In this months Fly Rod and Reel publication, Ted Williams writes about the Snake River dams. I could only dream of writing it up this well. Here are some excerpts:
At least in the United States, the age of big dams is over. But the age of removing obsolete, resource- and money-draining dams is barely underway; and progress has been all but halted by an administration that defends obsolete dams as if they were religious monuments.
. . .
But we still had the free-flowing Snake River, which once produced an estimated eight million salmonids, including almost half the chinook spawned in the Columbia system. Counting hatchery fish, which now comprise about 90 percent of all salmonid returns, the average spring chinook run at the fourth (farthest upstream) Snake River dam over the past decade has been just 51,737 while the average summer chinook run has been 9,688. In 2007, there were 31,987 spring chinooks, (including 9,085 jacks) and 7,312 summer chinooks. And while there were 157,214 steelhead (up from the 10-year average of 146,214), only 32,998 of these were wild fish.
Today, 13 Columbia/Snake stocks in 78 populations are listed as threatened or endangered, Snake River coho are extinct and sockeyes functionally extinct (four returned in 2007, nowhere near enough to maintain genetic integrity).
. . .
According to most fisheries scientists, the four lower Snake River dams pretty much guarantee extinction of all remaining stocks within the next 20 years (emphasis added) (with the possible exception of a few steelhead). This is hardly breaking news.
. . .
The four lower Snake River dams, completed between 1961 and 1975, are vestigial appendages from the age of pork-barrel river manipulation and cold-war trepidation. Built mainly for navigation, they were hawked to Congress as a means of barging wheat to the tiny community of Lewiston, Idaho (current population 31,293). An additional justification was their extremely modest power generating capacity (less than 5 percent of the Northwest’s current power grid), which was collected by Hanford, Washington (now a radioactive ghost town), the better to fashion plutonium H-bomb triggers for excision of the Soviet Union — which went extinct without our help in 1991, three years after the Snake River coho. (emphasis added)
. . .
Predator control is just one of the extremes to which the federal government goes in its profligate, obsessive-compulsive quest to make the world safe for obsolete dams. To a state fisheries biologist working to boost next year’s run, knocking off a few salmonid-eaters might seem “reasonable and prudent,” but it is not, as the Bush administration states, an “alternative” to jeopardizing the existence of 13 threatened and endangered salmonid stocks with four obsolete dams.
Are coastal cutthroats next? Do we then move on to smallmouth bass and walleyes? One gets the impression that if erosion threatened the integrity of a dam, our federal government would try to stop the wind and the rain.
For the full write up, click here: Dam Stupid
