

In one, a federal court in Seattle found that 150-year-old treaties guaranteeing Native American tribes a permanent right to fish for salmon had been gravely compromised by hundreds of roadway culverts and pipelines that blocked the fish from reaching traditional spawning grounds.

The original treaties did not envision “such a cynical and disingenuous promise,” Judge William Fletcher, of the federal appeals court for the Ninth Circuit, ruled last week. He upheld a lower court’s order requiring Washington State to replace hundreds of culverts with bridges that restore the natural flow of the salmon runs.

The other hopeful sign was a stirring decision in May by Judge Michael Simon of the Federal District Court in Portland, Ore., ordering federal agencies back to the drawing board to devise an aggressive plan to stave off extinction for 13 salmon and steelhead species in the Columbia River basin that are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. He found the government’s latest proposal not only inadequate but illegal, in that it fell well short of the act’s mandate to ensure a species’ long-term recovery.

The ruling showed Judge Simon to be as vigorous a champion of the fish and of the act as his predecessor, now-retired Judge James Redden, who had rejected three survival plans from three different administrations — Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s. Judge Redden’s basic complaint was that none of the plans, however grand their promises of restoring fish habitat, called for the kind of major changes in the operations of the Pacific Northwest’s hydroelectric system necessary to ensure recovery. At best, he said, they promised to do little more than to slow the rate at which the fish would go extinct.

Judge Simon has come to essentially the same conclusion about the Obama administration’s latest proposal. But he went further by ordering the agencies to give serious consideration to an option that politicians in the Northwest have run from for years, but that offers the salmon its best chance — breaching, bypassing or removing one or more of the four big dams on the Lower Snake River. These dams are seen by many biologists as the single biggest obstacle to salmon recovery, and studies have shown that the power they generate can be replaced.

For two decades, the agencies have refused to even consider this course. Now they have to.

In the clamor of progress now driving the Pacific Northwest, these two rulings are well-timed reminders of the obligations to both nature and treaty law that must not be sacrificed along the way.

To view article go here.

Could the end be near for one of the West’s biggest dams?

By Abrahm Lustgarten

May 20, 2016

WEDGED between Arizona and Utah, less than 20 miles upriver from the Grand Canyon, a soaring concrete wall nearly the height of two football fields blocks the flow of the Colorado River. There, at Glen Canyon Dam, the river is turned back on itself, drowning more than 200 miles of plasma-red gorges and replacing the Colorado’s free-spirited rapids with an immense lake of flat, still water called Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reserve.

When Glen Canyon Dam was built in the middle of the last century, giant dam projects promised to elevate the American West above its greatest handicap — a perennial shortage of water. These monolithic wonders of engineering would bring wild rivers to heel, produce cheap, clean power and stockpile water necessary to grow a thriving economy in the desert. And because they were often remotely located, they were rarely questioned.

But today, there are signs that the promise of this great dam and others has run its course.

Climate change is fundamentally altering the environment, making the West hotter and drier. There is less water to store, and few remaining good sites for new dams.

Many of the West’s big dams, meanwhile, have proved far less efficient and effective than their champions had hoped. They have altered ecosystems and disrupted fisheries. They have left taxpayers saddled with debt.

And in what is perhaps the most egregious failure for a system intended to conserve water, many of the reservoirs created by these dams lose hundreds of billions of gallons of precious water each year to evaporation and, sometimes, to leakage underground. These losses increasingly undercut the longstanding benefits of damming big rivers like the Colorado, and may now be making the West’s water crisis worse.

In no place is this lesson more acute than at Glen Canyon.

And yet even as these consequences come into focus, four states on the Colorado River are developing plans to build new dams and river diversions in an effort to seize a larger share of dwindling water supplies for themselves before that water flows downstream.

The projects, coupled with perhaps the most severe water shortages the region has ever seen, have reignited a debate about whether 20th-century solutions can address the challenges of a 21st-century drought, with a growing chorus of prominent former officials saying the plans fly in the face of a new climate reality.

“The Colorado River system is changing rapidly,” said Daniel Beard, a former commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the government’s dams in the West. “We have a responsibility to reassess the fundamental precepts of how we have managed the river.”

That reassessment, Mr. Beard and others said, demands that even as new projects are debated, it is time to decommission one of the grandest dams of them all, Glen Canyon.

The dam, completed in 1963, was erected as a compromise.

In 1956 the Colorado River Storage Project Act paved the way for the construction of four large power-generating dams in the upper basin of the Colorado River — a project meant to match the dam development that the southern half of the river had already seen. The Bureau of Reclamation had zeroed in on a dam site on a tributary in northwestern Colorado called the Green River, where the resulting reservoir would have submerged a tract of treasured, fossil-laden parkland called Dinosaur National Monument. Environmentalists, led by David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, fought passionately to preserve the monument in one of the nation’s epic conservation battles.

As a compromise, all sides agreed instead to build a dam at a remote spot in southern Utah called Glen Canyon, in a region far from highways, about 200 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Glen Canyon Dam would help normalize the erratic flows of the Colorado and flood a land of barren sandstone domes and inaccessible dendritic canyons — transforming them into a surreal oasis called Lake Powell.

The result was an elegant, sweeping structure engineered in an arch bowing against the pressure of the water, enabling a relatively thin sheet of concrete to withstand unfathomable forces. The reservoir behind the dam would be so deep that the sheer height of the water promised to generate enormous currents of power. By all measures, its completion was a feat.

It took 17 years for the reservoir to fill; 19 years later, a steady decline began. Thanks to the steady overuse of the Colorado River system — which provides water to one in eight Americans and supports one-seventh of the nation’s crops — Lake Powell has been drained to less than half of its capacity as less water flows into it than is taken out.

That relative puddle is no longer capable of generating the amount of power the dam’s builders originally planned, and so the power has become more expensive for the government to deliver, with the burden increasingly falling on the nation’s taxpayers. In 2014 the agency managing power at the dam spent $62 million buying extra power on the open market to make up for shortfalls. The dam’s power sales are relied on to pay for the operations of other, smaller, dams and reservoirs used for irrigation in the West, and as Glen Canyon crumbles financially, so might the system that depends on it.

But it is not just the reservoir’s overuse that is causing it to shrink. More than 160 billion gallons of water evaporate off Lake Powell’s surface every year, enough to lower the reservoir by four inches each month. Another 120 billion gallons are believed to leak out of the bottom of the canyon each year into fissures in the earth — a loss that if tallied up over the life of the dam amounts to more than a year’s flow of the entire Colorado River.

In all, these debits amount to “the largest loss of water on the Colorado River,” Mr. Beard said, enough to supply some nine million people each year.

Glen Canyon is not the only dam to fall out of favor. Other major projects are also being decommissioned or re-evaluated.

The Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead, which on Wednesday fell to its lowest level ever, some 145 feet below capacity, also loses hundreds of billions of gallons to evaporation and is now 37 percent full. The lake behind Arizona’s Coolidge Dam, one of the state’s largest reservoirs, is virtually empty.

And dams are coming down. Six Western dams were deconstructed in 2015 alone. Just last month California and Oregon agreed to dismantle four more power-generating dams on the Klamath River, having realized that the facilities were crippling native salmon fisheries, which also have enormous economic value. And earlier this month a federal judge in Oregon ruled that, because of extensive ecological damage, the system of dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers “cries out for a major overhaul.”

Still, on the Colorado, water managers dispute the notion that it’s time for a change.

Glen Canyon Dam may be past its prime, said Michael Connor, the deputy Interior secretary and a former commissioner of reclamation, but it’s not past its usefulness. Though he called the amount of water lost to evaporation and leakage “incredibly significant,” Mr. Connor credited Glen Canyon with numbing the pain of the recent drought. “Look at the last 15 years,” he said. “It’s the lowest inflow in history and there’s been no shortages on the Colorado River, and that’s because of Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell and Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.”

There is also a political tide to be reckoned with: the delicate peace accord struck among seven Western states in 1922, and later with Mexico, that divides Colorado River water among them, and the fear that they’d never be able to reach such an agreement again. Lake Powell is the gateway that gives the Colorado’s upper basin states control of their water, and a way to withhold every drop not required to be sent to the states downriver. Get rid of Powell, its protectors warn, and the states will drag one another into legal chaos.

But decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam could offer a solution hard to ignore — a cheap, immediate and significant new source of water where it is most desperately needed.

The idea is this: Since two of the nation’s largest reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, just 300 miles apart — depend on the same dwindling water source but are each less than half full, they should be combined into one. Lake Mead would be deeper, and its evaporative losses would increase. But the surface area of Lake Powell would be substantially reduced, and the evaporating water from there would be saved. Furthermore, sending the water out of Glen Canyon would move it from a valley that leaks like a sieve into one that is watertight. Evaporation losses at Mead — say plan proponents — would be more than offset by savings at Lake Powell.

In all, according to Tom Myers, a hydrologist who studied the proposal for the Glen Canyon Institute, an environmental group advocating for combining the two reservoirs, about 179 billion gallons of water would be saved each year — more than enough to supply the population of the city of Los Angeles.

The argument has weight because both reservoirs have been struggling to remain half full, and may never refill as temperatures rise because of climate change. At the same time, the Bureau of Reclamation predicts that demand for water will continue to increase on the river so much that by 2060 the region will run short by a trillion gallons each year.

The Glen Canyon Dam itself would not be removed. Rather, its gates would be opened, and the water behind it allowed to pass through, restoring the natural flows into the Grand Canyon just below it, draining Lake Powell, and allowing the magnificently scenic landscape of Glen Canyon to be resurrected.

The water would not be lost. It would simply flow down through the Grand Canyon and be recaptured behind the Hoover Dam in Lake Mead.

“To me it is a no-brainer,” said David Wegner, who studied Glen Canyon as a scientist with the Department of Interior. “You’ve got very few options.”

Vast tracts of land now submerged would be restored, and broad sections of river pinned between vertical canyon walls would be transformed into remote wilderness valleys, their floors once again inviting exploration on horseback or on foot. Dozens of archaeological sites, their walls covered in petroglyphs, would be revealed. The flow of the river through the Grand Canyon would again be defined mainly by the precipitation gathered by the mountains upstream.

Restoring Glen Canyon this way has long been the campaign of ardent environmentalists. Mr. Brower, who agreed to the dam’s construction without having ever visited Glen Canyon, mounted an intense campaign to save “the place no one knew” after seeing it. He called the reservoir his greatest regret, and the Glen Canyon dam has been a potent symbol of the desecration of wild places ever since.

Now the shortages on the river, and the likelihood that climate change is certain to make them worse, have breathed new, pragmatic life into their arguments.

Whether the “Fill Mead First” proposal would improve the water supply depends on whether Mr. Myers is right about the amount of water that leaks out of the bottom of Lake Powell. He puts that number at about 124 billion gallons each year. But the Bureau of Reclamation has not adopted Mr. Myers’s findings and has long said that water that seeps into the ground eventually returns to the river. Combining the reservoirs would save negligible amounts of water, in the bureau’s view.

“This is an attempt to find a water supply rationale which supports their recreational focus and narrow view of what the river should look like,” said Colby Pellegrino, the Colorado River programs manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Ultimately, the decision to drain Lake Powell — or perhaps to forgo the other new dam and water projects now in the works on the river — comes down to a question of whether the seven states and Mexico that share the Colorado River really need the water badly enough.

If they conclude that they do, abandoning parochial concerns about how the river is supposed to work, and changing the status quo, however uncomfortable or complicated, will begin to seem worth it.

But Jim Lochhead, chief executive of Denver’s water utility, said decommissioning the dam would probably require an act of Congress, a new agreement among seven state legislatures, a revised treaty with Mexico, and a lengthy federal environmental impact analysis.

“A half a million acre feet sounds like a lot of water,” he said, referring to the water saved by combining the Powell and Mead reservoirs, “but I don’t think it’s significant enough, frankly, to justify going through all of that.”

Abrahm Lustgarten covers the environment for ProPublica. This is an excerpt from a longer article published by ProPublica.

To view full article with photos, maps and graphics go here.

December 5, 2016

A panel convened at the Nov. 17 NW Energy Coalition conference in Portland explored options and pitfalls associated with replacing power from the lower Snake River dams, should the dams be removed.

The panel, moderated by NWEC board member Joseph Bogaard, was charged with considering only the value of the dams' energy system and impacts to it, and not irrigation, navigation, recreation or other values.

The four dams on the lower Snake--Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite--have a collective nameplate generating capacity of 3,033 aMW and a combined average yearly output of about 1,075 aMW, said John Fazio, senior power systems analyst for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and a presenter on the Nov. 17 panel.

Joining Fazio on the panel were NWEC policy director Wendy Gerlitz and Northwest Requirements Utilities CEO Roger Gray, whose group represents 33 small BPA customers.

Gerlitz told the panel that the May 2016 federal court decision rejecting the Columbia-Snake River BiOp created a new opportunity to explore more economical and environmentally beneficial strategies for the regional energy system.

Ruling that the BiOp violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the court ordered a new EIS on hydro-system operations and alternatives likely to bring about salmon recovery.

U.S. District Judge Michael Simon's opinion suggested an EIS that included evaluation of dam removal on the lower Snake might "break through the status quo." He gave the BPA, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation five years to complete the EIS.

In assessing the value of the lower Snake River projects, "we have to take into account not only the amount and price of energy but also the amount of sustained peaking capacity they provide and the contribution of automatic generation control or of load-following that would have to be replaced if these dams went away," Fazio said.

The lower Snake dams provide ancillary services ranging from automatic generation control to spinning reserves to load following, he said.

Depending on how you replace them, both Gray and Fazio emphasized, there are consequences to the transmission system.

Hydro from the Snake River dams helps integrate wind and other renewable resources, Gray said.

"We need to understand the value of this integration. These resources may be important to inter-regional energy exchange value as well as to the public-utility subscribers," he said.

However, Gerlitz countered that no data from BPA actually documents use of the lower Snake dams for load following, integration or the other services Fazio and Gray described.

She said it's known these dams have very limited storage capacity and produce most of their output during the spring months when wind is also plentiful.

"In that situation, are the dams integrating or competing with wind?" she asked. "If they are competing with wind, are they working to bring market prices down?

"If these dams are being used for energy exchanges or integration," she continued, "to what extent? And what is the value of these services? We don't know the answers. We haven't seen these data."

Gray offered it is possible to determine what services these plants have provided and to figure out the technical replacements.

He and other panelists said the Western EIM, demand response, energy efficiency, distributed energy and renewables are probably part of a replacement package. Gerlitz underscored that the region wouldn't be replacing the lower Snake dams with a single technology.

"The alternatives come down to costs," Gray said. The Snake River dams are inexpensive plants today.

Several audience members countered that the economic and environmental costs of keeping the dams were not trivial.

"The cost of keeping those dams going, including some scheduled giant refurbishing, will be in the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars," Steve Weiss, a NWEC consultant, said.

Dealing with the Endangered Species Act is also a significant cost, Gray said.

NWEC estimated in an August 2015 report that replacing power from the lower Snake dams with carbon-free energy sources would cost about a dollar a month per Northwest household, Gerlitz said.

The panelists agreed that whether or not the lower Snake dams are coming out, the energy world is rapidly changing.

In about five years, Fazio said, the region will lose Colstrip units 1 and 2 and one unit of the Centralia coal-fired power plant. He also mentioned flood control in Canada changing in 2024, and a regional shift
toward summer peaking.

Lynn Best, Seattle City Light director of environmental affairs and NWEC board member, said her experience in western Washington indicated hydro is less predictable than it used to be. "Loads are shifting," she said. "Winter load is going down, while summer will probably increase.

"Shouldn't we look at what we actually need and what new resources would do for us 20 years from now when the hydro regime is really different?" she asked.

Gerlitz said it is important to recognize now is the time to figure this out "because we have the energy resources now."

Fazio added that the power system is only becoming more complex.

"There will be more rooftop solar, more wind and other renewable resources," he said. "We have to look at the smart grid and other ways to use the internet to help us."

The system is more multifaceted than removing and replacing 1,000 MW, Gerlitz said. "It's not simply a matter of building a gas plant and knowing what the cost is."

She said good answers are still needed to these questions: How valuable are the energy outputs and services of the four lower Snake River dams? How valuable are they in the context of salmon recovery and climate change?

"The process that was launched by Judge Simon's order is going to try and get at the questions of impacts on the energy system and salmon, and the alternatives," Gray said.

"We don't know what the scope of the EIS will be yet, but we want to know," he said. "The intention of the NEPA process is to answer these big questions."

Gerlitz cautioned that as the region goes down this path, the region must not tolerate a "subpar or outdated analysis."

"The analysis needs to be very cutting edge, the best of the best. Everyone using energy has a vested interest in this analysis," she said.

"We have to get to the right answer," Gray concluded. "As we look at replacement power, we have to look at everything--reliability, resilience. The question queued up here is a question bigger than the
Snake River."

http://www.newsdata.com/fishletter/364/2story.html

-Laura Berg

Courtney Flatt, April 19, 2017

Helping juvenile salmon migrate out to sea has long been difficult and controversial. Barging is a common way to get the fish around dams. 

The salmon are hauled around eight dams in the Columbia and Snake rivers. Idaho Conservation groups say this practice harms fish — and needs to stop now. Seven groups sent a letter to NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, asking the agencies to this spring stop sending salmon along their migration route in barges. “When it comes to endangered sockeye salmon, the science shows that it’s particularly detrimental for sockeye salmon to be barged,” said Zack Waterman, Idaho Sierra Club director.

The groups say barging Snake River sockeye can make them more vulnerable to warm water conditions, like the 2015 drought and heatwave that killed 95 percent of the run. One reason: In barges, the fish can’t develop their homing abilities that help them return to spawning habitat as adults. “It takes the fish that were barged longer to make it back to where they were originally spawned at, than their counterparts that went through the river system,” Waterman said. NOAA officials say it’s long been known that it takes barged salmon a longer time to reach spawning grounds, but, they say, 2015 was a highly unusual year. By their math, excluding 2015 and 2014, it’s more beneficial to both barge juvenile salmon around dams and to allow others to fall over spillways. Every year isn’t going to be as hot as 2015, said Ritchie Graves, a fisheries biologist with NOAA Fisheries. He said barging is a way to increase your odds when gambling with Mother Nature. “If you’re playing on the roulette wheel in Las Vegas, and you have to make a bet every year, the smartest bet to make most of the time is still to at least bet some of your [juvenile salmon] on the transport strategy,” Graves said. Right now the federal government barges about 50 percent of Snake River sockeye salmon. Graves says the federal agencies are “diversifying risk.” “The problem with all this is we don’t know what the temperature is going to be like two years out,” Graves said. “Essentially we’re working under spread-the-risk advice. … We’re watching these numbers very carefully, and we’ll be thinking about how or if we need to change transport operations in the future.” The fish are collected above Lower Granite Dam in southeast Washington, along with other species that depend on barging, like steelhead. They’re then released below Bonneville Dam, about 50 miles east of Portland. Stopping barging, conservation groups said, would mean juvenile salmon would be spilled over the tops of dams. Ultimately, the groups would like to see the removal of the four Lower Snake River dams — this barging request, they say, is an important interim step to saving wild runs. “Removing the Lower Snake River dams — that’s what’s going to solve the problem,” said Kevin Lewis, Idaho Rivers United executive director. “Everything up to that point is a stopgap measure.” The conservation groups say juvenile mortality is the most problematic part of salmon recovery — that’s why how they get to the sea is important. David Cannamela is a retired fisheries biologist, now with Sierra Club. “We have 10,000 years of data that essentially prove that the river will work, and so for the long-term, anything that we can do that makes the system more like a river is going to be more successful to juvenile and adult [salmon] survival,” Cannamela said. Dam removal on the lower Snake has been consistently opposed by those who rely on the dams and impounded water for agriculture, hydroelectricity and commerce.

http://www.opb.org/news/article/conservation-groups-ask-to-stop-barging-sockeye-around-dams/

by Jes Burns Follow OPB/EarthFix | Aug. 15, 2016

Conservation groups announced plans Monday to sue the Environmental Protection Agency.  They say the agency isn’t doing enough to protect salmon from high water temperatures on the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Warm water can be deadly for salmon. Just last year, 250,000 sockeye died on the Columbia because of high temperatures.

The EPA started addressing the issue more than a decade ago, but that process stalled.

Miles Johnson of Columbia Riverkeeper said he hopes the lawsuit will jump start federal efforts to lower river temperatures.

“We want the EPA to take a holistic approach, to look at all the sources of temperature. But when EPA did that between 2000 and 2003, their conclusion was that it’s really the dams and flow that are controlling most of the temperature issues in the Columbia,” he said.

The lawsuit aims to force federal environmental regulators to determine “total maximum daily load” for the rivers, which would set a limit on water temperatures in order to protect salmon. The EPA and other agencies would then have to operate under those guidelines when regulating the river.

Johnson said a plan to manage river temperatures could include changes to dam operations and removal of what he called obsolete dams on the lower Snake River.

“I think this is really about whether, looking down the road 50 years from now, do we want to be teaching our children and grandchildren to catch salmon in the Columbia or explaining to them what salmon were?” Johnson said.

The EPA did not immediately provide an explanation for why the regulatory process was initially shelved.  A spokesperson said it was the agency’s policy not to comment on pending litigation.

Cassandra Profita March 27, 2017  

A judge has ordered federal agencies to spill more water over Columbia River dams to help threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead, though not until next year after testing.

The order from U.S. District Judge Michael Simon came in response to a motion filed by conservation groups together with the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe.

The groups represent the plaintiffs in a longstanding lawsuit over dams in the Columbia River Basin. Last year, Judge Simon rejected the federal plan for managing dams to protect salmon. Federal agencies are now in the process of writing a new plan.

The plaintiffs had asked the court to order as much spill as the law allows starting in April. State laws set limits on how much water can be spilled over dams before the gases produced in the process become harmful to fish.

In his response, released Monday, Simon said the federal agencies need time to test the effects of additional spill to avoid unintended consequences. He delayed the court order for increasing spill until the spring of 2018 to allow the agencies to test out spill options and develop tailored plans for individual dams. The court plans to confer the next year with the agencies’ on their plan for increasing spill.

Todd True, an EarthJustice attorney representing conservation groups, said new science shows spilling more water over the dams in the spring will improve the survival rate of imperiled fish by helping them reach the ocean.

“While we recognize that this relief will not eliminate the harm to salmon and steelhead from dam operations in the long run, we are encouraged that increased spring spill will be granted to reduce irreparable harm to juvenile salmon and steelhead,” True said in a statement about the ruling.

Spilling water over the dams reduces the amount of hydropower the agencies can produce.

Terry Flores, director of Northwest RiverPartners, represents ports, farms and utilities that rely on dam operations. She said the spill requested by the plaintiffs would have cost $40 million, which represents a 2 percent increase in customers’ electric bills. Flores said she’s worried her group “won’t get a fair shake” from the court in the larger case over dam management.

“We’re just very concerned that his judge believes that simply more spill is better,” she said. “We do know that some spill can be very good for fish, but too much spill can really harm fish or kill them.”

Flores points to studies showing young fish migrating though the dams can be exposed to too much gas and suffer from a condition similar to the bends. She said adult fish can have trouble finding the fish ladders that allow them to swim past the dams when there’s a lot of spill.

The plaintiffs also asked the court to stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from spending money on upgrades to the four lower Snake River dams until the new plan for managing dams is complete. Environmental groups are advocating for those dams to be removed as part of the new federal dam management plan.

Judge Simon did not grant their request to halt spending on all future upgrades, but he did tell the Corps to provide the court with advance notice of planned projects so the plaintiffs can seek injunctions in the future.

Flores said that decision raises concerns for her group as well because it shows the court is “willing to immerse itself in decisions relating to what sorts of investments should be made at the Snake River dams.”

She said those decisions are supposed to be made by Congress.

http://www.opb.org/news/article/court-orders-more-spill-over-columbia-river-dams-in-2018/

The following letter was sent from Oregon Governor Kate Brown to the Northwest Congressional delegation regarding HR 3144.

January 22, 2018

As Governor of the State of Oregon, I write expressing deep concerns with HR 3144. I am concerned this legislation would thwart fewer court direction to provide additional spill at dams on the lower Columbia and Snake rivers and the collaborative state, tribal and federal process that has worked effectively to develop spill provisions for 2018. These court-ordered collaborative efforts resulted in consensus recommendations from all sovereigns, representing a positive, and unprecedented, step forward in building stronger consensus from recovery actions. HR 3144 would negate this progress and our ability to implement and learn from these consensus recommendations.

HR 3144 would also derail ongoing collaborative efforts to examine a range of potential future dam operations and salmon management options required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The State of Oregon has engaged in good faith as cooperating agencies with federal agency leads for this Columbia Snake River Operations study. This process is vital to secure a sustainable path forward optimizing power, commerce, agriculture and fish recovery within a changing social and environmental landscape.

Through NEPA and the Endangered Species Act, Congress established processes for federal decision-making that are grounded in a robust analysis of alternatives in a systematic and science-based manner. HR 3144 contravenes these important principles and would disrupt the regional efforts to engage in a full, accurate and transparent analysis of salmon and dam management.

Washington Governor Inslee has expressed similar opposition to HR 3144. Oregonians and Washingtonians share decades of investment in covering Columbia River salmon, and I join my colleague in asking you to oppose HR 3144.

Sincerely,

Governor Kate Brown

November 20, 2013

By Liz Hamilton

At a time when Americans need their faith in government restored as national lawmakers play chicken with the world economy and approval ratings plummet --- out pops The Federal Family’s (Bonneville Power Administration, US Army Corps of Engineers and NOAA Fisheries) new biological opinion, which may surpass even those lows. The court-mandated biological opinion is the cornerstone for salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin.  None of the four previous attempts have passed the federal court’s straight face test, which has given rise to just how important basic principles of balance-of-power and the judicial branch of government are to the country, and ultimately Columbia Basin salmon.

Salmon are a part of the Oregon brand. Beyond iconic, these fish generate 11,000 jobs in Oregon. The Columbia Basin fuels a region-wide sportfishing economy generating nearly $4 billion in economic benefits and employing more than 34,500. If recovered, this basin becomes a destination for travelers from around the world to fish, enjoy the Oregon brand and leave an economic imprint that could total into the hundreds of millions annually.


The lone sentry for these important industry and community-enriching fish are the federal courts. The Federal Family, led by NOAA, has elected to embrace a minimalist approach focused on slowing the extinction rather than recovering these precious salmon. That’s at least what the scientists say. Time and again, the American Fisheries Society has looked at these plans and unanimously discarded them as folly, not recovery. How did we get here? When the dams were built the federal government recognized their impacts on these migratory runs of salmon and steelhead. Our nation passed laws to provide the proper mitigation to assure the future of these species. Since then numerous runs of salmon have gone extinct and 13 others are currently listed as either threatened or endangered. In large part what’s happened can be traced directly to the dams and their operation. Again, science, independent science, says so.

Frustrating the courts and stringing this discussion out over decades is of benefit to the dam operators because it means, for the most part, business as usual. Taking the low road might delay the hard choices about what’s needed to make sure these fish runs are recovered, but it just throws more money down the hole. In this case, it’s certainly reminiscent of that age-old adage of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Not only does the biological opinion not pass muster, it’s missing measures widely embraced by fishery scientists that would do more to help fish. For instance, large reservoirs are lethal mazes to salmon, and a drawdown of John Day Reservoir would make it friendlier to baby salmon and more flow is needed to push these baby salmon downstream through eight federal dams. Spilling water over the top of dams has benefited salmon more than any other measure, so much so that a federal judge ordered more spill. 

And what did the Federal Family do? Released a plan with less spill rather than using more of what has worked best for increasing salmon returns. What’s more, in what appears to be a punitive measure, BPA has announced it will slash funding for a critical program monitoring whether current baseline protections are even working – in the form of coded wire tags that provide key data on where the fish are going and how they are doing.


It’s time for these federal agencies to do the job they are hired to do, rather than to leave it to the courts to mandate how they do their business moving forward. It's time for government to show us they are on our side.    

Liz Hamilton is executive director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.

For more information: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/11/federal_government_doing_to_li.html

By Liz Hamilton, Jeff Feldner and Chris Daughters

June 26, 2016

As another early heat wave passes, we're reminded of last summer's devastating, record-hot river temperatures that closed down fishing opportunities and killed hundreds of thousands of returning salmon. With new rounds of record-high temperatures impacting Northwest waters, we're bracing our businesses in case we see a repeat of 2015.

Thankfully, those in the fishing industry and all who care about healthy rivers also have reason for renewed optimism about what's on the horizon.

Last month, a U.S. District Court judge in Portland opened the door to meaningful salmon and steelhead recovery efforts in the Columbia and Snake rivers after decades of failed plans by the federal agencies that oversee hydro and salmon management. The judge unequivocally rejected the most recent plan for managing threatened stocks of native fish runs for not taking into account the harmful impacts that climate change and dams have on salmon. The federal agencies have spent billions of dollars over the past two decades on a series of flawed federal plans that have been inadequate for the salmon and the commercial fishing and sport fishing businesses they support.

We believe this historic ruling opens the door to a new approach that will protect and restore our iconic fish populations and the jobs they sustain.

The judge has demanded a new way forward that's rooted in the best science and takes into account all viable salmon recovery alternatives. This new ruling presents a terrific opportunity for Northwest people to finally get it right.

The court agreed with the plaintiffs ˜ fishing advocates, conservationists, businesses, the Nez Perce Tribe and state of Oregon ˜ and found the agencies in violation of both the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act. It ordered a new lawful plan completed by March 2018.

Though impaired today, the Columbia/Snake remains one of the few productive river systems for wild Pacific salmon and steelhead. These rivers still support tens of thousands of fishing jobs across an area stretching inland to Idaho and along the West Coast from California to Alaska, bolstering a multibillion-dollar industry.

But with 13 stocks of salmon and steelhead still listed under the Endangered Species Act - and facing further threats from a changing climate - the court has insisted that federal agencies' failed strategies in the Columbia Basin require "a major overhaul."

Biologists have cited removal of the lower Snake River dams as the best tool we've got for restoring wild salmon at risk of extinction. Despite a rapidly growing list of river restoration success stories, federal agencies have avoided seriously considering this option. The recently restored Elwha River in Washington state is a nearby example of how quickly fish and wildlife populations can bounce back. Recent coverage in National Geographic points out that young chinook, chum and coho salmon have all seen unexpectedly rapid population spikes since the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams were dismantled.

Big decisions on the horizon will affect the health of our fish ˜ and thus our businesses ˜ for years to come, and the voice of the public must be heard in this process.

We are grateful for the leadership we've seen in the Oregon governor's office, going all the way back to Gov. Barbara Roberts, when it came time to hold federal agencies' feet to the fire and demand strong protections for fish in accordance with the law. Anglers and small businesses who depend on the health of salmon for our economic survival and way of life will now be looking to our elected leaders to ensure that federal agencies finally deliver a lawful plan that protects and restores our region's most iconic and irreplaceable species.

Liz Hamilton, of Oregon City, is the executive director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association. Jeff Feldner, of Logsden, is a retired commercial salmon troller and currently serves on the Pacific Fishery Management Council. Chris Daughters is the owner of the Caddis Fly Angling Shop in Eugene and author of the popular OregonFlyFishingBlog.com.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/06/renewed_optimism_for_salmon_re.html#incart_river_home

By Wendy Gerlitz

July 29, 2016

Some would paint a bleak picture of the region's energy future, one in which we choose between ample electricity and wild salmon survival. But we need not choose. We can take the actions necessary to restore healthy wild salmon — potentially even removing the lower Snake River dams — while keeping electricity bills low in a growing clean energy economy.

The Northwest's power grid is rapidly evolving to incorporate diverse renewable energy sources and ever-greater energy efficiency savings. Existing wind, solar and other non-hydro renewables and energy efficiency in Oregon already dwarf the annual power contribution of four aging and expensive dams on the lower Snake River in Washington state.

Across the region, almost 1,500 more average megawatts of new renewables are approved for development or in the permitting process. These resources will only continue to expand as rapidly falling prices add many more home-sited and large-scale solar installations into the mix.

Bill-reducing energy efficiency achieved in the Northwest since 1978 is now saving nearly six times as these four dams produce in a year — more than 5,800 average megawatt (aMW) versus around 1,000 aMW in good years — and additional efficiency is expected to meet virtually all increased electricity demand for the next 20 years.

We need honest and thorough analyses of the power system implications of salmon restoration options. Consideration of lower Snake River dam removal, for example, begins with understanding their variable power output. The dams' production peaks during the spring snowmelt when the power is least needed. They contribute less during high heating season and almost nothing during cooling seasons when river flows are much lower.

The four dams are used to adjust minute-by-minute power production to meet immediate demand, but it's a small, inadequately quantified role in the overall regional grid; the region has other resources to provide this service and will have more clean energy resources to do so going forward.

Cost estimates for replacing the four dams' power services must reflect the savings from avoided dam maintenance and expected major rehabilitation projects and set any net costs within a systemwide context. The NW Energy Coalition analyzed with a mixture of new solar and increasingly green grid purchases, finding that average residential utility customers would see their monthly bill rise by around $1 per month.

Climate change is deepening the hydrosystem's threat to wild salmon survival. Last summer, 99 percent of adult sockeye returning to Idaho perished due to record-high temperatures in the reservoirs behind the Columbia and lower Snake river dams.

In its latest rejection of federal agencies' salmon recovery plan (biological opinion), the U.S. District Court stresses the imperative of substantially changing dam operations to avoid losing Columbia Basin wild salmon and steelhead forever.

I am confident that an open and thorough process that considers all viable options to restore wild salmon — as the court has ordered — will conclude that we can save our wild salmon populations without putting the power system or electricity consumers at risk.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/07/we_can_have_a_clean_energy_fut.html

By Andrew Theen, April 24, 2017

Three women rode horses through downtown Portland on Monday, part of a 900-mile journey to raise awareness about the plight of endangered Idaho salmon.

The trio are traveling roughly the same path imperiled sockeye salmon do, making their way up the Columbia, Snake and Salmon Rivers to the spawning grounds in Idaho's Sawtooth National Forest.

The trek started last week in Astoria, and the three Idaho residents opted to ride through the heart of Portland to draw attention to their cause.

The "Ride for Redd," a nod to the term for a salmon spawning ground, is backed by the nonprofit advocacy group Idaho Rivers United. Just before noon, the three riders crossed the Hawthorne Bridge and gathered on the Central Eastside.
Under a persistent afternoon drizzle, Kat Cannell, rode her father's horse, Hogan, past OMSI in Southeast Portland and outlined the trip's mission.

"The Columbia produces an amazing amount of salmon, and the ones that make it to our home swim 900 miles inland and 6,500 feet in elevation," Cannell said as she plodded along the roadway. Each rider had a pack horse alongside them.
"Our salmon are really at stake right now," she said. "Idaho is at risk of never seeing salmon again, and that's devastating."

Cannell, Katelyn Spradley and M.J. Wright, plan to finish their trip by June 2 at Redfish Lake in Idaho's Sawtooth Range.

Idaho horseback riders on salmon trek pass through Portland
Environmental groups have long pushed for the removal several dams on the lower Snake River to improve salmon habitat. "This is a huge undertaking that's about bringing attention to Idaho's endangered wild salmon, which are no better off now than when they were listed as endangered 25 years ago," Greg Stahl, an Idaho Rivers United spokesman, said in a statement.  "Since dams were erected on the lower Snake River, populations of wild fish from central Idaho — where there's a motherlode of intact habitat for salmon — have plummeted."

Last month, a federal judge ordered that more water be spilled over those dams as a way of bolstering fish survival. Last year, the same judge rejected the plan proposed by federal agencies and utilities to manage those dams and protect salmon, the fifth such dismissal of a federal management plan in a legal fight that dates more than 20 years. Environmental groups continue to call for the dams to be removed.
The riders, Cannell said, are depending on the kindness of strangers for much of their housing along the route.  

Cannell said the horses can handle up to 30 miles of travel in a day. Monday night, the group plans to rest in a barn near Happy Valley.
They hope to reach Hood River in four days.

In total, the trip may take upward of 50 days.

"Oregonians are so sweet to us," she said, "We've been really well taken care of here. Other than being a little wet, it's been really flawless."

While the trip is sponsored by the river advocacy group, the riders also have a GoFundMe page. The crowd-funding site proceeds will also help pay for a documentary film of their journey. You can also track their journey on their Facebook page.

-- Andrew Theen 
atheen@oregonian.com


503-294-4026


@andrewtheen

By Nick Geranios, AP Reporter
November 6, 2016

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Conservationists and others have renewed a push to remove four giant dams from the Snake River to save wild salmon runs, after a federal judge criticized the government for failing to consider whether breaching the dams would save the fish.
The judge earlier this year rejected the government's fifth and latest plan for protecting threatened and endangered salmon in the Columbia River system.

Agencies must take a new look at all approaches to managing the southeast Washington dams, including breaching, said U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon in Portland, Oregon.

"This is an action that (government agencies) have done their utmost to avoid considering for decades," he wrote.

His order triggered 15 public meetings in Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon, where the dam removal issue has percolated for two decades.

The first meeting was held last month, and the final one is scheduled for Dec. 8. After that, a plan to save the salmon must be created.

The Snake River, at just over 1,000 miles, is the 13th longest in the United States, flowing from the western border of Wyoming to its confluence with the mighty Columbia River in Washington. For much of its history, the river and its tributaries produced salmon runs in the millions that sustained Native American tribes who lived near its banks. The best salmon spawning grounds were in Idaho, and were hampered by the construction of the four dams.

Environmental groups say restoring the salmon runs is impossible with the four dams in place.

The dams provide about 5 percent of the region's electricity, roughly enough power for a city the size of Seattle. A recent report by the federal Bonneville Power Administration said if the Snake River dams are removed, a new natural gas plant would be required to replace the lost electricity.

Thirteen runs of Columbia and Snake river salmon and steelhead remain endangered or threatened despite billions of dollars spent over decades to save them.

Sam Mace, a spokeswoman for Save Our Wild Salmon, said the dams' benefits are not worth the loss of the iconic fish.

"There is more than one way to get wheat to market," Mace said. "But salmon only have one way to travel, and that's in the river."

Salmon supporters say restored salmon runs will help the economy.

"Healthy salmon populations could support tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars annually in the recreation and tourism economy," said Liz Hamilton of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.

Idaho's Nez Perce Tribe also has called for removing the dams and restoring the fish to harvestable levels.

"The four dams on the lower Snake River have had a devastating impact on salmon," said McCoy Oatman, the tribe's vice chairman.

Opponents of breaching the dams say they provide irrigation, hydropower and shipping benefits, and allow grain barges to operate all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, more than 400 miles from the mouth of the Columbia River.

Wheat from as far as North Dakota is shipped downriver by barge for export to Asia. The Snake River also is used to transport about 60 percent of Washington's wheat and barley crop to Portland. A tug pushing a barge can haul a ton of wheat 576 miles on a single gallon of fuel.

Northwest River Partners, which represents a coalition of businesses and river users, called the dams an important part of the regional economy.

"I think both salmon and the dams are co-existing," said Terry Flores, director of the Portland-based group. "Why would you take out dams that are providing clean energy and billions of dollars' worth of commerce?"

However, critics note the river's barge traffic has experienced a 20-year decline because of competition from trucks and trains.
The four dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, roughly between Pullman and the Tri-Cities.

Breaching them isn't something that could be ordered by a court. Since the dams are federal projects, removing them would require action by Congress.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers, more than 90 percent of the river's young fish survive passage through each dam's fish ladders. But the total effect from dams and slackwater reservoirs adds up to mortality rates of 50 percent or more for Idaho-spawned fish as they migrate to the ocean. The fish then have to survive several years in the ocean before running the gauntlet of dams again when they return to the Northwest to spawn.

Removing the dams would provide migrating salmon with easier access to thousands of miles of pristine rivers and streams that even with climate change remain cold enough to support salmon and steelhead spawning, environmentalists say.

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2016/11/judges_order_revives_movement.htm

The Associated Press, January 1, 2017

A little-known federal program that avoids publicizing its accomplishments to protect from looters the thousands of Native American sites it's tasked with managing has been caught up in a big net.

The Federal Columbia River System Cultural Resources Program tracks some 4,000 historical sites that also include homesteads and missions in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

Now it's contributing information as authorities prepare a court-ordered environmental impact statement concerning struggling salmon and the operation of 14 federal dams in the Columbia River Basin.

A federal judge urged officials to consider breaching four of those dams on the Snake River.

"Because of the scale of the EIS, there's no practical way for us, even if we wanted to, to provide a map of each and every site that we consider," said Sean Hess, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Pacific Northwest Region archaeologist. "There are some important sites out there that we don't talk about a lot because of concerns about what would happen because of vandalism."

Fish survival, hydropower, irrigation and navigation get the most attention and will be components in the environmental review due out in 2021. But at more than a dozen public meetings in the four states to collect feedback, the cultural resources program has equal billing. Comments are being accepted through Jan. 17.

The review process is being conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, an umbrella law that covers the well-known Endangered Species Act. Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead on the Columbia and Snake rivers have been listed as federally protected species over the past 25 years.

What to do with four controversial dams on the Snake River in Eastern Washington? That's the question federal officials will analyze over the next few years.

But NEPA also requires equal weight be given to other laws, including the National Historic Preservation Act, which is where the cultural resources program comes in. Among the 4,000 sites are fishing and hunting processing areas, ancestral village areas and tribal corridors.

"People were very mobile, prehistorically," said Kristen Martine, Cultural Recourse Program manager for the Bonneville Power Administration.

Some of the most notable sites with human activity date back thousands of years and are underwater behind dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Celilo Falls, a dipnet fishery for thousands of years, is behind The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River. Marmes Rockshelter was occupied 10,000 years ago but now is underwater behind Lower Monumental Dam on the Snake River.

"If we're breaching dams, it would definitely change how we manage resources," said Gail Celmer, an archaeologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon ordered the environmental review in May after finding that a massive habitat restoration effort to offset the damage that dams in the Columbia River Basin pose to Northwest salmon runs was failing.

Salmon and steelhead runs are a fraction of what they were before modern settlement. Of the salmon and steelhead that now return to spawn each year, experts say, about 70 to 90 percent originate in hatcheries.

Those opposed to breaching the Snake River dams to restore salmon runs say the dams are an important part of the regional economy, providing irrigation, hydropower and shipping benefits.

Meanwhile, several tribes said they are better able to take part in the review process than they once were.

"Tribes have not had much opportunity to participate in these things because they didn't have professional staff or trained people," said Guy Moura of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington state, noting the tribe employed four people in its cultural resources program in 1992 but now has 38. "With growth in size, there also came the evolution of what was being done."

The tribe at one time had a large fishery at Kettle Falls, on the upper part of the Columbia River, but it was inundated in the 1940s behind Grand Coulee Dam. Dams farther downstream on the Columbia prevent salmon from reaching the area.

Also among the 4,000 historical sites is Bonneville Dam, one of 14 dams involved in the environmental impact statement. Bonneville Dam is the lowest dam in the system at about 145 miles from the mouth of the Columbia River. It started operating in the 1930s and became a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

-- The Associated Press

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2017/01/post_53.html#incart_river_index

Julian Matthews, February 3, 2017

Salmon have sustained the Nimiipuu people since time began for us. Nimiipuu means “the people” and is one amongst many names the Nez Perce call themselves.

_________________

Take Action Now!This is our last chance to tell federal agencies to include Snake River dam removal as they begin to look at salmon restoration options in the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The deadline to comment is February 7.

_________________

The loss of healthy numbers of salmon returning up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to our traditional lands in Idaho and Oregon, where we have fished and hunted for generations, has been devastating to our people, families and culture. In recent decades, our tribe has dedicated resources, including expert fisheries biologists and attorneys, to restore the fisheries and fight for legal protections in court. But it has not been enough. For salmon to return in the numbers needed to sustain our tribe, our rivers and the lands around us, the four lower Snake River dams must be removed.

Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment is a grassroots organization committed to protecting tribal treaty rights within our original ceded lands and usual and accustomed places. We also believe that with our treaty rights comes treaty responsibilities: the need to protect our salmon, wildlife, rivers and lands so that they survive and thrive for the next generations. We work with tribal members and environmental allies to push for the restoration of wild salmon to our home lands.

Right now, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore wild salmon to the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia and Snake Rivers and their tributaries—once the greatest salmon rivers in the world. We can do this by removing four outdated and expensive dams on the lower Snake River.

View the entire post here on Patagonia's The Cleanest Line Blog

Learn more about Nimiipuu - Protecting the Environment here.

Take Action - Submit your official public comment before Tuesday - February 7!

#FreeTheSnake

January 17, 2014

Contact: Gilly Lyons, Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition: (503) 975-3202

Federal agencies squander chance for progress on Northwest salmon

Another rehash of court-rejected plan omits meaningful salmon protections, undermines path out of the courtroom

Portland, Ore. – Today, the Obama administration’s NOAA Fisheries released a plan for endangered Columbia and Snake River salmon that fails to address the issues that triggered federal-court rejection of three previous plans. The latest plan, called a biological opinion, risks continued legal battles just as momentum is building in the Northwest for a broadly supported solutions process.

“Unfortunately, this latest blueprint is virtually indistinguishable from the plan rejected by the district court in 2011," said Save Our Wild Salmon executive director Joseph Bogaard. “Rather than looking for ways to do more to safeguard imperiled salmon and bring people together, the federal agencies have spent the last two years coming up with new reasons for the same tired conclusions – choosing conflict over collaboration.”

Conservation and fishing groups, along with the State of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe, have successfully challenged previous salmon plans for failing to protect these treasured and invaluable Northwest icons. The groups expressed disappointment with the new plan, and the missed opportunity to change course for the salmon and people of the Columbia Basin.

“Today’s plan fails to help salmon or boost salmon jobs, and fails to lay the foundation for a broadly-supported stakeholder process that could work toward shared solutions,” said Glen Spain, Northwest regional director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “And in some respects, such as cutting back spill, this version is actually a step backwards from what's already been thrown out of court as ‘illegal, arbitrary and capricious.’”

The federal plan not only squanders a chance to move the region forward, it also rolls back spill – water released over the dams to help migrating young salmon reach the Pacific Ocean more safely. A basic level of spill has been in place under court order since 2006. Federal, state, and tribal scientists studying the impacts of existing spill have concluded it is boosting salmon survival and adult returns. These same scientists predict that expanding spill could help recover some Columbia Basin salmon stocks. But instead of looking for ways to test that finding, NOAA Fisheries has ignored sound science and allowed dam operators to cut current spill to even lower levels.

“A 17-year study demonstrates that spill is our most effective immediate measure to increase salmon survival across their life-cycle,” said Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association executive director Liz Hamilton. “The court-ordered spill in place since 2006 has resulted in more adult fish returning to the Columbia. That’s helped salmon businesses and the jobs they support. Meanwhile, NOAA and Bonneville Power Administration seem to be stuck in the 1990s when it comes to spill science. We can understand dam managers’ reluctance to share the river water with salmon, but that doesn’t excuse their effort to turn back the clock and ignore 17 years of data from the fish.”

The plan also fails to identify any new or additional measures to address the intensifying impacts of climate change. “Climate change isn’t a future threat on the distant horizon – it’s already here and harming our imperiled salmon,” said Bogaard of Save Our Wild Salmon. “Yet NOAA – an agency that certainly knows better – didn’t include a single additional new action to help salmon better survive the warming waters and altered river flows that climate change is bringing to the Columbia Basin. That’s more than a missed opportunity – it’s negligence.”

Bill Arthur, deputy national field director for the Sierra Club, added that the federal government appears to be taking very seriously its obligations to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

“I’m all in favor of recycling, but this salmon plan takes the idea one step too far,” Arthur said. “The federal agencies have reduced in-river protections for salmon, reused flawed analyses that fail to ensure the long-term recovery of our fish, and recycled an old plan that the courts rejected more than two years ago. Rather than repackaging a failed plan and hoping for a different outcome, NOAA Fisheries should test expanded spill and employ other effective measures to help salmon and salmon economies while giving regional collaboration a running start - to help the Northwest move away from gridlock and toward real solutions that work.”

-30-

From the desk of Gilly Lyons. Feb. 27, 2014

The bottom line: ‘Spilling’ water over Columbia and Snake River dams is good for salmon. It helps young fish make the trip to the Pacific more safely, and it helps them better survive in the ocean to return a few years later as adults. As long as the dams remain in place, spill is our most effective near-term measure for improving salmon survival. We know this from nearly 20 years of data about salmon – data that has been collected and analyzed by state, federal, and Tribal fishery scientists working cooperatively as part of something called the Comparative Survival Study (CSS).

Last year, CSS scientists released findings that indicated expanding spill above and beyond current court-ordered levels could allow some imperiled Columbia-Snake salmon runs to rebuild and even recover. Indeed, expanded spill could possibly double the number of fish returning to Idaho.

Because these findings are so promising, the State of Oregon proposed an experiment to put expanded spill to the test in real-world/real-river conditions. Oregon submitted its proposal last Fall to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council (NPCC) as a recommended amendment to the Council’s updated Fish & Wildlife Program, which is currently being drafted. As part of its consideration of Oregon’s spill proposal, the Council referred the proposal to its Independent Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB) for additional review earlier this winter.

On February 21, the ISAB issued its review of the proposed spill experiment, determining that the proposal’s hypothesis has merit, and encouraging the development of a more detailed study design – one that addresses a number of key questions and issues identified by the reviewers – in order to move forward with a robust test of expanded spill.

Below is Save Our wild Salmon’s statement on the ISAB review.

You can download and read the ISAB Review here.

For Immediate Release
Feb. 23, 2014
 
Contact: Gilly Lyons, Save Our Wild Salmon: (503) 975-3202
 
Science panel’s review provides pathway to expanded spill test

Salmon advocates embrace call for putting experiment on rock-solid foundation
 
On Friday, the Independent Scientific Advisory Board of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council released its review of Oregon’s proposal to test state, federal and Tribal scientists’ findings that increased spring spill over Columbia Basin hydropower dams would help restore endangered Columbia-Snake river salmon stocks.
 
Oregon’s proposal is strongly supported by conservation and fishing groups, the Nez Perce Tribe, and the Pacific Fishery Management Council. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council sought the ISAB review to inform development of its 2014 Fish and Wildlife Program.
 
The ISAB concludes that testing the proposed spill experiment’s hypothesis has merit and “offers an opportunity to use adaptive management that might improve [survival] of threatened and endangered salmon…and increase knowledge for future decisions.” The reviewers also identify several outstanding issues and questions for strengthening the spill test, and encourage the development of a more detailed proposal addressing those concerns.
 
Here is a statement on the ISAB review from Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition executive director Joseph Bogaard:
 
“This review is an important step in the Northwest’s ongoing conversation about the future of our efforts to restore Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead. We appreciate the ISAB’s thoughtful attention to this issue, and know that the review will be of value to the Council as it continues to develop its Fish and Wildlife Program amendments for 2014.
 
“The ISAB’s broad and long-standing recognition of spill’s role in boosting salmon survival is echoed in today’s review, as is its interest in ensuring that the Council’s program rests on a rock-solid scientific foundation. We are pleased the ISAB has determined that a spill experiment has merit, that it is likely to enhance our knowledge of spill and its effects on salmon survival, and that it is consistent with the need for and role of adaptive management. We believe answering key questions raised by the reviewers, where robust responses do not already exist, will strengthen the test design. One thing we know for sure – as the ISAB points out – is that salmon need more help now in order to reach survival levels that allow for recovery; spill is a proven way of providing that help.
 
“We trust the Council’s next steps will include working with Comparative Survival Study (CSS) scientists to seek responses to the ISAB’s questions as quickly as possible, such that a spill experiment can be considered as part of the 2014 Fish and Wildlife Program. Specifically, we agree with the ISAB that the CSS Oversight Committee should move forward with developing a more detailed study design, per the review’s recommendations. Doing so will continue to illuminate our shared understanding of spill and its tremendous potential for the Northwest, and lead to a spill experiment that expands our knowledge of what’s needed to recover our invaluable salmon runs.”
 
-30-

October 28, 2015

Contacts:
Rod Sando, rosando@mindspring.com  /  503-982-3271
Joseph Bogaard, joseph@wildsalmon.org  /  206-300-1003

Northwest Fisheries Biologists Raise Serious Issues re: NOAA, climate change, and Columbia-Snake River salmon recovery efforts in letter to West Coast Administrator Will Stelle.

Please find the “Oct. 2015 Fisheries Biologists’ Letter to NOAA’s West Coast Regional Administrator Will Stelle RE: Columbia Basin Salmon and Climate Change”. It was delivered earlier today.

This Letter was drafted in large part in response to Mr. Stelle’s op-ed in the Seattle Times on August 29 (link below). Mr. Stelle’s op-ed was itself a response to an Aug. 2 op-ed (also below) by Pat Ford charging that NOAA has taken/is taking very little meaningful action to help ensure the survival of Columbia/Snake River salmon and steelhead faced with intensifying climate impacts.

This past summer, for example, the Northwest experienced high, prolonged temperatures in June and July and low stream flows (due to low snowpack) in the Columbia Basin. These conditions, in combination with the dam-created reservoirs on the Columbia  and Snake Rivers, raised water temperatures above the survival range for many salmon and steelhead. An estimated 250,000 adult sockeye were killed by these hot water conditions in the Columbia and Snake Rivers this summer. Other species were also harmed and killed in large numbers, including scores of imperiled sturgeon, chinook, and others.

While Summer 2015’s conditions may have been unusual, they were not unexpected. They are exactly the types of conditions long predicted by scientists in and out of NOAA-Fisheries. Despite these predictions, NOAA’s Columbia Basin salmon plans have contained virtually no meaningful strategies or measures to address or mitigate these types of hot water episodes. Last summer, NOAA and other agencies did respond on a last-minute ad hoc basis in an effort to assist struggling fish populations. The benefits of these efforts so far appear to have been very limited.

The attached “Scientists’ Letter to Mr. Stelle”, signed by eight accomplished and well-respected Northwest salmon biologists (listed below) representing approximately 250 years of salmon, fish and wildlife science and policy experience in the Northwest, outlines a number of specific ways in which NOAA’s current strategies for Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead are inadequate. The letter urges Mr. Stelle and NOAA to change course, follow the best available science, and take meaningful actions to protect Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead populations facing intensifying climate impacts.

Here are links to the two op-eds that appeared in the Seattle Times this past August that helped spur these 8 scientists into action in the form of a letter to Regional Administrator Stelle.

Seattle Times Guest Opinion by Pat Ford: Dead salmon, climate change and Northwest dams (Aug 2)

Seattle Times Guest Opinion by Will Stelle: NOAA Fisheries embraces — not ignores — climate research (Aug 29)

Coincidentally, this letter is being sent just after the following article on NOAA’s report on the extremely poor survival of juvenile salmon in Summer 2015: Preliminary 2015 Spring Juvenile Survival Estimates Through Snake/Columbia River Dams Dismal – the main conclusion of a recently released NOAA Fisheries report on juvenile salmon survival this summer in the Basin.

Thank you.

Joseph Bogaard
Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition
206-300-1003 (cell)
www.wildsalmon.org

Letter Signers:

Rod Sando
Former Chief Executive of Natural Resources for Minnesota                                                           
Former Director of Idaho Fish and Game Department
 
Don Chapman, Ph.D.
Fisheries Biologist (Retired)
 
Douglas A.  DeHart, Ph.D
Former Fisheries Chief, ODFW
Former Senior Fisheries Biologist, USFWS
 
Daniel H. Diggs
Former Assistant Regional Director for Fisheries
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
 
Jim Martin
Former Chief of Fisheries
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
 
Steve Pettit
Fisheries Biologist (Retired)
Idaho Department of Fish and Game
 
Bill Shake
Former Assistant Regional Director of Fisheries
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
 
Don Swartz
Fisheries Biologist (Retired)
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife

January 15, 2014

From the desk of Gilly Lyons

On January 7, a dozen fisheries biologists sent a letter to the Obamaadministration, expressing serious concerns with the scientific content of NOAA Fisheries' draft plan for endangered Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead.

Among the concerns detailed in the letter: the draft plan doesn¹t use the best available science; it relies too heavily on speculative habitat measures with uncertain survival benefits; and it rolls back crucial in-river protections such as spill while dismissing new data that says spilling more water for
salmon could dramatically improve overall survival.

The scientists urge the federal government to strengthen and improve its final salmon plan, which is expected to be released on Jan. 17.

Read the scientists' letter to the Obama administration here.

Operation of the dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers must change to restore salmon and steelhead runs

August 2, 2015

By Pat Ford    
 
Special to The Times
   
THIS summer, we are feeling climate change in the Northwest. Rivers and waters started hot this spring and got hotter. Fishery agencies say 250,000 to 400,000 Columbia River Basin salmon are dead or will die. Sockeye salmon are the worst hit, but chinooks are dying, too, and sturgeon.

Unrelieved hot water, at and above 70 degrees in the Columbia, Snake and many tributaries, is sickening and killing them. The best summary so far, by Hal Bernton in The Seattle Times  names the immediate causes: “Snowpack drought has salmon dying in overheated rivers.”

Water is low and water temperatures are too hot. Now comes August.

Is our warming climate a contributing cause behind the immediate causes? Even in my own climate-denying Idaho, the answer can no longer be refuted. This mass die-off may be the worst signal so far of the new abnormal in our rivers, but it’s far from the first signal.

So a question must be asked: Why has the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency in charge of salmon and climate science, refused since 2008 to analyze how climate change is affecting Columbia River Basin salmon, and how to reduce or buffer those effects? And why does Washington state support this inaction?

On June 23, two weeks after Columbia salmon were first found dead from hot water, NOAA’s attorneys argued in federal court that climate impacts on Columbia salmon are too speculative to usefully assess, analysis is not needed now, and measures already in place to mitigate salmon damage by dams will also cover any speculative effects of climate change. The court case centers on whether a massi9federal habitat-restoration effort in the Columbia River Basin would save salmon and steelhead.

The hundreds of thousands of dead salmon in the Columbia and Snake rivers are proving that NOAA is colossally wrong. But it was just as obviously wrong in 2008 and each year since.

Why so stupid a policy? The Bonneville Power Administration and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have more power than NOAA, and use that power to block changes to dam operations. Dams are the main human-caused killer of Columbia and Snake salmon, and honest climate planning would surely lead to changes at the dams. NOAA has tortured its mission, science and climate leadership to duck analysis that bigger dogs don’t want done.

Now salmon are shouting, “Mistake!”

What should be done? The federal court’s verdict, expected soon, will rule whether NOAA’s climate inaction is wrong. If the court orders climate planning for salmon and their rivers, NOAA would write it. But it would take a U-turn within NOAA and sustained White House attention to reverse the conscious lethargy behind this mistake. The Northwest needs President Obama to insist on it.

There’s a second path: Some years ago, I attended a congressional hearing on salmon. When a witness said climate change was an issue for the future — its effects on fish, rivers and people needed no attention now — then-U. S. Rep. Jay Inslee interrupted with memorable passion. How can you say that, he asked? Look at the evidence, Inslee said.

He was right then. And, despite Washington’s support for NOAA’s climate denial regarding the Columbia River, he is right now. Inslee is a climate champion, so he should take action.

Puget Sound orcas also eat chinook salmon, and would benefit from changes to the operation of the Columbia and Snake dams. The salmon die-off is bad for orcas now, but worse for their future unless we act.

If Gov. Inslee, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock asked for honest, science-based, inclusive climate planning for salmon, people, and for the waters in the Columbia and Snake Rivers, and promised to participate, it would happen and be good for the Northwest. Whatever the court rules, I hope these three good governors will put it on their hot list.
 
 Pat Ford lives in Boise, Idaho. He worked for the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition from 1992 through 2013, but this column reflects his own views.   -''''''

August 5, 2014

While the return of Okanogan sockeye is cause for optimism, a main driver of this recovery, court-ordered spill at federal projects, has a more doubtful future ["On Columbia, ‘just add water’ seems to be working," Local News, Aug. 2].

As reporter Lynda Mapes alludes in her article, and as the accompanying graphic clearly illustrates, exponential increases in sockeye, which began in 2007, coincide with then-federal District Judge James Redden’s order to dedicate more Columbia River water for salmon. Redden’s order came in mid-2005, and sockeye, with its typical two- to three-year life cycle, were the first species to show that spill is by far the most effective salmon recovery policy we’ve tried.

This is no mere matter of opinion. Since 2005, scientists comprising a multi-state, inter-agency task force known as the Comparative Survival Study have compiled data that show sockeye populations and other endangered strains of salmon have increased dramatically since spills were implemented — in years of good, fair and poor ocean and river conditions. Increased levels of spill, as sockeye tantalizingly have shown, could lead to overall recovery and de-listing of salmon.

Steven Hawley,
Hood River, Ore.

May 14, 2016

By Bob Rees, Nancy Hirsh and Bill Arthur

Special to The Times

EARLIER this month, the U.S. District Court in Portland rejected the government’s latest plans for protecting endangered wild salmon from the harmful effects of the Columbia and Snake river dams. This is the fifth plan in a row to meet such a fate.

Judge Michael Simon’s sternly worded 150-page decision is a sharp rebuke to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal agencies that have refused to acknowledge the need for a major change in dam management. It also reflects the opinions of three federal judges over two decades, each of whom has concluded the agencies that manage the federal hydrosystem have broken the law time and again by bending over backward to minimize changes to the dam operations, which are driving one of the Northwest’s most ecologically and economically important species to extinction.

This latest decision is a critical opportunity to finally “get it right” by letting go of a past our region has outgrown and making a new plan for dam management that gives new clean energy and wild salmon the priority they deserve in today’s world and — more important — in tomorrow’s.

In ruling for the plaintiffs — fishing, conservation and clean-energy advocates, the Nez Perce Tribe and state of Oregon — the court toppled the fundamental building blocks of the federal agencies’ failed salmon strategy and rejected their longstanding effort to lower the legal bar for protecting wild salmon. It also found NOAA and other federal agencies had failed to address the “potentially catastrophic impact” of climate change on these fish. Last year, an estimated 400,000 salmon died in the Columbia and Snake rivers’ overheated reservoirs — countless juvenile salmon en route to the ocean perished as well.

In addition, the court pointedly rejected NOAA’s heavy reliance on uncertain, speculative habitat projects as a substitute for changes in dam operations. Restoring salmon habitat is crucial, but it is not a substitute for addressing directly the effects of the dams. And as the court noted, despite spending billions of dollars since the 1990s, we have not recovered a single stock of wild salmon or steelhead. Indeed, during this time, the number of populations at risk of extinction in the Columbia River Basin has grown from four to 13.

While highlighting all of these flaws, the court also pointed the way forward when it condemned the agencies’ failure to consider alternatives to the current failed approach and ordered them to produce a new salmon plan no later than March 1, 2018. This ruling is an opportunity for a new, comprehensive, transparent analysis that fully and fairly considers all credible alternatives to protect wild salmon and includes meaningful public participation.

To resolve this extraordinarily expensive failure, Judge Simon made clear that the agencies must carefully consider Lower Snake River dam removal and other possible recovery strategies to protect salmon, such as expanded spill, increased flows and seasonal reservoir drawdowns. We agree. In fact, many of the region’s leading salmon scientists have long argued that the removal of the four Lower Snake River dams must be at the heart of any effective salmon restoration program in the Columbia Basin.

Much has changed in the past two decades. The Northwest today is a leader in the expansion of new renewable energy and energy efficiency. Renewable energy costs have dropped dramatically — a recent NW Energy Coalition study on replacing the four dams’ energy largely with solar calculates virtually unnoticeable additional costs to public utility bill payers — around $1 per month. Other studies have found even lower costs.

Transportation and markets have changed as well. The Snake River navigation corridor no longer is a critical link between the Inland Empire and the sea. Rising costs to maintain this aging infrastructure amid shrinking federal resources have made continued spending on the Lower Snake River dams a highly uncertain economic investment. And as the region learned last summer, we’re not even remotely ready for the future scale of climate change and the harm it will bring to wild salmon.

We believe the legal, scientific and economic case for removing these four dams today is stronger than ever.

With this ruling, the court has sent an unmistakable message: The government’s costly strategy for the Columbia and Snake rivers’ endangered salmon has failed. A substantially different approach is required. In the coming months, we look forward to participating with others in an honest, transparent analysis that accounts for what we now know and looks comprehensively at all of the alternatives for protecting wild salmon.

We urge the Obama administration to ensure that this work can begin immediately and we urge all of our elected officials to do all they can to support and protect the integrity of this process from Day 1. Only such an effort would allow us to seize the opportunity the court’s decision offers.

Bob Rees is the executive director of the Association of Northwest Steelheaders, the Oregon affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation. Nancy Hirsh is the executive director of NW Energy Coalition. Bill Arthur is the Northwest Regional Director of the Sierra Club. NWF, NWEC and Sierra Club are among the plaintiffs in this court case.

Read article here.

The latest version of a massive federal habitat-restoration effort in the Columbia River Basin is scheduled to be debated in front of a judge Tuesday. The plan to meant to boost salmon and steelhead populations imperiled by hydroelectric dams.

June 21, 2015

By GOSIA WOZNIACKA, Associated Press

PORTLAND — A massive federal habitat-restoration effort in the Columbia River Basin has spent more than $700 million on breaching levies, restoring tidal channels, reconnecting floodplains and other actions meant to boost salmon and steelhead populations imperiled by hydroelectric dams.

Experts say it’s likely the largest, most intensive and most expensive habitat-restoration program in the nation. Hundreds of restoration projects in Oregon, Idaho, Washington and Montana have reopened more than 2,800 miles of habitat.

The monumental scope and price stem from habitat restoration’s role as the centerpiece in a federal management plan to relieve the damage that dams cause to fish. Critics of the plan say relying heavily on habitat improvements is not enough to restore wild fish runs and take them off the endangered-species list.

The plan has changed over the past two decades after several legal challenges; the latest version has also been challenged in court and is scheduled to be debated in front of a judge Tuesday.

In defending the plan, federal officials say record numbers of chinook, coho and sockeye salmon returned in 2014 to the Columbia and its tributaries — thanks in large part, they say, to the improved habitat.

But many of the basin’s 13 protected runs of salmon and steelhead are still barely hanging on and most of the returning fish were born in hatcheries, not in the wild — a reality that’s leading critics to call for the breaching of four dams.

Before European settlement of the area, millions of salmon and steelhead returned every year to the Columbia and its tributaries. But due to overfishing, agricultural-water diversions, mining, logging and pollution, salmon populations plummeted.

Biologists estimate that most of the fish habitat was lost or damaged. Construction of energy-producing dams dealt the biggest blow to fish mortality. The management plans — called biological opinions — must mitigate the dams’ damage to the threatened or endangered populations and set goals for their survival.

These plans include improving fish passage and making operational changes at the dams, keeping predators such as Caspian terns or sea lions at bay and reducing the effects of artificially bred fish on wild ones.

But since 2000, habitat restoration has become the plan’s most important strategy. Officials say scientific evidence shows fish survival is directly linked to the quality of their habitat.

The Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that markets power from the dams and funds the majority of habitat projects in the basin, is effusive about the program. BPA says changes in habitat are impressive and the fish are using it — in some cases, salmon arrive within a few weeks after habitat is restored.

“We have been highly successful,” BPA’s Rosy Mazaika said.

But federal scientists overseeing the restoration work are a lot more reserved.

“We’re working on it. I’m not going to say it’s a qualified success, because not every project has a qualified benefit,” said Chris Jordan, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research scientist who oversees the largest research and monitoring project under the plan.

The biggest challenge, Jordan said, is isolating the factors that limit fish survival and recovery and deciding whether a habitat improvement will make a difference.

“There are so many different ways in which humans have destructed fish habitat for hundreds of years, it becomes hard to know what the limiting factor is,” Jordan said. “So even if you put a lot of money into restoring an aspect of habitat, you sometimes don’t see any fish response.”

Some techniques, such as riparian planting, take time to show the effects, Jordan said. And it takes years for fish to mature, reach the ocean and return to their native streams to spawn — which is the real measure of success.

Another challenge, said NOAA research scientist Phil Roni, is that the government doesn’t always choose projects that will have the greatest benefits. When a community, landowner or farmer refuses to cooperate, he said, the money is invested in another less-needed project. And instead of focusing on key watersheds, restoration is spread thin across the entire landscape.

“It’s opportunistic, meaning people are doing the projects that they can get done,” Roni said. “In most places, the actions aren’t big enough, and their choice and scope is limited by money, local cooperation and reasonable time frames.”

BPA says its strategy has evolved; the projects it now funds are larger and more data driven. Where an action proves infeasible or ineffective, the agency said it adds other projects.

To plaintiffs who oppose the federal plan in court, that strategy makes little sense.

“We’re not saying there is no value in restoring habitat,” said Todd True, an attorney with Earthjustice who represents environmental groups in the case. “Good habitat is beneficial, but the elephant in the room is the impact of the dams. Let’s address it and not get distracted by the idea that we’re spending millions of dollars on habitat so we must be doing something right.”

True said the method used by the government to calculate how improvements in habitat translate into higher fish survival is uncertain.

The best way to help fish, True said, is to breach the four lower Snake River dams.

Oregon, which also opposes the plan in court, has a different idea. Instead of breaching dams, Oregon wants federal managers to spill more water over dams to get fish past the concrete and quicken their migration to the ocean.

Oregon officials say habitat alone can’t save fish. For example: While there are nearly pristine wilderness areas in Oregon and Idaho, the fish populations in those watersheds are still imperiled.

“To think you can compensate for the effects of dams by habitat restoration is a flawed premise,” said Ed Bowles, with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Federal agencies oppose the idea because spilled water doesn’t go through the turbines and doesn’t produce energy.

View online story here.

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By Lynda V. Mapes

May 4, 2016

For the fifth time, a federal judge has called for an overhaul of Columbia and Snake River dam operations to preserve salmon and steelhead. In his ruling, he urged renewed consideration of Lower Snake River dam removal.

A federal judge has called for a new approach to Columbia and Snake River dam operations to preserve salmon and steelhead, with all options on the table for consideration, including dam removal on the Lower Snake River.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon in Oregon on Wednesday invalidated the U.S. government’s 2014 Columbia Basin biological opinion, under which federal agencies operate the Columbia River hydropower system. It’s the fifth time a biological opinion written by the agencies permitting operation of the dams has been struck down by the courts.

In his sweeping, 149-page ruling, Simon sounded about out of patience, quoting rulings over two decades by his predecessors denouncing a system that “cries out for a major overhaul,” and urging consideration of breaching one or more of the four dams on the Lower Snake River. “For more than 20 years, however, the federal agencies have ignored the admonishments and continued to focus essentially on the same approach,” Simon wrote. “ … these efforts have already cost billions of dollars, yet they are failing. Many populations of the listed species continue to be in a perilous state.”

The judge found federal policy is not “trending toward recovery,” and has generated “very little actual improvement in fish abundance.” Snake River sockeye were the first fish to be listed for protection in the Columbia and Snake rivers under the Endangered Species Act in 1991; today 13 runs are listed.

The judge also noted the “potentially catastrophic impact” of climate change on Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead populations, which he stated agencies had not adequately addressed.

He sent the agencies back to the drawing board for a new biological opinion and full NEPA analysis that complies with the law no later than March 1, 2018. That analysis “may well require consideration of breaching, bypassing, or removing one or more of the four Lower Snake River dams,” to be compliant with the law this time, Simon wrote.

Salmon and steelhead advocates celebrated the ruling, which they said will require the reset on the river they have been looking for, with a full public process to engage and reopen regional debate on the Columbia and Snake rivers and their future.

“It’s a very strong ruling and this is strike five for these federal agencies; how many times do they need to be told they need to change direction?” said Todd True, attorney for Earthjustice based in Seattle, one of the attorneys representing plaintiffs in the case, which include the Nez Perce Tribe, the state of Oregon, and fishing and conservation groups.

“This is a significant ruling and it is going to force some difficult decisions and some transparency on the part of the agencies as to what their programs have cost and what they have delivered, and where they are heading,” said Joseph Bogaard, executive director of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition. “This is a restart in a very significant way.”

Federal agencies released a written statement declaring “disappointment” that the judge didn’t agree with their approach, and pledging to continue to work for salmon recovery.

The Nez Perce Tribe — the only tribe in the region that did not sign an accord requiring support for federal management of the dams in return for habitat and hatchery program funding — celebrated the ruling.

“The tribe is a strong advocate for breaching the Lower Snake River dams,” wrote Anthony D. Johnson, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee. “We will continue to speak on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves, like the salmon and the lamprey.”

View article here.

Abundant food in the ocean and new cross-border cooperation to benefit fish have led to a blockbuster wild sockeye run on the Columbia River.

August 2, 2014

By Lynda V. Mapes

BREWSTER, OKANOGAN COUNTY — Good luck in ocean conditions for the past several years is stoking a bonanza fishing season for Pacific salmon.

But even in this spectacular year, with record-breaking returns of sockeye and chinook predicted to the Fraser and Columbia rivers, one run stands alone: Okanagan sockeye, storming the Columbia in astonishing, wriggling, wild abundance.

From the brink of extinction in 1994, the comeback of this small but mighty fish is the result in part of a unique cross-border collaboration among Indian tribes, dam operators and U.S. and Canadian fish managers.

Together, with quiet, nerdy, behind-the-scenes persistence, they created something that sounds so dull — a Web-based computer model for water management. But it’s helped them keep the right amount of water in the rivers for the fish at the times they need it. And it has been so wildly effective, it has spawned something even more rare than sockeye used to be on the Columbia: success.

“We are so habituated and so programmed for failure and for grim, gritty news,” said Will Stelle, Northwest regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service. “We are just not prepared to embrace success.”

But the results are demonstrable: monster increases in out-migrating juvenile sockeye, from about 300,000 fish before the implementation of the water management program in 2004, to more than 8 million in 2010.

The adults from that class of juvenile fish are booming back now, shattering records. More than 600,000 sockeye are predicted to cross over Bonneville Dam this summer — the most since counting began in 1938.

The computer model helps managers operating Canadian dams avoid scouring salmon eggs out of their nursery gravel when water is released. They also are better able to maintain enough water and flow in the system so that salmon eggs don’t freeze or dry out. They can even time the release of fresh, cold, oxygenated water to help juveniles and adults survive in late-summer heat.

Investments in better dam passage and court-ordered spills of water on the main-stem Columbia have helped boost all species in the river. But the success of the Okanogan River sockeye is a victory in particular for wild salmon: more than 85 percent of the standout Okanogan run this season are wild fish.

“That is the interesting thing, we don’t have a hatchery, we aren’t doing anything but helping them thrive in their natural environment,” said Meaghan Vibbert, spokeswoman for the Douglas County Public Utility District (PUD), which operates Wells Dam, the last dam of nine in the Columbia that Okanagan sockeye must pass in their epic migration from the Pacific. Then they turn up the Okanogan River and cross one more dam and a gantlet of flood-control structures to reach their mountain-lake spawning habitat in Canada.

The Fish and Water Management Tool, which cost the PUD about $2 million to develop and $215,000 a year to implement, also has helped managers to avoid flooding and balance competing water needs on the river, said Tom Kahler, biologist for Douglas County PUD.

“It’s not only the fish people that love this. The water managers do, too. They would never go back,” Kahler said. “This takes care of recreational issues, flood control, fish issues; everybody’s happy.”
Feast days for tribes

“Sockeye!” yells Mary Friedlander, as the Dreamcatcher crew nets a silvery torrent of fish.
Colville, Kalispel and Spokane tribal members joined with Friedlander, from the Upper Nicola Band, on a purse seiner for a collaborative, selective fishing trip near the mouth of the Okanogan River on the Columbia last month.

Sleek, fast, all muscle and the most streamlined salmon on the Columbia, the silvery sockeye had not yet morphed to their distinctive hook-jawed, green-headed, scarlet spawning regalia.

As the net was winched up, the spotted back of a big wild chinook broke the surface amid swirling sockeye, and a crew member gently lifted it out, then put it back in the river. But the sockeye — those were for keeping, and for sharing.

Free distribution was set for each tribal community later that day. At Kalispel, fish would be given house to house for elders, said David Bluff of the Kalispel Tribe. “They love it.”

Jesse Marchand, a Colville tribal member, piloted the boat as a fat sun rose. “I have been fishing my whole life, ever since I could walk or cast a pole,” he said. “It’s traditional, it keeps our families fed, we just grew up into it. We are born into it, really. And it’s better and better every year.”

And before wildfires struck Eastern Washington, devastating Pateros, shutting down power in the Methow Valley and closing critical highway access across the mountains, the sockeye action meant sold-out motel rooms and ringing cash registers.

On weekends, as many as 300 sport boats were working the fish stacked at the mouth of the Okanogan, with the numbers of fishermen expected to build.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife upped the legal catch limit to eight salmon, including six sockeye per fisherman, bounty unimaginable when the sockeye run was cratering not that long ago.
Only 1,662 sockeye crossed Bonneville Dam in 1994. The feds mulled an Endangered Species Act listing.

But this summer, before the fires, the fishery was drawing anglers from around the region: a high-school guidance counselor from Whidbey Island, an English teacher from Wenatchee, a retiree from Ephrata, all lined up in the pre-dawn dark to get their boat in the water on the Brewster boat launch for the morning bite.

“We were here Saturday and there must have been 250 boats, it was like I-5,” said Jack Breedlove, of Whidbey Island. “People were running into each other. But there should be plenty of fish for everybody. It’s just fun. And there is nothing better than a fresh sockeye.”

New optimism

The new water-management regime is expected to help sustain big runs even when ocean conditions turn less favorable.

No one anticipates a return to the scarcity of the past, because now sockeye have more of what they need to survive: water.

So successful are the Okanagan sockeye that they now comprise more than 80 percent of all sockeye on the Columbia, eclipsing the Wenatchee River run, which used to comprise 43 percent of the population but by comparison today is a minor contributor. Redfish Lake sockeye, kept alive with a life-support captive brood program and hatchery in Idaho, are the third, and by far the smallest sockeye run in the Columbia/Snake river system.

The Douglas County PUD had started out with conventional recovery methods, relying on a hatchery that, despite high hopes, failed to build up populations of out-migrating juvenile sockeye, as required by a 1990 court settlement.

It was the Okanagan Native Alliance, with eight member tribal communities including the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, that got the breakthrough going, with an invitation to Canadian fisheries officials to work together with them and dam managers to help the run.

“There has been a lot of going to court, and that was an option, but the bottom line has been to take that collaborative approach to restoration, and the leadership, that is what enabled restoration to happen,” said Howie Wright, fisheries program manager for the Native Alliance.

With so many fish back, Wright expects a whole suite of wildlife: bears, fishers, eagles and more, as salmon come back home. “We will need to be more bear aware as we do our (fish) counts,” Wright said. “It’s a nice problem to have.”

Said Kim Hyatt, an ecologist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, who helped develop the computer model: “If you give them a chance, wild salmon are more resilient than we think they are. It matters hugely, it provides hope that in the face of industrial, agricultural and human development, it is possible to restore wild salmon. It is not a hopeless task.”

Link to article here.

October 28, 2016

By Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times science reporter

One of the most easily recognized of Puget Sound’s resident killer whales has died, and her young calf will almost certainly follow — if he hasn’t perished already, biologists said Friday.
The losses would bring the population of endangered southern resident orcas to 80, among the lowest levels in decades.

“We have seen virtually no growth in this population in 20 years despite large amounts of money spent to study and recover them,” Ken Balcomb, director of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, wrote in an “obituary” for the two animals.

The mother whale, known as J28, was about 24 years old and in what should have been her prime breeding years. She was well-known to whale watchers because of a distinctive nick on her dorsal fin. Photos over the past few months showed her becoming more and more emaciated, Balcomb said. By Oct. 19, she had disappeared from her family group. Her carcass has not been found, but biologists say she probably died in the Strait of Juan de Fuca earlier that week.

The mother’s death doomed her 10-month-old calf, said Howard Garrett, of the monitoring program called Orca Network.

Photos showed his older sister and cousin attempting to support the young whale. Close-up shots show that his skin was scored by tooth marks, most likely incurred when his sister tried to push him to the surface to breathe.

“His mother had died a day or two earlier, and probably wasn’t providing enough milk even before that,” Garrett said. “He didn’t really stand a chance.”

The 7-year-old sister had also been catching and offering salmon to her little brother and mother for several months, but wasn’t able to provide enough food to sustain them, Balcomb said.

The southern resident whales, whose range includes Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the waters around the San Juan Islands, experienced a recent baby boom that raised hopes the population might be on the upswing.

Nine calves were born between December 2014 and January 2016, the biggest number in more than 30 years. But three of those young whales have died, Balcomb said.

Mortality is always high for young killer whales, but Balcomb blames the population’s overall decline primarily on a reduction in the species’ main prey — chinook salmon.

A healthy population of whales would be producing five to 10 calves that live past infancy every year, Balcomb pointed out.

Brad Hanson, a marine mammal expert for the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, said none of the other animals in J28’s pod, except for her calf, appeared emaciated. So it’s possible she had an underlying medical problem that contributed to her death.

Federal biologists are reviewing the status of the southern residents, which are not meeting recovery goals.

Whale advocates are pushing for removal or breaching of four dams on the lower Snake River, to boost struggling salmon populations. In May, a federal judge blasted federal agencies for failing to consider dam removal as a way to improve salmon runs. He sent the agencies back to the drawing board, with a March 1, 2018, deadline for a new approach.

Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com

Lupine has been a surprise star player in recovery of former lake beds along the Elwha River, and chinook are reaching higher and farther into the watershed than ever before.

By Lynda V. Mapes
Seattle Times environment reporter
July 3, 2017

OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK — With easy road access to trails open for the first time in years, and the river valley in full summer splendor, the Elwha beckons as never before.

Where once there was a dam, today tourists are enjoying the newest interpretive attraction at Olympic National ark, about the world’s biggest-ever dam-removal experiment.

Visitors can perch on an overlook made from remnants of the former Glines Canyon Dam, and look down 210 feet to where the Elwha River now rushes past in a foaming green slide. Recordings and interpretive signs along the viewing platform explain the project that began with the removal of Elwha Dam in 2011 and continued with the takedown of Glines Canyon Dam, completed in 2014.

The transformation of the landscape following the dam removal on the Elwha River beginning in 2011 is well underway as forests and flowers flourish where there were once lakes. (Courtesy of Doug MacDonald)

The Glines Canyon Overlook is handicapped-accessible, and offers expansive views of the Elwha River above and below the former dam site. A marked trail to the riverbed departs from the overlook.

It winds past stumps of old-growth trees cut before the dam was built, and the new forest rising on the former lake bed.

Lupine along the trail have been a surprising star of the recovery project. Purple, fragrant carpets of the flower in the former Lake Mills are alive with white-crowned sparrows, nesting and singing. The flowers buzz with pollinators.

Read the full article here at seattletimes.com.

For the fifth time, the federal agencies that run the Columbia and Snake river hydropower system must demonstrate to a judge’s satisfaction they can do so without killing off the region’s threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead.

By Lynda V. Mapes
Seattle Times environment reporter

October 17, 2016 

Public hearings will kick off throughout the region this month to inform an environmental review of operations of the Columbia River and Lower Snake River dams.

The federal Columbia River hydropower system, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is under a federal court-ordered scrutiny of the dams’ environmental effects. The dams provide hydroelectricity, irrigation, navigation and recreation benefits to the region.

So-called public scoping hearings throughout the region, intended to guide an environmental-impact statement ordered by a judge, will start Oct. 24 in Wenatchee. The only hearing in Seattle is scheduled for Dec. 1 in the Great Room of Town Hall at 1119 Eighth Ave. from 4 to 7 p.m.
 
The purpose of the review is to gauge the effects of long-term dam operations at the 14 federally operated hydropower facilities up and down the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers on fish, wildlife, irrigation, navigation, native cultures and more.

The hearings are convened by the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets power from the dams, and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, which operate the dams.

The agencies are charged with coming up with an operations plan that will protect and recover populations of endangered and threatened salmon and steelhead. The review is the result of a U.S. District Court ruling last May  siding with businesses, conservation groups, alternative-energy advocates, the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe, which have challenged dam operations in court as lethal to salmon and steelhead.

Operations at the dams continue under a provisional permit while the court review is under way.

Today 13 runs of Columbia and Snake river salmon and steelhead are at risk and still slipping away, despite billions of dollars spent to save them, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon of Oregon stated in his ruling.

He demanded a do-over of previous so-called biological opinions, created by the agencies defending dam operations. This time around, all aspects of operations and strategies for fish and wildlife recovery must be on the table, Simon insisted, and he demanded fresh analysis, thinking and information to inform the process.

He sent the agencies back to the drawing board for a new biological opinion and full National Environmental Policy Act analysis, which “may well require consideration of breaching, bypassing, or removing one or more of the four Lower Snake River dams,” to be compliant with the law this time, Simon wrote.

 The farthest inland of the four dams, Lower Granite, completed in 1974, capped a long-held regional economic-development dream to create deep-draft navigation from the Pacific to Lewiston, Idaho. The dams also provide hydropower, as well as irrigation for a small number of growers with large operations along the river.

Much has changed since the last review of the Columbia and Snake river hydropower system, including hard lessons about the risk of climate change to fish as warming water challenges their survival.

The changes in snowmelt patterns, drought and warmer weather make the dams even more detrimental for salmon and steelhead, which require cold, clean, oxygenated water to survive. During the brutal summer drought of 2015, after a record-low snowpack, many fish runs were hammered and, in particular, very few sockeye made it back alive to their spawning grounds. 

In addition to climate change, the dynamics of the power grid have changed, with more sources of energy coming online, including wind power. The economics of navigation on the Lower Snake waterway are also under scrutiny, with usage by shippers in a steady slide and maintenance costs on the rise.

Shippers increasingly use double-stacked railroad cars and trucks instead of barging, and container shipping has come to an end out of the Port of Portland.

Scientists are also gaining a better understanding of the web of life that depends on salmon to survive, which includes endangered orca whales. Diet studies have determined they depend nearly entirely on chinook salmon, including fish from the Columbia and Snake system.

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2515 or lmapes@seattletimes.com

This year’s strong spring flows through the Columbia River come amid a high-stakes conflict over how much water should be used to help salmon migrate over the dams rather than run through hydroelectric turbines.
 
By Hal Bernton, Seattle Times staff reporter

May 7, 2017
    
CASCADE LOCKS, Oregon — In this year of epic snow and rain, the Columbia River is a formidable sight, thundering over spillways at Bonneville Dam to form a turbulent stretch of white water that courses toward the sea.

The spring flows through the region’s mightiest waterway are a dramatic turnaround from the drought that gripped the region two years ago. They have been some of the strongest in decades, with a March 25 peak at Bonneville that was the highest for that month since at least 1960, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.

These high flows come amid an intensifying clash over how to manage the federal network of Columbia Basin hydroelectric dams that offer the region abundant low-cost renewable power but also are a major obstacle to the recovery of 13 runs of wild salmon and steelhead.

In a court victory this spring, salmon advocates persuaded U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon to order more water spilled over the dams to aid young salmon. That’s easy to do in high-water years such as this spring. But the injunction, which already has stirred a backlash from some in Congress, will require higher levels in leaner water years, and that could mean, at times, running significantly less water through the hydroelectric dams.

In his ruling, Simon cited a “growing scientific body of evidence and growing consensus” to support the higher levels of spills.

This water helps to guide young salmon over the dams, steering them away from a more treacherous trip downstream through the powerhouses that can prove fatal. It also creates a current that can help propel these juvenile fish toward their ocean feeding grounds, where they mature before returning to freshwater to spawn.

“Spill helps this dammed-up river act a little more like an actual river,” said Joseph Bogaard, executive director of the Seattle-based Save Our Wild Salmon coalition, which had members among the lawsuit plaintiffs. “It delivers juvenile salmon to the ocean more quickly and safely.”

Federal biologists at NOAA Fisheries largely acknowledge the benefits.

But they question the need to ramp up the spill to significantly higher levels. They argue that in some circumstances more spill may not offer more help to the fish, and in their court filings they allege that the National Wildlife Federation and other plaintiffs “attempt to oversimplify a complex and dynamic system.”

In another court filing, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal agency that markets the hydroelectric power to regional public utilities, estimated the cost of added spill as an estimated $80 million of lost power generation over a two-year period.

The judge largely rejected the federal agencies’ arguments. In his March 27 ruling, he gave federal agencies a year to come up with spill plans for each federal dam in the Columbia River Basin.

Federal agencies, in recent decades, have spent billions of dollars to help revive the 13 runs listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. But this was the latest in a string of rulings that over the years have faulted the federal agencies for failing to push forward aggressively enough to save these runs.
    
Opportunity to learn
For young salmon, downstream passage is a critical phase, and salmon advocates say this spring offers an excellent opportunity to learn more about the impacts of increased spill to aid these fish.

Unlike many years, plenty of water is available both to run the turbines at the highest levels that can be handled by the regional power grid and to push over the spillways at the levels outlined in the court order.

And this year’s high water volume is expected to continue deep into the spring as warmer temperatures begin to melt a high-elevation snowpack that remains largely intact.

“The thing that is on my radar is the amount of snow still above 6,000 feet,” said Steven Barton, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief of water management for the Columbia Basin. “We are going to continue to have flows at levels higher than people have seen in a long time.”

Bonneville, unlike some upstream dams, has no storage reservoir behind it. So all the river water must pass as it arrives. And, through the course of the day, Army Corps officials decide how to allocate the flow between powerhouse turbines and spill as they consult with the BPA, federal fishery biologists and other stakeholders.

Sometimes, these decisions get complicated by maintenance, such as with an erosion-repair project that this year put Bonneville workers below the spillway.

“They would go work for eight or 10 hours, and then we shoo them out and go spill for eight or 10 hours,’’ said Ray Guajardo, hydroelectric power operations manager at Bonneville. “Everything is coordinated. Everything.”

As the water is spilled, it increases the dissolved gases. Those gas levels are carefully monitored because — if they go too high — both sides in the legal battle agree they can injure or kill young salmon.

That’s why Washington and Oregon have set total dissolved-gas limits. They are not supposed to exceed 120 percent in the water that reaches an area below the dam.

In recent weeks, due to the unavoidable need to pass so much water over the dams, the dissolved gas levels at Bonneville and other sites have often averaged above the states’ limits. They often have measured in the 121 to 125 percent range, according to monitoring reported by the federally funded Fish Passage Center in Portland.

Michele DeHart, the center’s director, said that danger zone starts somewhere above 125 percent. Sampling of this year’s young salmon — known as smolts — has not detected significant health problems from the higher levels.

“We’ve been monitoring gas-bubble trauma under all conditions every single year — for about 20 years, and what we are seeing is consistent with all the historical data,” said DeHart.

‘Unintended consequences’
DeHart said years of research — under all different kinds of river conditions — indicate the increased flows should boost the numbers of smolt that make it to the ocean. That, in turn, should bump up the percentage of fish that return as adults to spawn in the Columbia Basin.

But some politicians are not happy with what’s been happening on the Columbia this spring.

In a May 2 letter to the administrator of the BPA, four Northwest members of Congress — Washington Republican Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Dan Newhouse, and Oregon Democratic Reps. Kurt Schrader and Peter DeFazio — expressed “deep concern” with the management of the Columbia Basin dams in the aftermath of the federal judge’s order.

Their letter appears to question the science behind the judge’s order and the economic impact that could arise in future lean-water years as more power production is sacrificed to fish passage.

“As you know, Judge Simon is ordering a significant increase in mandatory spill in the spring of 2018,” they wrote. “ … there will likely be unintended consequences that will hurt fish recovery while greatly increasing power costs … Our constituents deserve to understand the proposed measures, as well as the expected impacts they will have on the region.”

In their letter, they ask for the BPA to answer a series of questions about the dams, fish and costs to the region’s ratepayers in carrying out the judge’s order.

Bogaard, of Save our Wild Salmon, views the letter as “an excellent example of how politics continually intervenes to distort policy for salmon and communities in the Columbia Basin.”

Bogaard wants salmon restoration based on the best science. Otherwise, he cautions, those efforts risk failing, and wasting taxpayer dollars.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/salmon-hydropower-both-need-columbia-river-water-this-year-theres-plenty-but-conflict-lies-ahead/
 
Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com

September 28, 2016  
 
Washington State University researchers have learned that reservoirs produce much more methane, a potent greenhouse gas, than previously understood.
 
By Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times environment reporter

Think hydropower is carbon neutral? You have another think coming, Washington State University researchers have learned.

In their paper to be published next week in BioScience, the researchers reported that reservoirs of all sorts are important sources of the potent greenhouse-gas methane. The gas is produced by decomposing organic material underwater.

While much attention has been paid to the effects of dams on fisheries and the natural form and function of rivers, little notice has been taken of the emissions they cause. Usually thought of as carbon-neutral sources of energy, hydropower dams, while far cleaner than fossil fuel for generating power, nonetheless are sources of carbon pollution.
 
Reservoirs not only produce methane, but they generate more greenhouse gases than natural lakes, found research associate Bridget Deemer and John Harrison, associate professor of biogeochemistry at WSU Vancouver.

That is for two reasons: Dams on rivers trap organic materials from a large cachement area continually delivered by the free-flowing river upstream. Secondly, dams tend to be located nearer to human presence, where nutrient loading from fertilizers used in agriculture, manure from farm animals, and septic and sewer systems boosts production of algae and other organic life in the water. That means more for microbes to eat — and more methane produced by the microbes.

In their synthesis review of 100 research papers published on the topic since 2000, the researchers and their collaborators also established that methane emissions were about 25 percent higher per acre than previously understood on a given reservoir, said Deemer, lead author on the paper. That was because the researchers looked not only at methane diffused from the surface of lakes, but at gas in bubbles rising to the surface.

“I was excited about what we found,” Deemer said.

Collectively, reservoirs created by dams produce about 1.3 percent of total annual global human-caused emissions. That’s as much greenhouse gas as other significant human sources, such as rice cultivation and biomass burning, the researchers found.

 The findings are expected to shift the way the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tallies greenhouse-gas production by human activities to include flooded lands in those calculations, Harrison said. Previously — unlike rice cultivation and biomass burning — emissions from flooded lands were not counted.

 More than 1 million dams constructed globally have provided a variety of services important to people. But their environmental effects are profound, from blocked migration of fish, to impoundment of woody debris and other organic materials carried by rivers. Add to the list the generation of potent greenhouse gases, so called because they block the radiation of heat from the Earth and reradiate it to the atmosphere, raising the global average temperature of the planet.

Per molecule, methane is far more efficient at trapping and reradiating heat to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, also adding to importance of the findings.

Researchers are continuing their work to investigate the degree to which management of reservoirs also contributes to greenhouse-gas production, Harrison said. Lower reservoir levels reduce water pressure in the lake, which releases more gas, in the same way that taking the cap off a soda bottle releases bubbles of carbon dioxide for that soda-pop tang.

The synthesis paper is the largest of its kind to date, pulling together findings not only from hydropower reservoirs, but any sort, such as reservoirs for flood control, navigation or irrigation. The study also is the first to examine the flow of all three major greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — from reservoirs to the atmosphere.

The contribution of greenhouse gases from reservoirs is sure to increase.
 
 While Washington state leads the world in dam removal — most notably on the Elwha River    <http://projects.seattletimes.com/2016/elwha/>  — globally, a boom in dam construction is under way.

At least 3,700 major hydropower dams are either planned or under construction, primarily in countries with emerging economies, according to a paper published in Aquatic Sciences in 2015 by Christiane Zarfl and A.E. Lumsdon at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin.

Dam construction on such a grand scale, primarily in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, is predicted to reduce the planet’s remaining free-flowing large rivers by 21 percent, those authors found.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/hydropower-isnt-carbon-neutral-after-all-wsu-researchers-say/

April 13, 2016

By Hal Bernton

Amid last summer’s drought and heat wave, some 98 percent of Okanogan basin sockeye salmon died before they reached upstream spawning grounds, a report presented to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council Wednesday says.

The analysis by a federal fishery biologist is a grim reminder of how vulnerable sockeye salmon are to elevated freshwater temperatures, which last June and July climbed far above historical averages in the Columbia River and peaked at 80 degrees in its Okanogan River tributary.

These Okanogan fish formed the majority of the 475,000 sockeye that returned from ocean feeding grounds to swim up the Columbia and over Bonneville Dam east of Portland.

Some of the sockeye were caught by fishermen. But most of them perished in warm waters that weakened their immune systems and left them vulnerable to disease.

The heat also clobbered endangered Snake River sockeye.

Some 4,000 of those fish made it past Bonneville, but more than 99 percent died as they tried to go farther upstream.

“It was bad, really bad for the Okanogan River sockeye and the Snake River sockeye,” said Ritchie Graves, a NOAA Fisheries biologists who leads the agency’s Columbia River hydropower branch. “They got a lot of miles to go, and it was hot all the time.”

A third population of sockeye that return to Lake Wenatchee spawning grounds fared somewhat better.

The analysis showed that 10 to 15 percent of those fish that made it past Bonneville reached their spawning grounds.

Graves said Columbia Basin sockeye runs are resilient and not threatened by a single bad year like 2015. But the fish would be at risk if such summers become more common due to climate change.

Graves said sockeye salmon, through natural selection, might adapt to changing conditions.

They could, for example, begin returning to spawning grounds earlier to avoid peak summer temperatures.

But it is uncertain whether they could change fast enough.

“It is kind of a race,” Graves said. “The environment is changing, and the fish are changing. Can they change fast enough?”

Read the online article here.

More sockeye, chinook and bull trout have made it above the former Glines Canyon dam site so far this spawning season than documented in any year since the unprecedented dam-removal project completed on the Elwha River.

By Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times environment reporter
October 17, 2016

More sockeye, chinook and bull trout have made it above the former Glines Canyon dam site so far this spawning season than documented in any year since the unprecedented dam-removal project was completed on the Elwha River.

The fish returns this season are an encouraging sign that blasting work in the river last summer to improve passage after initial dam removal has made a difference.
Numbers aren’t yet final, but so far snorkel surveys and radio telemetry used by scientists to track and monitor fish throughout the Elwha show that from the end of July through the end of September, about 70 chinook salmon made it above the former Glines Canyon dam site.

The farthest the fish have been seen upriver so far is at river mile 29. “That’s a considerable ways above, that’s past Elkhorn,” said George Pess, biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. Pess, with an interagency team of collaborators, has closely tracked the river before and after dam removal to document the Elwha’s response.

To understand how fish are using the river, more surveys of redds and analysis of DNA samples from river water are under way this fall.
The largest ever anywhere, the $325 million federal dam-removal project on the Elwha took out the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams, built beginning in 1910 to provide hydropower for Port Angeles and the Olympic Peninsula.

Before the dams came down, the power they generated was replaced by juice from the public power grid to the dams’ only remaining customer, a pulp mill in Port Angeles. One of the dams’ original customers, the mill is still in business.

Concern over fish-passage problems persisted when scientists documented only one adult chinook making it past the former Glines dam site during the 2015 summer and fall migration season.

Last fall, 14 large boulders were demolished in Glines Canyon to help open the channel. Two boulders were demolished at the Elwha site, and four more were blown up at the Glines Canyon site this past summer.

Now fish are returning to the river above and below the dam sites in about equal numbers, adding to confidence that passage barriers are ameliorated.
About a dozen steelhead have also been spotted so far this year above the former dam site — and they may be summer steelhead, adding to the diversity of fish beginning to recolonize the river, Pess noted.

About 47 bull trout have been counted above the upper dam site. About 60 redds, or nests of returning chinook, also have been counted so far this migration season.

More than 4,000 chinook spawners were counted above the former Elwha Dam the first season after the dams came down. The first concrete went flying in September 2011, and Elwha Dam was out the following March. Glines Canyon Dam upriver tumbled for good in September 2014.

Overall, fish populations are the highest in 30 years. And that’s before the first progeny of salmon and steelhead going to sea since dam removal started coming back this year.

The first tagged coho marked in August 2014 in the Little River, a tributary of the Elwha, migrated out of the river in 2015. Now it’s back, having just cruised past the tag reader in the Little River on Oct. 8. The parents of the fish were natural recolonizers, so it’s a fish bearing big news. “It shows we are getting natural recolonization,” Pess said.

In addition to salmon and steelhead, lamprey have been documented using new areas of the river system, including Indian Creek.
The thing to do now is continue monitoring the recovery in the river, to see how it goes. But the blasting “obviously made a substantial difference,” Pess said.

Divers with torches also worked last month to cut off rebar and remove other debris, including metal shards and hunks of concrete from the former Elwha Dam’s original concrete foundation.

The debris created a boating hazard in the Elwha in the area of the former dam such that the National Park Service warned boaters away beginning last May.

The goal of the restoration is a multispecies revival of the entire watershed, three-quarters of which is in Olympic National Park. Taking down the two dams reopened 70 miles of some of the best spawning habitat for salmon in the region.

Acting park Superintendent Rachel Spector said in a prepared statement she is pleased so far with the results of dam removal. “As restoration proceeds, the benefits continue to mount along the entire river and throughout its entire system.”

The project already has received international recognition. Federal scientists Jeff Duda and Jonathan Warrick traveled to New Delhi last month to receive the 2016 Thiess International Riverprize for the collaborative work of the U.S. Department of the Interior and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to restore the Elwha.

The Riverprize is an annual award given by the International RiverFoundation to recognize premier examples of river-restoration management. The Elwha dam removal project was recognized as one of three Riverprize finalists for its unprecedented scope as the largest dam-removal project in history. The prize also recognized other elements of the project, including reseeding and replanting, sediment management and more.

“The Elwha River restoration is a shining example of what can happen when diverse groups work together to recognize rivers for their many contributions to our culture, economy and environment,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said of the award in a prepared statement.

“It was powerful to witness the largest dam removal and ecosystem restoration in history, and to see endangered salmon, trout and other fish once again regain access to their historic migration and spawning habitat along the Elwha River.”

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2515 or lmapes@seattletimes.com

By Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times environment reporter

Salmon and steelhead are in hot water — a problem scientists warn is going to get worse because of climate change.

Steelhead returning this year to the Columbia and Snake rivers migrated out of the river during horrendous conditions in 2015, which included record low flows and high water temperatures.

Those steelhead also were at sea during the so-called “blob” — a mass of warm water that began forming off the West Coast in 2013   and wreaked havoc in the ocean, including depressed food supplies for marine animals of all sorts.

Now those steelhead are migrating back through reservoirs where water temperatures at some Columbia and Lower Snake River dams, thanks to a record Northwest heat wave, have been stuck this summer above 70 degrees for days on end — potentially lethal for salmon and steelhead.

“They are just getting creamed everywhere they turn; conditions in the Columbia and Snake are the worst I have ever seen them,” said Steve Petit, a steelhead biologist with Idaho Fish and Game for 32 years before retiring, he hoped, to fish the Clearwater River that runs past his home.

But not this year. The state of Idaho closed all rivers for sport harvest of steelhead this week because there are so few fish. Only about 400 steelhead had crossed Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River when the agency announced a fall steelhead season closure,  a precipitous drop from the 10-year average of more than 6,000 steelhead over the dam near Lewiston, Idaho.   

Steelheaders all over the region are reeling — just not the good kind of reeling.

“Until this year, I had a narcoticlike steelhead fishing habit,” Petit said. But this year he’s fishing in the Kamchatka region of Russia for a last hurrah. “Then I’m probably going to just put all of my gear on eBay and sell it. I just don’t see any future for our fish. And I am not alone. All my friends that are in our 70s have just given it up, they don’t fish anymore. It’s too painful.”

Read the full story with graphics at the Seattle Times website.

From the desk of Sara Patton

February 5, 2014

Critics of the proposed test of enhanced spill at Columbia Basin dams to aid endangered salmon’s spring migration are overstating the measure’s greenhouse gas effects. In the attached letter to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, Save Our wild Salmon and the NW Energy Coalition explain that untapped energy efficiency and new renewable energy can replace most and eventually all of the hydropower generation lost to spill.

The letter begins with the Council’s own assessment of the effects of replacing potential lost hydropower entirely with natural gas, puts the resulting emissions increase in context, and then explains that replacement with fossil fuels is neither optimal nor cheapest. We have clean energy options, and should adopt them.

As the letter notes, “Playing salmon recovery against clean energy is a false choice that harms both objectives.” So is playing climate change mitigation (additional spill, in this case) against emissions reductions.

The test suggested by state, federal and Tribal scientists can determine how far enhanced spill can go toward moving list species toward actual recovery and set the stage for negotiated common solutions for river users and power consumers.

By Sam Mace

May 14, 2016

Five illegal plans. Twenty years of foot-dragging and failure. That’s the track record to date of the federal agencies tasked with restoring wild salmon in the Columbia and Snake rivers.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Simon in Portland recently rejected the latest plan, ordering NOAA, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bonneville Power Administration and other agencies to develop a new plan to restore endangered wild salmon and steelhead, beginning with an assessment of all recovery options and a public comment process.

In ruling in favor of sport and commercial fishing groups, conservation organizations, clean energy advocates, the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe, Judge Simon firmly rejected the federal agencies’ strategy to avoid dam management changes on the Columbia-Snake system that wild salmon need to survive.

The judge rejected the government’s attempt to weaken the requirements of the Endangered Species Act and its reliance on speculative and uncertain habitat projects rather than changes to the dams and their operation.

Also, the agencies were called out on their failure to address the growing impacts of climate change on wild salmon. Ninety-nine percent of Idaho’s sockeye died last year due to hot water behind the dams brought on by drought and record-breaking hot weather. Overall, hundreds of thousands of adult and juvenile salmon perished while migrating last year.

Judge Simon ordered the agencies to address these failures and deliver a new plan by March 1, 2018. Most significant and hopeful for our salmon, he made clear that the agencies must consider Lower Snake River dam removal.

Many river advocates have fought hard for the Snake River over the decades. Steelhead fishermen led the fight to stop the controversial Lower Snake dams from being built in the first place, including a last stand over Lower Granite Dam in the 1970s. When the Army Corps considered dam removal in the late 1990s, we came together again to advocate for a free-flowing Snake River. More than 800 people turned out to hearings in Spokane and more than 600 urged the agencies to remove the dams and restore the river. We came close.

Will it be different this time? Can we fix an indisputably broken status quo? Yes we can.

The landscape has changed significantly in the last 20 years. Renewable energy has grown by leaps in the past decade. A NW Energy Coalition study from last year shows how replacing the energy of these four dams with largely renewable power would cost taxpayers around $1 a month. Other studies show even lower costs.

Barging – the primary purpose of these dams – has declined dramatically. While barging remains robust on the Lower Columbia River between Pasco and Portland, container shipping on the Lower Snake River has disappeared and grain shipments have declined too as more shippers switch to rail and/or send goods to Puget Sound rather than Portland.

And the Lower Snake dams are aging. The costs of maintenance and repairs are rising as federal budgets are shrinking and nationally the Army Corps increasingly looks to mothball projects whose benefits not longer justify their expense. When one considers the declining benefits to local communities, rising costs to taxpayers, and the enormous cost to the health of our fisheries and rivers, these four dams no longer make sense.

Perhaps most hopeful: The Northwest has now undertaken many more dam removals – Elwha, Condit, Marmot, to name a few – and celebrated the return of rivers and salmon. And we have learned how people, communities and ecosystems benefit from removing dams and restoring rivers. None of the dire predictions by opponents has come true.

These success stories can show us the way forward on the Lower Snake. We can trade four aging dams for a modernized transportation system to better benefit farmers, truly clean energy for our citizens and utilities, and hundreds of millions in river and other outdoor recreation dollars to benefit towns throughout the region.

A judge has provided the path forward. Anglers, river users, community leaders and citizens must push our elected leaders and the federal government to finally free the Snake River.

Sam Mace is Inland Northwest director for Save Our Wild Salmon, a coalition of sport and commercial fishing interests, conservation groups and clean energy advocates working to restore wild salmon and steelhead to the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Read article here.

By Josh Mills, August 11, 2017

As I read John Francisco’s Aug. 5 op-ed (“Legislation saves salmon, hydrosystem”), a question came to mind: If the federal agencies had told us 20 years ago that they would spend $16 billion of our money – as ratepayers and taxpayers – on a scheme claiming to protect wild salmon in the Columbia and Snake rivers, but fail to recover a single one of the 13 endangered runs, wouldn’t we have demanded a different plan?

That’s why fishing businesses, sport fishing and conservation groups, the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe all applauded federal Judge Michael Simon’s ruling in 2016, rejecting the government’s latest plan to protect endangered salmon. Simon noted that the Federal Columbia River Power System “cries out for a new approach and new thinking.” He strongly urged the agencies to consider lower Snake River dam removal as an alternative.

Instead of embracing an opportunity to finally resolve the decadeslong morass, our Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers seeks to maintain the uncertainty, the wasting of billions of dollars and the decline of our fish to shore up a status quo that works for fewer people, businesses and communities as the years go by. Her bill, H.R. 3144, would lock us into this failure for at least another five years and lock us out of having input into a new plan that has a chance of success.

H.R. 3144 would effectively overturn the court ruling and rubber-stamp the government’s previous inadequate and illegal plan. It would prohibit the study of dam removal and overrule the court injunction supporting more spilling of water at dams to aid fish migration starting in 2018. Scientists tell us that these two actions are key to recovering wild stocks to healthy numbers.

Perhaps worst of all, this bill perpetuates the uncertainty inflicted on all stakeholders in the Northwest due to the shameless inaction of agencies charged with restoring our region’s iconic fish. By dragging their feet they have ignored the plight not only of businesses and small river towns that depend on fishing, but also the industries that use the dams and towns such as Clarkston, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho, that flank a reservoir.

As long as our wild salmon and steelhead continue their trajectory toward extinction, dam removal will remain on the table. Lifelong anglers like myself will not give up on a species that defines our rivers and family recreation. We recognize it is difficult for shippers to invest in transportation or riverside towns to develop waterfronts as long as the future of these dams remains in question. Ultimately it’s a situation that does a disservice to everyone.

The federal agencies and certain elected officials have spent the past 20 years trying to protect every dam in the system at the expense of wild salmon and on the backs of Northwest taxpayers. During that time, the benefits of the lower Snake River dams have declined dramatically, with river barging down 70 percent and energy produced by the dams worth much less with the rise in renewables and efficiency. It is time for a new approach, based on up-to-date information and an honest commitment to restoring one of our most precious species and natural resources.

Rep. McMorris Rodgers’ bill thwarts an opportunity to move beyond this impasse. If it becomes law, H.R. 3144 would derail a new planning process that includes new economic analyses, a review of recovery alternatives including dam removal and an opportunity for citizen scrutiny and input. H.R. 3144 would also take off the table an important interim tool – increased spill – that would deliver much-needed help to our struggling wild salmon and steelhead populations.

Instead of losing 99 percent of the Idaho sockeye run because of hot water behind dams like we did in 2015, or witnessing the most dismal return of Snake River steelhead seen in decades, we could have abundant fish returning to the thousands of miles of pristine streams within the largest, most intact salmon habitat left in the Lower 48. We could begin planning for a modern transportation system that works better for shippers, affordable clean energy alternatives and a free-flowing river recreation corridor with 14,400 acres of public land ready to attract tourists and recreational dollars.

The Inland Northwest has a choice. We can acquiesce to another five years of wasted time and money, further imperiling our wild fish and perpetuating the certainty for businesses and communities. Or we can urge McMorris Rodgers to reverse course on this bad bill and let Northwest citizens work together toward a future that includes abundant salmon and a thriving economy.

Josh Mills of Spokane is a board member of the Wild Steelhead Coalition.

By Nancy Hirsh
Saturday, Oct. 22, 2016

The Spokesman-Review’s Sept. 30 article “Feds asking public to weigh in on breaching Snake River dams” allowed to go unanswered a statement claiming that, if the region chooses to remove the four outdated and expensive dams on the lower Snake River, the hydroenergy they produce will have to be replaced by building a carbon-emitting natural gas plant that adds to climate pollution.

In short, the claim is that we can have either salmon restoration or we can have carbon-free energy, but not both. This is a false choice of the kind that moved the federal court to find that the federal agencies failed to adequately consider viable options, including ones that can replace the electricity from these dams with carbon-free, clean and renewable energy and help to bring back our amazing salmon. Here are the facts they are overlooking.

The Northwest electricity grid has changed tremendously in the past 20 years. Building on our abundant hydropower resources, Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana have developed new, renewable resources totaling more than 2,500 average megawatts (aMW) from wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy, with another 1,500 aMW under construction or in the final stages of approval. On top of this we continue to make strong advances in conservation and energy efficiency, saving more than 5,500 aMW of electricity over the years.

The four lower Snake River dams produce about 1,000 aMW of electricity each year, or about 5 percent of the Northwest’s supply. The claim that the only way we can replace this power is by building a new natural gas plant to burn fossil fuels is just not credible in light of the changing ways in which electricity needs are being met. Even as capacity from new renewables expands, the electric grid is evolving, and we’re becoming smarter about how we generate, consume and manage electricity.

Despite dire predictions from skeptics, utilities and electricity system operators have successfully integrated new, renewable resources and built energy efficiency equivalent to over a dozen natural gas-fired plants. We are improving how we bundle wind and solar from different geographic areas to increase reliability of renewable energy contributions to system operations. And we are beginning to use energy markets to more efficiently utilize all the existing resources we have.

Finally, the region is expanding a broad collection of energy efficiency, distributed clean renewables, energy storage and load management programs that make renewables even more reliable and affordable. In these ways and others, Northwest ingenuity has proved the skeptics wrong while also providing some of the lowest electric rates in the nation.

By the time changes to the lower Snake River system are made, the portfolio of low-carbon resources will be even more robust and more than able to meet the capacity and energy needs of the region. Meanwhile, the cost of new solar, wind and other renewables is plunging, while the cost to maintain the aging dams is only going to increase.

That’s why two recent studies, one by the NW Energy Coalition and one by Rocky Mountain Econometrics, find that we can replace the power from the four lower Snake River dams at little additional cost to customers through new, renewable energy, purchases of clean energy from existing sources, and smart planning and system coordination.

All of this is a part of building an integrated and modern electricity grid that meets customers’ needs, protects the environment and contributes our share to climate action. Our greatest asset is our ingenuity and ability to adapt. If we apply these skills to the challenge of providing carbon-free, clean energy, and restoring healthy salmon populations, we will secure a clean, reliable and affordable energy future.

That’s why we emphatically do not have to choose between restoring the ancient cycle of salmon in the Northwest that is part of our region’s way of life and having low-carbon energy. We can and should have both.

Nancy Hirsh is the executive director of the NW Energy Coalition, an alliance of environmental, labor, civic, faith and human service organizations.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/oct/22/we-can-restore-salmon-and-have-carbon-free-energy/

By Becky Kramer
Thursday, August 18, 2016

About 35 percent of this year’s Snake River sockeye salmon run hasn’t shown up at Lower Granite Dam, and the fish are probably dead, the Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday.

About 1,240 adult Snake River sockeye were counted at Bonneville Dam on the Lower Columbia earlier this summer. But only 788 of those fish have been detected at Lower Granite, the farthest upstream dam of the four Lower Snake River dams.

“They’re presumed to have perished,” Army Corps spokesman Bruce Henrickson said of the missing fish.

This year’s results are better than 2015, when 98 percent of the Snake River sockeye run died because of high temperatures in both the Columbia and the Snake, Henrickson said. Last year was the hottest on record.

Adult sockeye are particularly vulnerable to hot water, because their migration to spawning grounds coincides with the hottest part of summer. Water temperatures above 68 degrees are dangerous for salmon.

The Army Corps has been pumping cool water into the fish ladders at Lower Granite and Little Goose dams this summer to reduce the “thermal barrier” that stops salmon from migrating upstream. The pumping appears to be helping, officials said.

But salmon advocates say more must be done to protect fish from lethal temperatures in reservoirs behind the dams on both the Columbia and Snake. On Monday, they filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the agency’s failure to address high temperatures in the river system. Dams contribute to temperature problems by creating slack water reservoirs that heat up in the sun.

Snake River sockeye returned in record numbers in 2014, when more than 2,700 adult fish passed over Lower Granite Dam.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/aug/18/about-35-percent-of-snake-river-sockeye-presumed-d/

Nov 14, 2016
 
By Becky Kramer
      
Bryan Jones is a Whitman County wheat grower who ships his grain to Portland by barge.

He’s not against breaching the four Lower Snake River dams if cost-effective alternatives can be found for getting his crops to market. It’s an issue that Jones, an angler, feels so strongly about that he spoke at a pro-salmon rally Monday at Riverfront Park.

“I know there are solutions out there,” Jones told the crowd. “Free the Snake. Save the salmon, but keep the farmers whole.”

Jones was a moderate voice in an often polarized discussion over the dams that took place Monday in Spokane.

More than 200 people turned out at the Davenport Hotel for an open house on Columbia-Snake River dam operations. Federal agencies are gathering public comments as they prepare a new environmental review of the system’s impact on salmon and steelhead.

The review was ordered by a federal judge in May, who said federal agencies had “done their utmost” to avoid considering breaching the Lower Snake dams, and suggested that a proper review under federal law could require that analysis.

Pro-salmon groups say that removing the four Lower Snake dams is one of the most important actions needed to help wild salmon and steelhead runs. The dams impede access to thousands of miles of wilderness streams – habitat that will help salmon survive as the climate warms, they say.

The government is overdue for a true cost-benefit analysis of the dams, which produce about 5 percent of the Northwest’s electricity, said Harvey Morrison, a member of the Spokane Falls chapter of Trout Unlimited.

Economics was also on the mind of Alex McGregor, president of McGregor Co., an agricultural chemical and equipment company based in Colfax. About 60 percent of Washington’s wheat and barley is shipped by river. The dams’ reservoirs allow barge shipments on the Lower Snake, providing an alternative to rail shipments.

“I think we’ve made so much progress at finding ways to improve fish survival,” McGregor said.

Taking out the dams would create challenges for farm families, said Les Wigen, a retired Whitman County commissioner.

“The Snake River is our Interstate 5 corridor to Eastern Washington,” he said.

Stevens County Commissioner Wes McCart was also at Monday’s meeting. Changes in dam operations on the Snake River have the potential to affect the Upper Columbia River, where Stevens County has a long shoreline, he said.

“If they breach the four Lower Snake dams, what does that do to our power production?” McCart said.

Even modest fluctuations in the price of power will affect rural communities’ ability to recruit manufacturing businesses, he said.

Monday’s meeting has been one of the best attended of 15 meetings held around the region, said David Wilson, a Bonneville Power spokesman. About 40 people were lined up before the doors opened.

Another meeting takes place from 4-7 p.m. Wednesday at the Red Lion Inn in Lewiston.

To see photos, full article:  http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/nov/14/big-crowd-turns-out-in-spokane-to-talk-about-lower/

By Becky Kramer

MONDAY, AUG. 15, 2016

Hot water is killing salmon in the reservoirs behind Columbia and Snake river dams, and the federal government must take action to prevent future die-offs of the Northwest’s iconic fish, environmental groups say.

Last year, more than 250,000 adult sockeye salmon perished when temperatures in some reservoirs hit 72 degrees by mid-July. Nearly all of the 4,000 sockeye returning to spawn in Idaho’s Stanley Basin were killed.

“For the people of Idaho, this is a huge deal,” said Kevin Lewis, executive director of Idaho Rivers United. “Sockeye salmon are a special species to us, and they’re already imperiled. To have virtually the entire run killed from hot water is unacceptable.”

A coalition of salmon advocates on Monday filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the water temperature. If the agency doesn’t develop a plan for addressing high temperatures within two months, or reach a settlement, the groups will proceed to a lawsuit under the federal Clean Water Act.

“I think 2015 was an ugly glimpse into the future of what the Columbia and Snake rivers could look like under climate change,” said Miles Johnson, an attorney for the Columbia Riverkeeper. “We need a comprehensive plan to deal with dams’ impacts on water temperature, or we may be telling our kids stories about salmon instead of teaching them to fish.”

Dams heat up water temperatures by creating large, slackwater reservoirs that act like “solar panels” for absorbing radiant energy, Lewis said. Water temperatures above 68 degrees are dangerous for salmon.

Adult sockeye are particularly vulnerable because they migrate back to spawning grounds during the hottest part of summer. Spring and fall chinook migrations typically occur before and after the temperatures peak.

Last year was the warmest on record globally, with drought and early melting of snowpack affecting Northwest rivers. Even though 2016 has been a return to more typical weather patterns in the Northwest, some Columbia and Snake reservoirs still are recording temperatures of 70 degrees. It’s the third consecutive year of record-high water temperatures in the rivers, salmon advocates say.

“Salmon are used to living in much colder water; it would be like us being outside on a 110-degree day with a fur coat on,” Lewis said. “Every year, we’re flirting with disaster. It doesn’t take much to push us over the norm.”

The waters of the Columbia and Snake rivers are listed by Washington, Oregon and Idaho as too hot to protect returning adult salmon in the summer and fall. Back in 2000, both Washington and Oregon asked the EPA to develop a legally enforceable plan to address water warmth in the river system.

The EPA released a draft plan in 2003 identifying dams as the primary cause of higher river temperatures.

However, the plan “was never finalized. It got put on a shelf,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, the Columbia Riverkeeper’s executive director.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates many of the federal dams on the Columbia and Snake, “derailed the process,” Johnson said. The Army Corps wanted to address the warm water through an alternate plan, but “essentially, nothing has happened for the last 15 years,” he said.

An EPA spokesman declined to respond, saying the agency’s policy is not to comment on pending litigation. The Army Corps also declined to comment Monday.

Water temperatures in Lake Roosevelt, the 150-mile-long reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam, are up to 10 degrees warmer in late fall than pre-dam conditions, the draft EPA report said. In the Lower Snake River, water temperatures in four reservoirs are each 1 to 2 degrees warmer than they were before the dams were built, Johnson said.
The warming has a cumulative effect on the Lower Snake, he said. The water gets progressively warmer as it moves through each reservoir, which affects salmon migration, he said. The Snake also delivers the warm water to the Columbia, Johnson said.
Last year, many of the fish kills occurred in the Lower Columbia River, before the fish reached the John Day and McNary dams, he said.

“The main stem of the Columbia itself has pretty significant temperature problems, especially in warm years with low flow,” Johnson said. “EPA recognized that temperature is a problem for salmon and steelhead. We’re hopeful that EPA will restart the planning process” to address the water temperature.

Other groups involved in the litigation include the Snake River Waterkeeper, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the Institute for Fisheries Resources.

By Becky Kramer

MONDAY, AUG. 15, 2016

Hot water is killing salmon in the reservoirs behind Columbia and Snake river dams, and the federal government must take action to prevent future die-offs of the Northwest’s iconic fish, environmental groups say.

Last year, more than 250,000 adult sockeye salmon perished when temperatures in some reservoirs hit 72 degrees by mid-July. Nearly all of the 4,000 sockeye returning to spawn in Idaho’s Stanley Basin were killed.

“For the people of Idaho, this is a huge deal,” said Kevin Lewis, executive director of Idaho Rivers United. “Sockeye salmon are a special species to us, and they’re already imperiled. To have virtually the entire run killed from hot water is unacceptable.”

A coalition of salmon advocates on Monday filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the water temperature. If the agency doesn’t develop a plan for addressing high temperatures within two months, or reach a settlement, the groups will proceed to a lawsuit under the federal Clean Water Act.

“I think 2015 was an ugly glimpse into the future of what the Columbia and Snake rivers could look like under climate change,” said Miles Johnson, an attorney for the Columbia Riverkeeper. “We need a comprehensive plan to deal with dams’ impacts on water temperature, or we may be telling our kids stories about salmon instead of teaching them to fish.”

Dams heat up water temperatures by creating large, slackwater reservoirs that act like “solar panels” for absorbing radiant energy, Lewis said. Water temperatures above 68 degrees are dangerous for salmon.

Adult sockeye are particularly vulnerable because they migrate back to spawning grounds during the hottest part of summer. Spring and fall chinook migrations typically occur before and after the temperatures peak.

Last year was the warmest on record globally, with drought and early melting of snowpack affecting Northwest rivers. Even though 2016 has been a return to more typical weather patterns in the Northwest, some Columbia and Snake reservoirs still are recording temperatures of 70 degrees. It’s the third consecutive year of record-high water temperatures in the rivers, salmon advocates say.

“Salmon are used to living in much colder water; it would be like us being outside on a 110-degree day with a fur coat on,” Lewis said. “Every year, we’re flirting with disaster. It doesn’t take much to push us over the norm.”

The waters of the Columbia and Snake rivers are listed by Washington, Oregon and Idaho as too hot to protect returning adult salmon in the summer and fall. Back in 2000, both Washington and Oregon asked the EPA to develop a legally enforceable plan to address water warmth in the river system.

The EPA released a draft plan in 2003 identifying dams as the primary cause of higher river temperatures.

However, the plan “was never finalized. It got put on a shelf,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, the Columbia Riverkeeper’s executive director.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates many of the federal dams on the Columbia and Snake, “derailed the process,” Johnson said. The Army Corps wanted to address the warm water through an alternate plan, but “essentially, nothing has happened for the last 15 years,” he said.

An EPA spokesman declined to respond, saying the agency’s policy is not to comment on pending litigation. The Army Corps also declined to comment Monday.

Water temperatures in Lake Roosevelt, the 150-mile-long reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam, are up to 10 degrees warmer in late fall than pre-dam conditions, the draft EPA report said. In the Lower Snake River, water temperatures in four reservoirs are each 1 to 2 degrees warmer than they were before the dams were built, Johnson said.
The warming has a cumulative effect on the Lower Snake, he said. The water gets progressively warmer as it moves through each reservoir, which affects salmon migration, he said. The Snake also delivers the warm water to the Columbia, Johnson said.
Last year, many of the fish kills occurred in the Lower Columbia River, before the fish reached the John Day and McNary dams, he said.

“The main stem of the Columbia itself has pretty significant temperature problems, especially in warm years with low flow,” Johnson said. “EPA recognized that temperature is a problem for salmon and steelhead. We’re hopeful that EPA will restart the planning process” to address the water temperature.

Other groups involved in the litigation include the Snake River Waterkeeper, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the Institute for Fisheries Resources.

By Becky Kramer
      
AT A GLANCE:
The dams: Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite

The wild fish: Spring, summer and fall chinook; sockeye; steelhead

Electricity production: About 1,000 average megawatts, or enough to power Seattle

Barge traffic: Ships about 60 percent of Washington’s wheat crop

Irrigation: Ice Harbor Dam’s reservoir irrigates about 60,000 acres of cropland.

Scoping meetings: Tuesday in Coulee Dam; Wednesday in Priest River; Thursday in Bonners Ferry; Nov. 14 in Spokane.

Comments <http://www.crso.info/> Accepted through Jan. 17.
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Over his lunch hour, Steve Pettit used to tug on his waders, grab his fly-fishing rod and scramble down the hill from his Lewiston office to the Clearwater River.

A dozen casts later, he’d hook a steelhead.

“I’d fight it for 30 minutes. Then I’d release the fish, say goodbye and go back to work at 1 p.m.,” Pettit said.

But on a February day in 1975, the young Idaho Fish and Game biologist rode a jet boat down the Snake River instead of fishing on his lunch break. The pool behind the newly constructed Lower Granite Dam had begun to fill, creating a reservoir that stretched to Lewiston, the city at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers.

Most Lewiston residents celebrated the day their town became an inland seaport. Barges could leave the Port of Lewiston, passing through a series of locks and dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers to travel 360 miles to Portland.

The day was especially sweet for the Inland Northwest’s grain growers. They’d spent 40 years lobbying for a barge route that could transport their wheat to Portland, providing relief from high shipping costs charged by railroads.

But Pettit felt only grief as the rising water covered familiar landmarks. “It was the saddest day of my life,” he said.

A series of public meetings begin this week on the operation of the Northwest’s federal hydropower system. Pettit will attend at least one of the meetings, testifying that the Lower Snake River dams should come down.

Beginning in the 1950s, state and federal fish biologists warned repeatedly that damming the Lower Snake River could drive Idaho’s wild salmon and steelhead runs to extinction.

Lower Granite was the last of four dams built across the Lower Snake’s basalt canyons.

All of them were constructed with fish ladders, but passage over the dams was yet another impediment to young salmon and steelhead that spawned in central Idaho and migrated hundreds of miles to the ocean.
‘This is a really critical process’
The upcoming meetings are a result of a federal judge’s ruling in May saying the latest of five federal plans for restoring wild salmon and steelhead runs on the Columbia and Snake river systems was flawed.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Simon ordered federal agencies to prepare a new plan by early 2018. The meetings will allow Northwest residents to talk about issues they think should be part of an environmental review of federal hydropower operations.

The court ruling doesn’t order the agencies to investigate breaching the Lower Snake River dams to restore salmon, said Amy Gaskill, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is hosting the meetings with the Bureau of Reclamation and Bonneville Power Administration.

But in blunt language, Simon wrote that the federal agencies had “done their utmost” to avoid considering breaching the Lower Snake dams, and suggested that a proper review under federal law could require analyzing the effect of breaching or bypassing one or more of the dams.

Salmon advocates who were plaintiffs in the lawsuit have seized the moment. Several hundred supporters gathered last month for a “Free the Snake” flotilla in Lewiston.

“Removing the four Lower Snake dams is the single most important action we could take to restore salmon in the entire Columbia-Snake river basin,” said Sam Mace of Save Our Wild Salmon <http://www.wildsalmon.org/> .

Beyond the dams are thousands of miles of pristine rivers and streams. As the climate warms and snowpacks shrink, those high-elevation river basins will remain cold enough to support salmon and steelhead spawning and rearing, Mace said. They’re sometimes called “the ark” for preserving wild populations, she said.

Dam advocates also are preparing their testimony.

“This is a really critical process,” said Terry Flores, executive director of Northwest River Partners <http://nwriverpartners.org/> , which represents agriculture and shipping interests and the public utilities that buy electricity from the federal hydropower system. “We think that dams are an important part of the Northwest economy.”

About 60 percent of Washington’s wheat and barley crop is shipped downriver by barge to Portland. And the reservoir behind Ice Harbor Dam on the Lower Snake irrigates about 60,000 acres of cropland.

A dam-breaching discussion also raises questions about how the carbon-free electricity would be replaced. About 5 percent of the Northwest’s electricity comes from the four Lower Snake Dams, which provide enough energy for a city the size of Seattle.

Breaching the four Lower Snake dams isn’t something that could be ordered by a court, said Gaskill, the corps spokeswoman. Since the dams are federal projects, removing them would require action by Congress and a federal appropriation, she said.

BPA, which sells the electricity from the Northwest’s federal hydropower system, estimates the cost of breaching the dams at $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion.
Plight of Idaho’s fish  ‘very bleak’
Pettit retired after 32 years with Idaho Fish and Game, spending a significant part of his career on fish passage at the dams.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent over the years, the dams and their reservoirs still kill too many young salmon and steelhead, Pettit said.

According to the Corps of Engineers, more than 90 percent of the young fish survive passage through each dam. But the cumulative toll from dams and reservoirs all along the Columbia and Snake rivers adds up to mortality rates of 50 percent or more for Idaho’s wild runs as they migrate to the ocean, Pettit said. The exception is fall chinook, which survive in higher numbers because of court-ordered water releases from reservoirs during their migration, he said.

With climate change presenting new risks to wild salmon and steelhead, bold action is needed, Pettit said.

“Unless something drastic happens, the plight of Idaho’s salmon and steelhead is very bleak,” he said. “I don’t think we can change the dams enough to recover the fish with climate change in place.”

Salmon and steelhead will face increasingly hostile ocean conditions as a result of climate change, Pettit said. Ocean acidification is affecting the North Pacific’s food chain, which means there’s less for them to eat.

In addition, some Northwest rivers will become too warm for the fish, he said. The Deschutes, John Day and Wenatchee rivers are at risk, Pettit said.

With their high mountains, central Idaho’s Clearwater and Salmon river drainages have the best cold-water habitat for spawning left in the Columbia Basin, he said.

“It’s wilderness, as pristine as you can get,” he said. “As climate change grabs ahold of us harder and harder, the high elevations are going to be the last bastion for salmon.”

Preserving wild runs is critical to salmon and steelhead long-term survival, Pettit said. Wild fish are genetically adapted to where they live, and they return from the ocean in higher percentages than hatchery fish, he said.
Barges ship most of the region’s wheat
The Lower Snake dams have strong advocates in Eastern Washington.

About 3,700 farmers grow wheat and barley in the region, according to the Washington Grain Growers. Most of their crops are shipped to Portland and exported overseas.

Besides the 60 percent of the grain that moves to Portland by barge, some of it is transported by rail and truck. Farmers benefit from multiple shipping options, which helps keep prices competitive, said Glen Squires, chief executive for the Washington Grain Commission.

Barges can move large amounts of grain quickly, and they’re an environmentally friendly form of transport, he said. A tug pushing a barge can haul a ton of wheat 576 miles on a single gallon of fuel.

Grain shipments make up the largest commodity movement on the Lower Snake River. Some other crops, fertilizers, wood chips and sawdust are also shipped on the Lower Snake. But in general, barge traffic on the Lower Snake has experienced a 20-year decline, including decreases in wheat shipments, according to the Corps of Engineers Navigation Data Center <http://www.navigationdatacenter.us/> .

Petroleum shipments to Lewiston dropped after a pipeline was built to Spokane, according to a 2015 study by Rocky Mountain Econometrics. And railroads have competed for grain shipments with lower prices, the study said.
Climate change ups the ante for salmon, carbon-free energy
Climate change has upped the ante not only for salmon survival, but for the carbon-free energy produced by the Lower Snake dams.

The four dams produce about 1,000 average megawatts of power, which is enough to supply 800,000 households. But the dams’ average output doesn’t fully explain their importance for meeting the region’s electric needs, according to BPA officials.

During an extended cold snap in 2014, when nighttime temperatures dipped to the teens and lower across the Northwest, BPA used extra generating capacity at the Lower Snake dams to meet higher demand for electricity, said Steve Kerns, BPA’s manager of generation scheduling.

Reservoirs behind the four dams store water in the fall and winter. Even though they’re not deep reservoirs, the pools can be drawn down or raised 5 feet to respond to changes in electrical demand or unexpected outages at other plants, Kerns said. The dams can produce 2,650 megawatts of electricity during times of peak demand.

The Lower Snake dams are among 10 federal dams in the Northwest with automatic controls that allow them to react instantly to changes in electric demand, which provides reliability for the system. The versatility in the hydro system helps the region’s electric grid integrate wind generation, which ramps up and down quickly, Kerns said.

The Lower Snake dams also are strategically located on one of the main transmission corridors that bring electricity from Montana and Idaho into Oregon and Washington. The dams’ power production helps stabilize the system.

Breaching the four Lower Snake dams would require the Northwest to build a plant fired by natural gas, BPA said in a study last year.

Even a highly efficient gas-fired plant would increase the region’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2 million to 2.6 million metric tons annually, which is like adding 421,000 passenger cars to the road, the study said.

But the analysis has been criticized by some environmental groups, which say a combination of conservation and other renewable energy could replace the power from the four dams.

BPA officials declined to talk about the study because the issue of energy replacement could become part of the federal environmental review.

Pettit, the retired Idaho biologist, still fishes for steelhead, though it’s been a poor year for both wild and hatchery returns, he said.

The region is overdue for a serious talk about the Lower Snake dams, he said.

“I consider the salmon and steelhead that return to the Snake River system to be a strong icon of what Northwest living is all about,” Pettit said. “If we’re going to keep them around, there will have to be tradeoffs made.”

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/oct/24/pressure-mounts-on-lower-snake-dams-as-fish-runs-s/

December 15, 2013

By Sam Mace

The best fall chinook salmon run in years has made this a banner season for Columbia Basin anglers. River towns, outfitters, shops and motels throughout our region have shared in this unexpected bounty.

Unfortunately, the news about many of our region’s other salmon and steelhead populations is far less encouraging. And the future for all the basin’s endangered wild salmon remains very much in doubt.

Amid this busy fishing season, federal agencies have released a draft of their latest plan to restore endangered Columbia-Snake salmon. Ironically, the government’s fourth attempt in 12 years to craft a legal Biological Opinion calls for rolling back the very provisions that helped bring our iconic fish home this year – most notably additional spill.

For years the Bonneville Power Administration and the other agencies have resisted calls by fishing and conservation groups, the State of Oregon, the Nez Perce Tribe and the federal judiciary to develop a recovery plan guided by science and law. The recently released draft plan fails to address the issues that forced the court to reject the three previous versions. Worse, it would cut back on existing critical protections for wild salmon, including spilling water over dams to aid young salmon’s spring-summer migration to the ocean. Rather than build on this limited success, the agencies want to take us backward.

The federal court began ordering increased spill in the spring and summer in 2006, and wild salmon – and fishing businesses – have benefited greatly. While current court-ordered spill levels have aided endangered populations, 13 Columbia Basin stocks remain at risk of extinction. More help is needed.
Spill is our most effective near-term measure for restoring wild salmon and steelhead, allowing the river to flow more naturally and speeding fish more quickly and safely to the ocean. Science tells us that more spill – not less – is one of the most effective immediate actions we can take. Many state, federal and tribal scientists believe greater spill actually could recover some at-risk Columbia River populations.

But the agencies’ draft plan ignores the scientists, their findings and their call for an enhanced spill test. Unless their final plan, due in January, incorporates the spill test and other significant improvements, the federal agencies will surely plunge our region into yet another expensive, time-consuming round of litigation.

To pass legal muster, the final plan must address the concerns the court raised in its 2011 ruling. It must include, for example, an analysis of lower Snake River dam removal. It must consider other, more aggressive measures for moving salmon through the hydrosystem. And it must address the effects of climate change. On all these crucial matters, the draft is silent.

The agencies can get this right. They can produce a scientifically sound plan that complies with the law and protects and restores endangered salmon and steelhead. We need our elected leaders, including Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, to push them to end their wasteful and destructive litigation loop.

Lasting peace in the Columbia Basin depends on leadership from our elected officials. They can call all interests to the table to consider all credible recovery options, including but not limited to restoration of a free-flowing lower Snake River. Energy interests, farmers, shippers, tribes and communities in other areas have forged joint solutions – some involving removal of aging, costly dams – to restore fisheries and local economies.

The people of the Columbia-Snake are ready to move forward together; our political leaders must lead the way.

Sam Mace is the Inland Northwest Director for Save Our Wild Salmon, a coalition of fishing businesses, conservation groups and clean-energy advocates working to restore wild salmon and steelhead to the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Friday, Sept. 30, 2016 By Becky Kramer A federal judge is forcing discussion of a radical step to save endangered salmon: taking out four dams on the Lower Snake River.

The public will get a chance to weigh in at meetings throughout the Northwest starting next month.
“Scientists tell us that removing the four Lower Snake dams is the single most important action we could take to restore salmon in the entire Columbia-Snake river basin,” said Sam Mace of Save Our Wild Salmon.

The four dams produce about 5 percent of the Northwest’s hydroelectric power. They allow barges to ship goods between Lewiston and Portland. But they also hamper salmon migration to some of the best remaining fish habitat.

Commercial interests have long opposed removing the Lower Snake Dams.

“We think those dams need to stay in place because of the multiple benefits they provide,” said Terry Flores, executive director of Northwest River Partners, which represents public utilities, port districts and farm groups.

“They provide clean, carbon-free energy … We think they’re an important part of the Northwest economy and the environment,” she said.

Three federal agencies will hold public hearings across the region this fall to discuss the creation of a new salmon plan.

Back in May, U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Simon sided with fishing groups, environmentalists, the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe, finding that the latest of five federal plans for protecting the fish wasn’t adequate. He ordered the agencies to prepare a new one by early 2018.

Simon said federal agencies had “done their utmost” to avoid considering breaching the Snake River dams, ignoring strong suggestions to do so by a previous federal judge.

While Simon said he wouldn’t dictate what options agencies should consider, he said a proper analysis under federal law “may well require” considering breaching, bypassing or removing one or more of the four Lower Snake River dams.

Salmon advocates said the ruling is the closest the region has come to dam breaching since 2000, when the Army Corps of Engineers did a study of taking out the Lower Snake dams.

The four dams produce about 1,000 megawatts of electricity on average, which is enough meet the needs of about 800,000 households each year. But despite millions of dollars spent on fish passage improvements, adult salmon still die in the reservoirs behind the dams.

“The four dams on the Lower Snake River have had a devastating impact on salmon, steelhead, and Pacific lamprey, and in turn on the Nez Perce people,” said McCoy Oatman, vice chairman of the tribe, which is also advocating dam removal.

The Snake River is the gateway to million of acres of pristine, high-elevation habitat in central Idaho, southwest Washington and northeast Oregon, which could help salmon survive in a warming climate.
“We have the healthy rivers, but the salmon aren’t making it back,” Mace said.

On a typical year, only about 40 percent of the Idaho sockeye counted on the Lower Columbia River make it back to their Idaho spawning grounds. During last year’s drought, mortality was in the 99 percent range. Warm water in the four Lower Snake reservoirs is a contributor.

The economic argument for the dams isn’t as strong as it once was, Mace said.

The Lower Snake dams were built from the 1950s to the 1970s, with navigation as a primary goal. But that barge traffic has dropped in recent years as the region has invested in rail capacity, Mace said.

“These dams weren’t built for flood control. They’re not big water storage dams … and their power benefits are replaceable,” she said. “It’s time to call the question on them.”

Salmon advocates “downplay the value of the dams,” said Flores, of Northwest River Partners.

Dams provide more operating flexibility than other renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, Flores said. Electricity generated from wind turbines and solar panels can’t be stored easily. But dams can store water, releasing it during periods of high demand for electricity.

Breaching the four Lower Snake dams would require the Northwest to build a natural-gas-fired plant, the Bonneville Power Adminstration said this spring.

Even a highly efficient gas-fired plant would increase the region’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2 million to 2.6 millon metric tons annually, which is like adding 421,000 passenger cars to the road, according to the BPA.

The agency sells the electricity produced by 31 federal dams.

Replacing the Lower Snake dams’ electric production with natural gas would cost between $274 million and $372 million each year, the agency said. The estimates include the capacity to keep the Northwest power grid running smoothly.

Another study found that dam removal would have a minor impact on electricity costs. A 2015 study done by the Northwest Energy Coalition said residential customers of public power companies would pay about $1 more per month.

John Harrison, a spokesman for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, said he’s not aware of an “objective, independent, bipartisan” analysis of the economic impact of dam removal.

The information available at this time either comes from agencies or interest groups, he said.
This story contains information from the Associated Press.

To view full article with graphics go here.

Tacoma News Tribune:   September 22, 2013 

By BILL ARTHUR AND SARA PATTON

First the good news: On Sept. 9, a record 64,000 adult fall chinook salmon passed Bonneville Dam near the mouth of the Columbia River. For a change, fishing limits are being adjusted upward – a great sign for our fall chinook and for Northwest fishermen.

Here’s the bad news: In an ironic twist, Sept. 9 was the same day federal agencies unveiled their latest woefully inadequate draft plan for addressing the perils posed by Columbia Basin dams to the 13 endangered salmon and steelhead populations that are not faring nearly as well as this year’s fall chinook. That plan proposes cuts to some of the same measures that helped bring about this year’s returns.

Over the past 12 years, courts have rejected three straight proposed plans (known as Biological Opinions) as inadequate and illegal, and the “new” 751-page document hit the region not with a splash but a thud.

The Bonneville Power Administration and its partner federal agencies appear to be trying an end-run the court’s most recent decision in 2011. The draft fails to improve on the rejected plan it’s supposed to replace. In fact, it seeks to weaken critical fish protections and greatly increases the likelihood of further litigation.

If adopted in its current form, this plan risks forcing the region into another extended court battle just as we are moving toward a new collaborative approach to solving the decades-long debate over salmon restoration.

The feds would allow early termination of summertime salmon spill, which refers to spilling water over the tops of dams and sending migrating young salmon to the ocean more quickly and safely. Spring and summer spill have proved our most effective near-term measures for boosting endangered salmon and steelhead populations.

Spill is the law on the river. The court first ordered federal agencies to implement spill in 2006 as the line of illegal salmon plans began to lengthen. Seven years later, the results are undeniable. Regional scientists find that spill increases juvenile fish survival through the hydrosystem and the numbers of returning adults, thus helping fish and boosting fishing jobs. This month’s huge fall chinook return is a testament to the value of the court-ordered spill (aided by favorable ocean conditions).

Today, many state, federal and tribal scientists agree that greater spill levels could recover some at-risk populations in the basin. They believe the feds should include a real-world test of expanded spill in their new plan, rather than trying to roll back a highly successful strategy.

Clearly, our hydrosystem managers want to wring as much marketable electricity out the dams as they can. But concerns about rising consumer power bills from reduced generation due to spill are exaggerated at best.

The region’s official power planning agency, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, found that record energy efficiency achievements make it possible to give water back to fish – and wean the region off coal power – without raising families’ electric bills one iota.

The Obama administration can still make this right. In their final plan, due by the end of the year, the feds can join the rising chorus of Northwest voices calling on stakeholders – fishermen, farmers, energy producers and others – to work together on effective, long-term solutions to our shared salmon, energy and transportation challenges.

Salmon and salmon-economy supporters can submit their official comments (//237/2013DraftFCRPS@noaa.gov">2013DraftFCRPS@noaa.gov) calling for significant improvements before the Oct. 7 deadline. Our elected leaders – including Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell – must also weigh in to assure continued movement toward shared solutions for endangered salmon and people of the Northwest.

Bill Arthur of Seattle, the Sierra Club’s deputy national field director, has been a leader in wild salmon restoration for the past 10 years. Sara Patton of Seattle is executive director of the NW Energy Coalition, which advocates for policies promoting energy efficiency, renewable energy, consumer and low-income protections, and restoration of fish and wildlife affected by Northwest power production.

For more information: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/09/22/2798508/theres-good-news-and-bad-news.html

Lynda Mapes, Seattle Times, December 1, 2016

Public hearings are under way throughout the Northwest to inform an environmental review of operations of the Columbia River and Lower Snake River dams.

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Tuesday, December 6 — Columbia Gorge Discovery Center, River Gallery Room, 5000 Discovery Drive, The Dalles., 4 to 7 p.m.

Wednesday, December 7 — Oregon Convention Center, 777 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Portland, 4 to 7 p.m.

Thursday, December 8 — The Loft at the Red Building, 20 Basin St., Astoria, 4 to 7 p.m.

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The federal Columbia River hydropower system, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is under a federal court-ordered scrutiny of the dams’ environmental effects. The dams provide hydroelectricity, irrigation, navigation and recreation benefits to the region.

So-called public scoping hearings throughout the region are intended to guide an environmental-impact statement ordered by a judge.

The purpose of the review is to gauge the effects of long-term dam operations at the 14 federally operated hydropower facilities up and down the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers on fish, wildlife, irrigation, navigation, native cultures and more.

The hearings are convened by the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets power from the dams, and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, which operate the dams.

The agencies are charged with coming up with an operations plan that will protect and recover populations of endangered and threatened salmon and steelhead.

The review is the result of a U.S. District Court ruling last May siding with businesses, conservation groups, alternative-energy advocates, the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe, which have challenged dam operations in court as lethal to salmon and steelhead.

Operations at the dams continue under a provisional permit while the court review is under way.

Today 13 runs of Columbia and Snake river salmon and steelhead are at risk and still slipping away, despite billions of dollars spent to save them, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon of Oregon stated in his ruling.

He demanded a do-over of previous so-called biological opinions, created by the agencies defending dam operations. This time around, all aspects of operations and strategies for fish and wildlife recovery must be on the table, Simon insisted, and he demanded fresh analysis, thinking and information.

He sent the agencies back to the drawing board for a new biological opinion and full National Environmental Policy Act analysis, which “may well require consideration of breaching, bypassing, or removing one or more of the four Lower Snake River dams,” to be compliant with the law this time, Simon wrote.

The farthest inland of the four dams, Lower Granite, completed in 1974, capped a long-held regional economic-development dream to create deep-draft navigation from the Pacific to Lewiston, Idaho.

The dams also provide hydropower, as well as irrigation for a small number of growers with large operations along the river.

Much has changed since the last review of the hydropower system, including hard lessons about the risk of climate change to fish as warming water challenges their survival.

The changes in snowmelt patterns, drought and warmer weather make the dams even more detrimental for salmon and steelhead, which require cold, clean, oxygenated water to survive. During the brutal summer drought of 2015, after a record-low snowpack, many fish runs were hammered and, in particular, very few sockeye made it back alive to their spawning grounds.

The dynamics of the power grid also have changed, with more sources of energy coming online, including wind power.

The economics of navigation on the Lower Snake waterway are also under scrutiny, with usage by shippers in a steady slide and maintenance costs on the rise.

Scientists are also gaining a better understanding of the web of life that depends on salmon to survive, which includes endangered orca whales.

Locals got their chance to comment on the future of dams

By Edward Stratton, The Daily Astorian

January 10, 2017 10:26AM

Supporters of the removal of four dams on the Snake River rallied at Astoria’s Suomi Hall Monday before attending the last of 16 public scoping meetings organized by federal agencies to gather public comment on the future operation of the Columbia and Snake Rivers hydroelectric dam system.

The scoping meetings have been organized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bonneville Power Administration and the Bureau of Reclamation, tasked with gathering public comment and developing alternatives on how to operate the system.

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon ruled the current salmon recovery plan violated the Endangered Species Act by not doing enough to protect 13 listed Columbia River Basin species of salmon and steelhead. It was the fifth-such plan to be rejected.

Simon’s predecessor in the case, Judge James Redden, said after stepping down that the four Snake River dams — Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite — should be removed to help struggling salmon species.

Simon stopped short of such a pronouncement, but said the government needed to look at more aggressive approaches to help struggling salmonids, including removal of the dams. The four dams on the Snake River provide about 5 percent of the Pacific Northwest’s hydropower, along with barge transport for agricultural products between Lewiston, Idaho, and the Columbia.

Simon’s ruling has renewed a push to remove the dams, seen as an impediment to healthier salmon runs by some and an economic lifeline by others.

Freeing the Snake
“Since the erection of the Snake River dams, I have witnessed the end of … commercial canning in Astoria,” Dioniscio Y. Abing, a self-described adopted member of the Chinook Nation who worked in the former Bumble Bee Cannery on Pier 39, said during the rally at Suomi Hall.

Abing said the removal of two dams on the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River showed the benefits, soon to be followed by the removal of several dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California. He said those opposed to dam removal should look to develop better rail connections to move cargo.

“Astoria is symbolic of the non-native demographic groups that have lost the most in the headlong rush of the federal government into hydropower development of the Columbia River Basin,” said Hobe Kytr of Salmon for All, a local group supporting commercial gillnetters.

Kytr said the previously flourishing salmon canning industry has been decimated by projects like the Grand Coulee Dam, which cut off the upper third of the Columbia from fish passage, and the dams on the Snake River, while commercial fishermen have been unfairly scapegoated.

Dan Serres, the conservation director of environmental group Columbia Riverkeeper, said his group had monitored temperatures in the reservoirs behind each Snake River dam in 2015. “The river temperature steps up with each dam, and it’s obvious why,” he said.

He and Kytr both pointed to 2015, when nearly all Snake River sockeye salmon counted at the Bonneville Dam died amid warm water temperatures before they reached Idaho.

Feeling disenfranchised
Joseph Bogaard, executive director of Save Our Wild Salmon, said part of the reason for the rally before the scoping meeting was the disenfranchising nature of the federal agencies’ collection of public comment.

Instead of impassioned public comment in front of a crowd, visitors to the scoping meeting walked into The Loft at the Red Building filled with posters displaying information about the hydroelectric dam system and scoping process. Staffers from the federal agencies stood by to help answer questions. Public comment was taken one-on-one through a stenographer, or by writing.

Rebecca Weiss, a program coordinator with the Army Corps, said the format of the meeting was meant to allow more of a two-way dialogue between visitors and staffers. She said the agencies expect about 50,000 public comments from the scoping period, most of them standardized form letters created by various groups and signed by supporters, from as close as Astoria to as far away as Sweden. “They’re all weighed the same as far as scoping,” she said.

Bogaard argued the format allowed the agencies to control the information being presented — information based on salmon recovery plans that have been struck down by a federal judge.

“It’s a dog-and-pony show; that’s what it is,” Kytr said.

He and other locals took umbrage at only one of the 16 meetings being held on the coast, arguing that salmon migrate out of the Columbia as far as Alaska, affecting much of the coastline.

Sonja Kokos, an environmental compliance officer with the Bureau of Reclamation, said  the 16 meetings were sited based on the location of projects and multiple benefits they provide to society. “Those are all on the same playing field, just like the fish,” she said.

Public Comment
The federal agencies are taking public comment on the dam system through Feb. 7. Submit comments and find more information at www.crso.info; email comment@crso.info or send comments by mail to: CRSO EIS, P.O. Box 2870, Portland, OR 97208-2870. After public scoping ends, the agencies will develop alternatives and draft an environmental impact statement, expected in late 2019 to early 2020.

http://www.dailyastorian.com/Local_News/20170110/debate-spills-over-the-dams

Marissa Luck, January 16, 2017

(Eds' note: This informative article contains a number of misleading quotes and assertions by defenders of the lower Snake River dams - including, for example, the impact of dam removal on regional electrical rates, the "need" for natural gas plants to replace lost hydro-power, or the implications of dam removal on transportation and the opportunities to replace waterborne navigation with salmon-friendly alternatives like rail. For more information specifically on transportation issues associated with lower Snake River dam removal, see this new piece by Idaho resident Lin Laughy: Many Dollars and Little Sense.Salmon and fishing advocates welcome a fact-based debate on the actual costs and benefits of the lower Snake River dams - and the opportunity to work with people in the region to develop an effective plan to replace the dams' modest services with alternatives in order to restore the river and its endangered salmon populations. -jb)

Longview, WA. Even though the four Lower Snake River dams are nearly 300 to 400 miles away, breaching them could unleash far-reaching effects on Cowlitz County. Local electricity rates, port industries and fisheries could all be impacted by removing the dams. And that’s exactly what some want.

Advocates say removing the dams is the fastest and best way to save wild salmon runs, which would be a boon for both commercial and recreational fishers here and across the region.

“It just seems like it’s common sense. We’re facing climate change. We’re facing ocean acidification. But the one thing we can do to give them a shot against all these other factors is opening up this huge piece of habitat,” said Sam Mace, outreach director for Save Our Wild Salmon.

But Cowlitz PUD officials, like other utilities in the region, worry that removing the dams would drive up electricity rates for their customers. Paper mills like Norpac contend it could hike up their costs, making their products less competitive on the global market. And several area grain mills — including one in Longview and two Kalama — would have to find a new ways to get white wheat from Idaho, possibly driving up costs.

Whether dam removal would increase or decrease greenhouse gas emissions remains a hotly-debated concern.

Rob Rich of Shaver Transportation argues the four dams play a vital role for the whole river system. “Can you take a large blood vessel out of your leg? Yes you can actually. And eventually your leg will function again. It will just never function as well,” Rich said.

Dams at issue again
Debates have swirled around the four Lower Snake River dams for 30 years. Last May, a federal judge rejected the government’s fifth plan to manage endangered salmon and ordered the three federal agencies responsible for dams to prepare a new plan and take a hard look at all options, including dam removal.

“Despite billions of dollars spent on these efforts, the listed species continue to be in a perilous state,” Judge Michael Simon wrote in his decision. “The (Federal Columbia River Power System) remains a system that ‘cries out’ for a new approach.”

His order triggered a new five-year environmental review of the entire Columbia-Snake River system, led by Bonneville Power Administration, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation. A comment period on the scoping of the environmental impact statement ends Feb.7.

How fish would fare
Dams present some tough challenges for juvenile salmon: Warmer water temperatures behind the dams, predators and the energy-intensive process of swimming through locks and ladders can be lethal for baby fish trying to make it to the ocean.

A total of 13 salmon and steelhead species were listed as endangered or threatened after reaching dramatically low number in the 1990s. Since then, federal agencies have invested billions of dollars into making the dams more fish-friendly by increasing the number of ladders, spillways and diversions, and even transporting salmon around the dams by barge and tank trucks. In Cowlitz County, about 25 cents of every dollar Cowlitz PUD pays to Bonneville goes toward BPA’s fish and wildlife program.

“We really believe that the survival of fish coming through the system is better than it used to be,” said Micheal Milstein, spokesman for NOAA Fisheries. In the 1970s and 1980s, just about 80 percent of fish successfully survived through each individual dam. Now about 95 percent to 98 percent of fish survive from the top of each dam to the bottom. “That’s the a pretty significant improvement,” Milstein said.

Despite the improvement, last year NOAA’s five-year review of Snake River salmon and steelhead runs found that there wasn’t a significant enough improvement to take them off the endangered species list.

And advocates say that fish recovery rates are a far cry from where they need to be. For every 100 salmon that go out to the ocean, about 2 percent to 6 percent of them must return for sustained recovery, according to targets from Northwest Power and Conservation Council. According to the Fish Passage Center, over the last 15 years, return rates have frequently hovered around 2 to 4 percent, but have dipped to 1 percent or lower at some points. And in 2015, a heat wave killed off thousands of returning Columbia Basin salmon, compounding the problem.

Electric rates to rise?
About 5 percent of the region’s power comes from the Lower Snake River dams. That’s enough to power the City of Seattle, according to BPA.

Advocates claim power from the dams could be replaced with renewable energies. But there’s a hitch: energy from wind and solar can’t be stored, so they can’t mimic the continuous reliability of hydropower. Instead, BPA says it would have to replace the dams with gas-fired power plants, which are expensive and have higher greenhouse gas emissions.

While BPA isn’t certain how removing the dams would affect electric rates, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council estimated in 2010 that Bonneville’s rates would rise anywhere between $1 to $8.15, per megawatt hour. As BPA’s second largest customer, Cowlitz PUD gets 80 percent of its power from the federal agency. Any increases to BPA costs could have a direct impact on customer rates here.

And a potential increase could be a blow for paper mills and energy- intensive industries here, dam supporters say.

“For industry here on the river, especially Noparc, Weyerhaeuser, Nippon Dynawave and KapStone, low-cost electricity is absolutely critical to our survival. That’s one of the reasons why these industries are here today, because of the hydroelectric system,” said Craig Anneberg, CEO of Norpac, who also serves on the board of Northwest Riverpartners, a pro- hydroelectric group. Any increase in electricity costs could hurt paper mill’s competitiveness on the global market, Anneberg said.

“This issue could have an impact on jobs, especially in our county,” he added.

But anti-dam advocates say fears about electricity rates spiking are overblown. Todd True, an attorney with Earthjustice, said studies suggest residential bills may increase by about $1 per month. He argues that additional gas-fire plants could be avoided by using “a combination of wind, solar and smart gird management and planning.”

How would it affect industry?

Paper mills aren’t the only industries paying attention: the dams are used to move barges of wheat, wood chips, logs and the occasional large, odd-sized cargo smoothly from Idaho to the mouth of the Columbia River. Without the dams, rapids, waterfalls and swift-moving currents would make the river impassible. About 10 percent of all U.S. wheat exports move through the Snake River, according to Pacific Northwest Waterways Association. In Cowlitz County, grain terminals in Longview and Kalama rely on the dams for shipments of white wheat from the Snake River region.

“If we were not able to get it by barge... that makes us noncompetitive on the the global stage,” said Matthew Kerrigan, manager at EGT in Longview. “I really don’t know if we would be able to get (the wheat) elsewhere” but rail shipments may also be more expensive, he added.

While opponents to the dams claim freight traffic over the dams has been trending downward over the last 20 years, Pacific Northwest Waterways Association shows cargo use of the dams spiked 34 percent between 2012 to 2014.

Regardless of how often or for what purpose the dams are use, opponents believe the economic benefits are far outweighed by the damage to native salmon.

“The (dam navigation) system we’re subsidizing with taxpayer dollars is destroying the salmon runs, which are a huge economic asset,”said True, the Earthjustice attorney. “We have alternatives that can be just as efficient and just as (positive for) economic without the Snake River dams.”

http://tdn.com/news/local/removing-dams-could-affect-cowlitz-industry-electric-rates/article_6347b242-b7df-5233-8b13-ac42fd8be9b6.html

The river’s steelhead are struggling.

By Steve Hawley
June 13, 2017

Tucker Jones is certainly comfortable speaking in front of a surly audience. This much is clear from the outset. The burly, self-deprecating Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist is standing in front of a group of 50 guides and anglers on a blustery spring evening at his agency's office overlooking the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon. Jones and his colleague, Rod French, who manages ODFW's Deschutes River fisheries program, are here as the bearers of bad news. Before they begin their presentation, a Tidewater Lines barge glides ominously past the picture windows opposite the lectern where Jones is just clearing his throat, as if to remind anglers that the river was re-made a half-century ago. It isn't just for fish anymore. "Well, as most of you know," Jones begins cordially, going for a yarn-around the campfire tone, "steelhead and salmon runs in the Columbia are in pretty bad shape this year. So we're here to tell you about some management actions we have to take."

Read the full article here.

From the desk of Gilly Lyons. June 3, 2014.

Deja vu all over again. Groundhog Day (the Bill Murray version). Reduce, reuse, recycle. Same <stuff>, different day.

Each of these expressions has been used at one time or another over the last 8 or 9 months to describe the virtually-unchanged Columbia-Snake salmon plan issued by federal agencies – first in draft form last September and then in final form in mid-January. And while these phrases are entirely accurate – the 2014 federal salmon plan is almost identical to the illegal 2008/2010 plan it’s supposed to replace – they may not tell the full story. Sure, the federal agencies have issued three illegal plans in a row, and now we have a recently-released fourth attempt that manages to both repeat the mistakes of the past and roll back existing salmon protections.

But what this string of inadequate and failed plans really tells us is that the federal agencies seem intent on a lowest-common-denominator approach to safeguarding Columbia Basin salmon from the impacts of the hydropower system. Rather than ask questions like, “What do salmon actually need in order to survive and recover?” or “What does real salmon restoration look like and how do we get there?” – it’s as though our federal salmon managers are asking, “What’s the least we can get by with under the law?” or “How can we redefine success under the Endangered Species Act so that things look a whole lot better than they really are?”

After nearly two decades of creatively reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act, assiduously avoiding meaningful and substantial changes to the hydrosystem (where the bulk of salmon mortality occurs), touting habitat improvements as a means to mitigate for the harm caused by said hydrosystem despite a lack of evidence showing that such mitigation actually works, and, more recently, sidestepping any attempt to address the clear and present danger posed by climate change, the federal agencies have shown that their eagerness to protect the status quo apparently trumps their interest in ensuring the longterm protection and recovery of salmon and steelhead. Pacific Northwest residents and American taxpayers deserve much more – as do the very species we’re supposed to be restoring.

With stubborn recalcitrance like this, we can only assume that the federal government is itching to go back to court over their latest salmon plan. Since the 2008/2010 salmon plan was ruled illegal almost three years ago (leading to the current plan that was issued in January 2014), conservation and fishing groups have repeatedly asked – actually, more like strongly urged, on occasions too numerous to list – that the Obama Administration seize the opportunity to end the cycle of poor decision-making and litigation and convene a solutions-driven process that brings together a range of stakeholders from across the Columbia Basin to find a durable path forward on this complex, long-running challenge. No dice. More recently, over the last year, salmon advocates, along with the State of Oregon, the Nez Perce Tribe, and others, have proposed a collaborative experimental spill program that could do wonders for salmon survival and productivity – another opportunity to perhaps take a break from the ongoing litigation. Again, the answer so far has been a resounding no (and if you’re an electricity ratepayer in the Northwest, you may be interested to know that Bonneville Power Administration has made every effort to squash the possibility of a spill experiment; indeed, it's safe to say that they’ve spared no expense in trying to ensure this tremendously promising effort doesn’t get off the ground).

So a return to the courtroom may very well be inevitable – and, in the absence of any kind of collaborative process or willingness to consider new measures like expanded spill, a necessary next step toward ensuring our Columbia and Snake River salmon receive the near-term protections they need - and that the law requires. Stay tuned.

Scientists have identified man-made reservoirs as a huge source of heat-trapping methane. Will it be the last straw for Washington’s controversial dams?

Brett Cihon
Wed Oct 5th, 2016

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/washingtons-big-dam-climate-nightmare/

In late August, Washington State University professor John Harrison boarded a plane at Portland International Airport. The scientist found his seat and took some time to dig through his briefcase and order his papers before takeoff.

Harrison slept a bit during the 10-hour flight to Amsterdam, the first leg toward his final destination of Minsk, Belarus. But the man with thinning brown hair and a permanent smile took much of the flight to examine data on ebullition rates, CO2 fluxes, and other complex sciences. He also took the chance to read over the statements he was slated to give at the international conference of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Minsk.

Harrison was so engrossed in his preparations for the conference that he likely missed the chance to look out the window as the plane flew east toward the Atlantic. Had he looked out, though, he could have spotted the Bonneville, The Dalles, the John Day, or any of the other 60-odd hydroelectric dams in the Columbia River watershed area. Expansive walls of concrete, churning turbines, and the placid waterways behind them that provide irrigation for crops, water supplies for towns, recreation for boaters, and renewable sources of energy for just about everyone in Washington.

Renewable, yes. But clean? Not as such.

Much of the reason Harrison was flying to speak at the IPCC was to discuss findings from a synthesis study he co-authored, released in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal BioScience. The study calls into question hydroelectricity’s reputation as a climate-friendly source of energy. According to the study, reservoirs from around the world are an “important source of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere.” The study suggests Washington’s dams—from the expansive Grand Coulee down to the littlest blockade on a spring in King County—and the reservoirs behind them all pump out methane, a compound up to 85 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The study also shows some of Washington’s reservoirs may produce more of the powerful greenhouse gas than most, as agricultural lands around the waterways feed the methane-producing organisms with the material they crave. And with more than 90 percent of Seattle’s energy coming from hydroelectric power, the study calls into question City Light’s claim of having a zero carbon footprint.

“Reservoirs and dams are not greenhouse-neutral,” Harrison says today.

Harrison may have missed looking out the window on his flight to Amsterdam. But his mind was certainly on dams and reservoirs—and how he could convince the IPCC and others to accept the latest numbers, and the stark conclusion he drew from them: “Through the construction of dams, people are changing the world we live in on a geologic scale.”

Looking at placid, serene reservoirs like Lake Sacajawea behind the Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River, it’s easy to miss them as major carbon emitters. Gray smoke doesn’t billow from the surface of their waters; black soot doesn’t line their shores.

But, according to the 16-page Bioscience report, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Reservoir Water Surfaces: A New Global Synthesis,” and other recent studies, some reservoirs emit more greenhouse gases than fossil-fuel-based energy providers, such as natural-gas power plants.

Artificial reservoirs produce methane—a carbon atom bonded with four hydrogen atoms—in three key ways. First, the flooding of previously dry areas fuels a process called microbial decomposition. Put simply, microbial decomposition occurs when organic matter dies underwater, breaks down, and emits gas. Second, reservoirs often experience greater changes in water levels than natural lakes. During frequent water drawdowns, methane is released through increased ebullition—aka bubbling—rates, meaning that methane trapped in the reservoir is released more often.
 
The final way dams produce methane is by collecting organic materials that run into their reservoirs and decompose. The closer big reservoirs are to human activities like agriculture, the more methane they produce as organic materials like fertilizer wash into the reservoirs and then decompose. This is because, by their nature, reservoirs are typically oxygen-starved environments. When organic material decays in such environments, the gas produced is methane, whereas under normal circumstances it would emit more benign gases. This method is particularly pertinent in Washington’s reservoirs: As farmers fertilize the hops, wheat, grapes, and other crops crowding the Columbia River Basin, for example, those organic materials get washed away, end up in reservoirs, and slowly break down in the oxygen-starved environment best suited for methane production.

Until recently, the study’s authors say, only reservoirs in tropical areas were thought to be potent sources of methane. But after gathering data from all parts of the world, their study shows almost no difference in the amount of powerful greenhouse gases emitted from tropical vs. temperate reservoirs. “Temperate reservoirs were surprisingly more active than previously thought,” Harrison says. “New studies in places like Oregon and Washington have shown reservoirs can be very active in [releasing] methane to the atmosphere.” The study shows the amount of gas released was greatly underestimated: “Acre-to-acre methane production is about 25 percent higher than previously suggested,” Harrison says.

And pound for pound, methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short term. For example, if one molecule of methane and CO2 are each released on the same day, 10 years later the molecule of CH4 will have about 85 times more radiating force—the force that traps heat—than CO2. After 20 years, methane’s power depletes and has only about 70 times the radiating force; after 100 years, about 34 times the force; and so on until the gas breaks down entirely. So methane’s radiating force is able to heat the atmosphere much quicker than CO2, explains Abby Swann, an assistant professor with the UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences. “The methane is going to be a really, really good trapper,” she says. “With CO2, you’re guaranteeing that trapping of heat for a really, really long time.”

The BioScience authors estimate that the world’s reservoirs produce 1.3 percent of all human-caused GHG emissions on a 100-year timescale. That’s comparable to the amount of GHGs coming from rice patties or biomass burning, the authors say, and roughly equivalent to Canada’s total production of human-caused GHG. And that number is doubled—if not more—in the short term because of methane’s radiating properties, Harrison says. While that percentage will decrease as the methane weakens, it’s the short term that could be more important for the climate, says Rebecca Neumann, a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. As the world’s global average temperature speeds toward the important benchmark of 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, eliminating methane could more quickly curb temperature increases. “If we’re trying to mitigate near-term climate change, methane would be one place to put some effort,” Neumann says. “It can have some impact on a short time scale.”

Since methane is a much more powerful gas, reservoirs don’t need to release epic loads of it to put them on the same level as some carbon-based power plants. A 2013 study in Environmental Science and Technology estimates that about 10 percent of hydroelectric reservoirs produce more greenhouse gases per unit energy generation than CO2 emissions from natural gas combined-cycle plants. In other words, though natural-gas energy releases many more molecules of CO2 than reservoirs release CH4, some reservoirs are bigger GHG producers because of methane’s potency. And, with the recent BioScience paper asserting previous CH4 production rates were underestimated, it’s possible that a lot more than 10 percent of reservoirs are worse GHG producers than natural-gas power plants.

The world—and certainly Washington—loves hydroelectric power. More than a million dams are in existence around the globe, a 2011 study shows. And many more are on the way as countries turn to renewable sources for their energy consumption.

The problem, Harrison says, is that governments are jumping to hydroelectric without recognizing the costs. Thus his trip to Belarus, urging the multination IPCC to include methane emissions from reservoirs into countries’ allotted GHG budget. As of right now, they’re not; they’re slipping through the cracks as countries try to reach their emission goals. “The problem is people aren’t considering it,” Harrison says.

Washington certainly doesn’t appear to be considering it, either. In a state with more than 1,000 dams—a few with reservoirs stretching over 50 miles long—concern about CH4 production seems nonexistent. Seventy percent of the state’s energy comes from hydroelectricity, with most of that coming from eight of the state’s 10 largest power plants on the Columbia and Snake rivers. The city of Seattle receives more than 90 percent of its energy from hydroelectric plants, and touts the figures. A page from the city’s website reads: “With more than 90 percent of Seattle’s electricity generated from clean, hydroelectric power, it means something. It means we all enjoy low rates, and we can hold our chins high knowing that our electricity is 100 percent carbon-neutral.”

Lynn Best, environmental officer at Seattle City Light, says the methane issue is not new. Other science on the subject shows that Seattle City Light’s major dams—Ross, Diablo, Gorge, and Boundary—don’t produce any more methane than a forest floor, she says.

Citing a 2004 study, Best says methane production at the four dams is almost nonexistent because of the prevalence of oxygen and their low intake of organic material. The city has even hired an independent evaluator with the Climate Registry to look into the dams’ methane emissions, she says. No methane emissions were included in the evaluator’s report of possible GHGs from Seattle City Light. “I think I want to be very clear,” Best says. “We really don’t see any evidence of methane or any measurable quantities of methane coming out. The fact that it’s oxygen-rich makes it highly unlikely that there’s any meaningful production of methane.”
 
Best did emphasize, however, that she has not seen the latest study in BioScience. She said the city will certainly take a look at it and consider its implications for a grid with a vast majority of its power coming from hydroelectric. “Our idea of good inventory is to be as accurate as we possibly can,” Best says. “It sounds like they’ve done an extensive study.”
 
Harrison, for his part, says that out of the 75 reservoirs measured in the BioScience study, all were shown to release methane. That includes four reservoirs from Washington—Cle Elum, Keechelus, Kachess, and Lacamas—which have fairly similar base characteristics to the Seattle City Light dams. “All of the reservoirs we studied were net sources of methane to the atmosphere,” Harrison said when asked if it’s possible a reservoir could have no emissions. “From what we studied, it can’t be true.”

The study has implications in other places in the state, too. Earlier this year, a federal judge urged consideration of the removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River—Ice Harbor Dam, Lower Monumental Dam, Little Goose Dam, and Lower Granite Dam—in an effort to save salmon runs, which are seriously imperiled by the concrete obstructions. The dams’ removal would be a massive undertaking, and is often lobbied against with the argument that the four decades-old dams provide clean sources of energy. Joseph Bogaard, executive director at Save Our Wild Salmon and proponent of the Lower Snake River dam removal, believes some hydroelectric power can never be considered clean, even if reservoirs didn’t produce a single bubble of methane. “It can’t possibly be called clean because it’s sending salmon into extinction,” Bogaard said.

The cost and benefits of the dams on the Lower Snake need to be constantly re-evaluated, Bogaard says, especially as new studies are released. If the reservoirs produce a sizable amount of CH4, this needs to be factored into a cost-benefit analysis. He says that with clean energy as the only ace dam proponents have left up their sleeve, they’re increasingly left without an argument. As dams continue to damage salmon runs and are shown to produce GHGs, it’s time to move to newer energy sources that are more in line with the state’s goals, he says.

“We have options here,” Bogaard says. “We can stick with old, harmful technologies, or we can seize opportunities to innovate and look forward to the future.”

Of course, Bogaard, Harrison, and others are not suggesting the state tear out every dam from Diablo down to The Dalles. The state has vast energy needs that must be met. Besides, dams and their reservoirs have functions other than power production—irrigation and flood control, for example.
 
And, Harrison and co-author Bridget Deemer argue, steps can easily be taken to help mitigate reservoirs’ methane production. With nutrient inflows a huge factor in the amount of CH4 reservoirs produce, imagine gutters along the sides of dams, filtering out some organic material before it reaches the reservoir. Or simply siting new dams upstream of farmlands. “Nutrient controls could be an important piece of planning,” Deemer says.

Deemer and Harrison also hope to see more reservoir-specific studies. For Washington and Seattle to get a better handle on how much CH4 is let into the atmosphere, more precise measurements at area dams need to be made. “You can always guess to how the world is working,” Harrison says. “But until you measure it and know for sure, you don’t know.”

But the first step is accepting the reality that reservoirs produce methane in the first place. Harrison says his talk in front of the IPCC was well-received, and the body appears to be moving to a place where they mandate that countries monitor GHG emissions from reservoirs. His hope is that by 2019, reservoirs will be included in national inventories of GHG emitters.

Once these facts are accepted and added to the complex narrative of how best to curb climate change, then other decisions can be made, Deemer says. The goal is to dispel the myth of hydroelectric as a completely clean source of energy, while not damning it entirely.

“Any form of alternative energy has its cost,” Deemer says. “There are costs, and we have to look at these. It’s just one piece of the puzzle that needs to be factored in.”

news@seattleweekly.com

By Cameron Probert, cprobert@tricityherald.com


In April, three Idaho women set out from Astoria, Ore., with seven horses — on a mission to save threatened salmon.

Katelyn Spradley, Kat Cannell and MJ Wright trotted into Kennewick this weekend, a month into their 1,000-mile journey.

“We’re following the salmon home,” Cannell said. “We started from where the Columbia meets the ocean and we’re going all the way to Stanley, Idaho, which is the farthest inland that any of these fish go.”

The women, ages 23 to 27 from Central Idaho, started out at the ocean on April 18, spending most of their days on horseback following the course of the river.

We started from where the Columbia meets the ocean and we’re going all the way to Stanley, Idaho, which is the farthest inland that any of these fish go.

Their days start at 5 a.m. and end at 8 p.m., and at a speed of roughly 3 mph, they cover about 20 miles each day.

The slow pace presents challenges. If they end up going the wrong direction, the women could lose an entire day backtracking.

“You’re constantly thinking about your route and not taking a wrong turn,” Cannell said. “You’re always thinking about the condition of the horses.... When was the last time they drank. Are we making ample time to make sure we get to camp early to make sure they get ample rest.”

The women, all experienced long-distance riders, spent months plotting their course, arranging for supplies to meet them and conditioning their horses.

“We’re already calling forward to the next place because we’re going to have other horses that will need farrier attention,” Spradley said.

Their stop in Kennewick was their first resupply stop since Hood River, Ore., seven days earlier. Their next stop is Lewiston, where the Snake and Clearwater rivers meet.

They are pretty exquisite fish. Their numbers are down and they continue to go down. And if we don’t make a difference and try to find a solution, they’re going to go away completely.

And, all the while, they are acting as ambassadors for the two species of Idaho’s threatened and endangered salmon — fall and spring chinook and sockeye salmon. They aren’t promoting any specific resolution for helping the fish that travel 900 miles upstream and about 6,000 feet in elevation to spawning grounds.

“There is some serious polarization happening on the sides for how to save the salmon,” Cannell said.

“Nobody is getting anywhere because of it.”

They thought they might be a good bridge to bring people together.

“They are pretty exquisite fish,” Spradley said. “Their numbers are down and they continue to go down. And if we don’t make a difference and try to find a solution, they’re going to go away completely.”
Cameron Probert: 509-582-1402, @cameroncprobert

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/article149418059.html#storylink=cpy

By Julian Matthews and Lin Laughy

December 4, 2016

Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., has called on Congress to protect federal hydroelectric dams as a “top priority.” (Tri City Herald, “Newhouse Pushes for Law Protecting Snake River Dams,” Nov. 10).

This plea asks Americans to stay on a course that hastens the disappearance of salmon from our rivers, continues to burn through taxpayers’ hard-earned money at a substantial loss, and adds insult to the injury by reneging on promises made to First Nations people more than 150 years ago.

Many salmon runs have already vanished, but if we take appropriate action now as stewards of the natural world, we can still conserve the resources we care about. No one understands this better than the Nez Perce tribal community, which has relied on salmon as a traditional and essential food since time immemorial. Under the 1855 Treaty, the Nez Perce are guaranteed hunting, fishing and gathering rights. The removal of the four Lower Snake dams would go a long way towards restoring these treaty rights.

Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment is a Native nonprofit focused on honoring traditional treaty rights and lands of the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce). We recently released a video and petition to call on all tribal members and allies to make their voices heard to remove these dams, because their removal is the most effective solution to restore dwindling salmon populations in our traditional fishing grounds.

Newhouse states that salmon survival past these dams is already 99 percent, but that’s wrong. The Army Corps of Engineers claims the real per-dam number is 93 percent to 97 percent, but Snake River salmon must pass eight dams. Average survival of 95 percent through eight dams results in a combined survival of just 66 percent, which still ignores all the juvenile salmon that die in warm, slack-water reservoirs or die later from injuries sustained during dam passage. The overall survival rate of juvenile Snake River salmon? For most populations, it’s 50 percent or less.

The Newhouse letter also implies that the Snake River dams help with flood control and irrigation. They do not. They are run-of-river dams with no flood storage, and irrigation can still be provided by a free-flowing river.

The letter fails to mention the annual cost to taxpayers of keeping these dams. For example, the Corps recently spent $27 million on sediment management for just one reservoir and plans to spend more. And that doesn’t count expensive lock repairs like those to be incurred during a 15-week river closure beginning in December, or annual operation and maintenance costs of tens of millions. Taxpayers finance these costs, a giant subsidy almost exclusively to a single segment of one industry. The return on this investment? Less than 50 cents for each dollar spent.

In fact, because dam infrastructure is so deadly to wild salmon populations, federal agencies have shelled out billions in an attempt to rescue these fish from harm. But as a federal judge pointed out for the fifth time in May, these mitigation measures have not been effective. Our salmon still hover on the brink of extinction. The claim that returns are improving and populations growing is an illusion. Sure, a hundred returning salmon is better than 50, and 1,000 is better than 500, but no credible scientist has suggested these “improved” returns indicate any real recovery.

Meanwhile, barging has been in decline, with freight volumes now less than half what they once were. The capacity exists for producers to switch to alternative transportation, such as rail, which can be even more cost effective and climate friendly than barging. The Port of Wilma recently upgraded its rail access; major fertilizer bulk plants there will now ship 90 percent of their product by rail. Removing the dams would require a transition to alternative transport for some — and farmers’ needs would absolutely have to be factored in every step along the way. As it stands, continued operation of the dams needlessly pits farmers against fishermen.

Finally, consider the definition of “boondoggle”: a public project of questionable merit or “work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.” That describes the lower Snake River dams today. The projects are wasteful not only of taxpayer dollars but also of wild salmon, a key cultural resource for indigenous communities and an irreplaceable icon of our region. It’s time to remove the dams and revive the health of our waterways.

Read more here.

Julian Matthews is a Nez Perce Tribe member, and a co-founder in the nonprofit organization, Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment (NPtE).

Linwood Laughy is a longtime resident of the Clearwater Valley in north central Idaho. He is a graduate of Harvard College and a former publisher, outfitter, author and educator.

From the desk of Joseph Bogaard

January 22, 2014

Federal agencies in the Northwest released their (not so) new Federal Plan for Columbia-Snake River salmon and steelhead on Jan. 17. Four of the last five plans – dating back to the 1990s and including the last three in a row – have been rejected by the courts as inadequate and illegal. This latest plan, by the feds’ own admission, is barely distinguishable from the illegal 2008/2010 Plan it is meant to replace.

Needless to say, salmon and fishing advocates are very disappointed by the federal government’s latest effort. With this email, we want to deliver to you some highlights (lowlights?) from the feds’ plan and approach,  serve up a mash-up of excerpts to give you a flavor of the media coverage, and provide a few links to some of the recent news stories.
 
We’ll be in touch in the coming weeks with further details about the plan,  updates about the feds’ apparent decision to go back to court for yet another round of litigation (the plaintiffs – salmon and fishing advocates, the State of Oregon, and the Nez Perce Tribe – are studying the plan now, but no decisions have yet been made about future litigation), and how you can help.

Stay tuned and, as always, thanks very much for your support.

Joseph and the SOS Crew
joseph@wildsalmon.org
206-300-1003

1. A quick guide to the 2014 Columbia-Snake Salmon Plan’s shortcomings:

A.     It reduces spill, instead of expanding it as the region’s top salmon scientists suggest.
B.     It fails to include a single new or additional measure to address the mounting impacts of climate change.
C.     It’s a status quo plan that threatens to send the region right back into court - and as such, it’s a real buzz kill for collaboration.
D.     It moves the goal posts: Five years ago federal agencies declared “productivity” the gold standard for measuring success, but then salmon productivity tanked. Now they tout short-term 
“abundance” instead. Good grief.
E.     It leaves endangered wild salmon and steelhead bumping along the bottom – and at persistent, prolonged risk of extinction.
F.     Its habitat restoration projects and projected benefits are based on hope, not science. Absolutely, habitat restoration is a good thing, but can it compensate for the heavy toll caused by the dams? The math just doesn’t pencil out.
G.     The 2014 Plan pretty much ignores the judge’s 2011 ruling when he declared the last plan illegal and asked for an analysis of lower Snake River dam removal, along with consideration of more aggressive measures like additional river spills and higher flows.

2. Media Mash-up on the 2014 Columbia-Snake Salmon Plan

“New Columbia River plan for protecting salmon and steelhead is little changed.”
 
“The federal government's management plan for protecting salmon and steelhead populations imperiled by federal dams in the Columbia River basin differs little from its earlier version and continues to rely heavily on habitat improvement.”
 
“Even as officials have spent millions on habitat restoration and are touting its benefits in this latest plan, they acknowledge that fish populations are barely hanging on and nowhere close to being recovered.”
 
“Yet officials acknowledge that productivity — the number of the next generation of adults produced by returning spawning fish — was lower.”
 
“’Only a tiny percent of adult fish are returning to the rivers,’ Todd True of Earthjustice said, ‘and a large percentage of those are hatchery fish.’ On some runs, he said, up to 80 percent of returnees are hatchery fish. ‘That doesn't sound to me like habitat is beginning to work,’ he said.”

“Critics also decried the plan for reducing spill on several dams and for not including separate measures to address the effects of climate change.”
 


“The agency has issued four such biological opinions, commonly called biops, in the past two decades. But each one was struck down by Judge James Redden, who deemed them to be insufficient. That last happened in 2011, when the judge said the agency depended on benefits from habitat improvement projects that were too ill-defined to pass muster with ESA. Redden also said the agency should at least consider dam breaching and increasing spill at the dams.”

“But the strategy included in the new biop is virtually identical to that of its previous versions. It does not analyze breaching, and while it discusses a proposal to dramatically increase spill at the dams, it instead adopts policies that would curtail spill in late summer.”
 


“The Nez Perce Tribe, one of the plaintiffs in previous court challenges, called the document disappointing. ‘It's immediately clear that the biop's foundation is fatally flawed,’ said Silas Whitman, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe's governing body.”
 


“Barry Thom, deputy regional director for NOAA Fisheries, also said a review of the listed runs showed they are meeting goals outlined in previous biological opinions and in many cases exceeding abundance targets. But he said returning adults have not been as productive as expected. When pressed, Thom acknowledged there are vast amounts of pristine yet under-utilized habitat in the roadless and wilderness areas of central Idaho and said none of the protected runs is close to meeting recovery goals.”



3. Links to media coverage:



Lewiston Tribune: Latest NOAA opinion on salmon goes back to well

SOS Press Release: Federal agencies squander chance for progress on Northwest salmon


AP: New Columbia River plan for protecting salmon and steelhead is little changed



Idaho Statesman: Salmon, dams will head back to court

By Terry Otto, Columbian staff writer
Published: May 16, 2018, 9:22 PM

The United States Congress is currently considering legislation that could affect the management of fisheries in the Northwest and directly impact local fishing.

One of the bills being considered addresses the issue of sea lion predation on endangered stocks of salmo

n and steelhead. Another would effectively reverse a recent judge’s decision to increase spill at Columbia River and Snake River dams to improve downstream migration.

There are also two bills that would amend the Magnuson-Stevens act, which regulates ocean fisheries.

H.R. 2083 Sponsored by U.S. Congresswomen Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, the Endangered Salmon and Fisheries Predation Prevention Act, or H.R. 2083, would amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. It would authorize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to issue one-year permits allowing Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and a broad coalition of tribal entities to kill sea lions in a portion of the Columbia River or certain tributaries in order to protect fish from sea lion predation. Sea lions in the Columbia River and its tributaries consume thousands of salmon and steelhead every year. This bill specifically targets those marine mammals that set up at “pinch points” where the salmon funnel through tight areas, such as fish ladders. Heath Heikkila of the Coastal Conservation Association thinks the marine mammal problems need to be addressed, and soon. “We badly need a solution to the predation by sea lions,” he said. “They have tried hazing and moving the animals, but it hasn’t worked.”

Herrera Beutler proposed the legislation after hearing the concerns and frustrations of many of her constituents. She said that she understands the importance of salmon to our region and worries about the damage sea lions can cause. “There is a 90-percent chance of Willamette steelhead going extinct (because of sea lions)” she said. “Forty-five percent of our spring Chinook disappear between the mouth of the Columbia and Bonneville Dam.” She is aware that critics of the bill denounce the killing of sea lions. “This is not an anti-sea lion bill,” Herrera Beutler said. “It’s a balanced approach that protects our salmon. It has the support of fish
and wildlife managers, as well as the tribes, and the governors of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.” The bill currently is awaiting a floor vote in the house, and its future in the Senate is as yet unknown. However, Herrera Beutler is hopeful. “This is the best chance we have had yet,” she said. “But it’s not a sure thing.”

H.R. 3144 H.R. 3144 is to “provide for operations of the Federal Columbia River Power System pursuant to a certain operation plan for a specified period of time, and for other purposes.” This bill, sponsored by U.S. Congresswomen Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R- Spokane, would effectively reverse the recent decision by U.S. District Judge Michael Simon that ordered more springtime spill over dams along the Columbia and Snake Rivers. H.R. 3144 would order the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bonneville Power Administration to adhere to the 2014 Obama-era plan for operation of the dams, which pre-dates the judge’s order.
Advocates say spill allows juvenile salmon to safely pass over dams, rather than sending them through the structures, which kill a percentage of the juvenile salmon as they head to sea. Spilling water instead of running it through the generators reduces the money earned from the dams. Also, some advocates of the bill say dissolved gasses caused by spill pose a risk to juvenile fish. Congresswoman Herrera Buetler supports the bill. She said the 2014 salmon plan is a “comprehensive plan”

 that was designed by scientists of federal agencies during the Obama Administration. She said the legislation is not about blocking spill. “It’s not an issue of whether or not to spill, it’s about the best way to do it,” she said. “This is about how to mitigate the effects of the dams in the best possible way.” “We don’t want to breach the dams and wreck the economy,” she adds.

Liz Hamilton, the executive director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association minces no words when she condemns this bill. “This bill stinks,” said Hamilton. “The judges decision allows spill up to the gas cap, and it is the number one thing they can do to restore salmon populations” The gas cap is the limit on dissolved gasses in the river. Hamilton and the NSIA have been actively involved in the legal wrangling over operation of hydro dams in t

he Columbia Basin. The dams are already ordered to spill during the summer months when fall salmon are migrating out to sea, but the new ruling means the power agencies will now have to spill water in the spring as well. Spill has been widely lauded for increasing returning adult fall salmon in the Columbia River. Long-time fishing guide Jack Glass of Team Hook-Up Guide Service has fished the Columbia and its t

ributaries for decades. He is pleased with the results of the summer time spill. “I’m very much in favor of the spill, and we need to maintain that,” he said. “Given the poor ocean conditions we had, if we had not had that spill we would not have any fish coming back this fall at all.” The bill has passed the House and awaits action by the Senate. H.R. 2023, H.R. 200 These two bills are designed to amend the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which was passed in 1976, and reauthorized as recently as 2006. The act provides a structure for ocean fisheries but was designed for commercial fishing. The new bills give state managers more flexibility when setting recreational ocean fishing seasons. Sport anglers have often criticized the act because its structure does not lend itself well to recreational anglers. The bills also allow for a number of exemptions that foes say can be used by state fishery managers to get around annual catch limits set by federal fish managers for ocean fish stocks.
These bills get mixed reviews from sport anglers. Most believe the Magnuson-Stevens act needs to be revised to reflect the rise in
popularity of recreational ocean angling, but many are not happy with the provisions concerning annual catch limits. Bob Rees, an Oregon fishing guide and director of the Northwest Steelheaders, worries about possible reductions in ocean fish stocks if the bill becomes law. “It is a Gulf Coast initiative, bit it is changing federal law,” he warns. “Many of our ocean species could be affected, including
groundfish.” The Magnuson-Stevens act is credited with recovering 40 overfished populations since 2000, including populations of lingcod along the West Coast
.

By Chris Mooney, June 21, 2016

Most people these days know that wind and solar energy are booming. And for the most part, we simply see this as adding two new and cleaner sources of electricity to the mix that we already have.

But really, it is way more complicated than that. These two renewable sources have a tremendous difference from sources such as coal, nuclear and even hydropower that involves not where the energy comes from but, rather, when it comes. You can run a nuclear plant, or a coal plant, all night, steadily. But you cannot do that with a solar plant, except perhaps in the summer in far northern Alaska.

This large “variability” or “intermittency” of renewable energy has been endlessly cited to suggest that sources like wind and solar can only make up in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent of all electricity on the grid, notes a recent report by President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. And yet, the study goes on to say, we are already seeing isolated instances, albeit brief, of renewables doing much more than that in some locations.

“Portugal was run 100 percent on wind, solar, and hydropower for four days straight in May 2016, and Texas hit a record level of 45 percent instantaneous penetration from wind generation during one evening in February of this year,” the report observes.

So can we really attain far higher levels of renewables, and still get everybody power when they want and need it? Without suggesting it will necessarily be easy — or that we can entirely do away with “baseload” power sources like nuclear any time soon — what’s so striking is to find that Obama’s advisers think that, thanks to the burgeoning growth of grid batteries and other technologies that can help integrate variable energy streams, the answer is yes.

In the process, they’re subtly undermining one of the key arguments made by defenders of coal and also sometimes nuclear — that renewables cannot compete with the steady output of baseload electricity from these long established sources.

“What they’re getting at here is that these things are growing rapidly, and there isn’t a hindrance to higher penetration of renewables,” says Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association, an industry group that welcomed a White House rollout of the CEA report, other related battery-focused announcements, and an energy storage summit late last week. “There’s not some artificial cliff that says, ‘Okay, if we hit 30 percent, or whatever other magic number we decide, that renewables are un-viable.”

Through new administration moves and paired announcements by industry and utility companies, the expected upshot of the new initiatives is “at least 1.3 gigawatts of additional storage procurement or deployment in the next five years,” the White House said.

The Council of Economic Advisers report amounts to the intellectual backup for these endeavors. It finds that two key trends — managing the grid’s electricity requirements at a given time through innovations such as “demand response,” and a greater proliferation of batteries and other energy storage technologies — can substantially ameliorate the very real problems caused by the variability of wind and solar and “support further increases” in the deployment of these electricity sources.

Granted, more wind and solar “will require a re-envisioning of the management of the grid,” the report notes. But it argues that this re-envisioning is not only possible, it’s already underway.

The key problem is that with more wind and especially more solar on the grid, you reach a situation where solar can be doing a great deal of work for supplying electricity during the middle of the day, when it’s most plentiful — but also one in which demand for electricity rises steeply, even as solar availability declines, in the evening. This means that other energy sources, such as natural gas, will have to ramp up very rapidly to close the gap, and this is quite expensive — unless, that is, there is a way to mitigate the steepness of this daily rise in demand.

At the same time, there’s another, more general issue. The variability of renewables — epitomized by a cloudy day, or one that isn’t very windy — adds more question marks for those charged with operating the grid on a daily basis. This means that as more wind and solar are added to the grid, there will also be a need for more ways of switching where and when power is used, which comes with a cost.

However, forms of energy storage — for instance, charging up batteries when there is a lot of solar power, and then having that electricity ready to dispatch when it’s needed — could mitigate this problem to a significant extent. Large-scale energy storage today remains expensive to deploy, but the Council of Economic Advisers concludes that that’s going to change, even as more penetration of renewables makes its deployment more valuable because of the need for the additional services it can provide.

And then, there’s “demand response,” getting key users of electricity — either large businesses or aggregated groups of individuals — to use less at key times when the grid faces high levels of demand. This could significantly ease the evening ramp-up of electricity demand, and basically amounts to a technology and coordination problem: You need to be able to alter electricity usage quickly at key moments, and you need to be able to organize and provide compensation to those who are willing to help out the grid by doing so.

But this, too, is becoming more and more possible. The Council of Economic Advisers finds that “continued expansion of smart markets and advanced communications is likely to make demand response all the more valuable going forward.”

The Supreme Court recently resolved a challenge aimed at large-scale demand response — mainly used by big companies that use a lot of electricity, and want to get paid for being selective about when they use it — in its favor. But there are also many smaller scale, individual possibilities with demand response, involving home appliances that can become “grid interactive” and modulate precisely when they are used. Water heaters and electric vehicles, in particular, are promising in this respect, says the Council of Economic Advisers.

The upshot is that while really big changes are clearly coming to the grid — and while nobody is saying that we can suddenly go to 100 percent renewables — there are many reasons to think that new technologies, as they become cheaper, will work hand-in-hand with the growth of wind and solar to make a cleaner grid possible. And if we see these technologies grow, and drop in price, at anything like the rate that wind and solar themselves have, that grid could come sooner than we think.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/21/obamas-advisers-just-dismantled-a-key-myth-about-the-future-of-clean-energy/