THE SALMON SITUATION: part two

 

Grand Ronde Tribe asking for dam drawdowns

Editor’s note: Salmon, rain and conifer forests are symbols of the Pacific Northwest. In a three-part series, “The salmon situation,” Smoke Signals examines how the region’s signature fish is heading for extinction, with little time left to reverse course and save these ancient species, which are crucial to both the ecosystem and Tribal culture. In the end, the Tribe’s best hope to prevail may lie in winning an epic battle with bureaucracy.

Part three will run in the Feb. 1 edition.

 

By Nicole Montesano

Smoke Signals staff writer

One of the biggest problems facing Pacific Northwest salmon is lack of access to suitable habitat. The fish require gravel spawning beds and cold, clear, moving water for their young, but are shut away from most of their historical range by dams built 50 to 60 years ago with no fish passage.

Although the state of Oregon operates massive fish hatcheries to keep numbers high for fishermen, both hatchery and wild-born juvenile fish face the same problem: Increasingly warm, stagnant water in which they cannot thrive. The Army Corps of Engineers captures salmon returning to spawn in several locations and trucks them past the dams. But that leaves their offspring, which must migrate to the ocean, trapped behind the same concrete walls.

The Tribe, which focuses its conservation efforts on the Willamette River Basin, is advocating for a simple and inexpensive solution; return access to thousands of acres of prime spawning habitat.

It is asking the Army Corps of Engineers to draw down reservoir levels far enough to let returning fish get over the dams to spawn, and smolts escape to migrate to the ocean.

It’s a solution that has also been urged for years by the National Marine Fisheries Services and the federal courts.

While arguments rage over the merits of hatcheries and their effects on wild fish, the Tribe’s Natural Resources Department focuses on a different concern.

“It’s not a non-issue,” Tribal Aquatic Biologist Brandon Weems said. “But without that habitat, it doesn’t matter what your fish are.”

 Thirteen concrete dams in the Willamette River Basin block access to more than 75% of the most productive salmon spawning habitat in Oregon.

“When you put a dam in, it completely changes the river,” Weems said. “All these wetlands that would have held cooler water are gone, and your rivers look more like ditches, instead of the web that it used to be. A lot of wetland and off-channel habitat is just completely lost.”

Instead of a free-flowing river, he said, dams create massive, stagnant, warm lakes — exactly the opposite of what salmon need.

In a press release from the National Marine Fisheries Services about a five-year review of salmon species’ status, published last July, lead reviewer Annie Birnie noted that, “The fish are more vulnerable where they cannot access much of their historical habitat, which they relied on because of the cold, clean water that is important for spawning and rearing.”

In addition, the dams were not built to enable salmon to bypass them, either as juveniles heading out to sea or as adults returning to spawn.

“The dams are considerably taller than hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River built specifically to generate power,” NMFS noted in its press release.

The dams were put in for irrigation, flood control, recreation and  drinking water, Grand Ronde Fish & Wildlife Program Manager Kelly Dirksen said, but they failed to provide for fish.

“They were put in in the late 50s and 60s, and some have no fish passage,” he said. “Others have passages of sorts but they don’t work well.”

To get past the dams, juvenile salmon, which normally stay near the surface, must dive 50 feet or more to reach the outlets. Many die, due to what the Army Corps of Engineers calls “harsh passage conditions,” including not only the depth, but spinning turbines that batter and bruise the young fish as they try to swim through.

“We were seeing mortality rates of up to 60%,” Lawrence Schwabe, the Tribe’s hydrosystem expert in Natural Resources, said.

The Corps captures adult salmon and trucks them in massive tanks around the dams. It doesn’t work out well.

“They get stressed out and that’s not good for them,” Weems said. “A thing that depends on a person doing it is never going to thrive. That depends on whether they have the budget to do it and how many people they have to do it. (Salmon) have got to be able to go themselves.”

In 2011, the Corps tried a different tactic at Fall Creek Reservoir, outside of Eugene. According to the Corps website, it has “usually held Fall Creek Reservoir at a minimum of 728 feet above sea level for flood damage reduction during the rainy winter season.” However, that makes it almost impossible for juvenile spring chinook to make it through the dam.

The Corps dropped the water level by about 48 feet during November and December that year, the months when salmon fry migrate to sea. That put the water just 10 feet above the outlet, a dive that was much easier for the young fish to make.

The tactic worked: The Corps website reports roughly a 10-fold increase in the adult salmon that later return to Fall Creek.

Dropping the water level also allowed material trapped behind the dam to be moved downriver.

“Plankton, aquatic plants and insects, and larger vertebrates such as fish and mammals all benefit from the cycling of nutrient-rich waters,” the Corps website said. “The entire food web downstream will see a great benefit over time from the liberation of the trapped material.”

Dirksen said doing the same at other dams would significantly increase salmon’s access to habitat.

“Our study showed that it also benefited lamprey,” he said. “It requires no construction and there are several places where they could do it immediately.”

In fact, the Corps has been ordered to do dam drawdowns multiple times. Since 2021, the Corps has been under a federal court order to improve fish passage and water quality at several of its dams for both spring Chinook and winter steelhead — in many cases, by conducting deep drawdowns, to accommodate both outgoing salmon fry and returning adults.

The judge who issued that order, U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez, noted in a ruling that the Corps failed to carry out similar orders from the National Marine Fisheries Service, issued in its 2008 Biological Opinion and Reasonable and Prudent Alternatives report.

“The Corps has not begun operating any of the permanent downstream passage structures required…and will not meet any of the future deadlines for doing so…has essentially abandoned plans to build a facility at Lookout Point Dam and has not begun studying or planning to construct the fourth fish passage facility discussed in the BiOp,” Hernandez said.

“Except for the annual deep drawdown at Fall Creek Reservoir, the Corps has not consistently carried out downstream fish passage measures. … The Corps also has not constructed the water temperature control tower at Detroit Dam. ... As early as 2017, NMFS determined it was necessary and, as provided in the RPA, requested the Corps begin outplanting adult UWR Chinook salmon above Green Peter Dam. ... The Corps has refused to do so.”

Hernandez ordered deep drawdowns at Lookout Point Dam upstream of Eugene, Green Peter Dam 10 miles upstream of Sweet Home, and Cougar Dam, 42 miles upstream of Eugene and Springfield.

Hernandez assigned an expert panel, consisting of two Corps employees, two experts brought in by environmental advocates, two NMFS employees and two ad hoc federal experts, to draw up plans for the drawdowns and other orders.

The NMFS press release noted that it continues to advocate for the measures it’s been urging for decades.

Top recommendations include providing effective upstream and downstream passage, enacting deep drawdowns that lower levels for easier fish passage in the fall and winter, and continuing restoration of lower-lying floodplain habitat along the Willamette and its tributaries to provide refuge for juvenile migrating fish.

The Corps has been reluctant to implement more deep drawdowns, partly because nine of the 13 dams produce hydropower, which is significantly reduced during drawdowns.

“The cost of generation far outweighs the return on selling the electricity,” Tribal Council member Kathleen George said, adding that the dams produce less than 5% of Oregon’s hydropower.

A report published last year by ProPublica and OPB noted that “By the Corps’ own estimates, the cost of hydropower over the next 30 years will outstrip revenues from electricity customers by more than $700 million.”

Congress has twice ordered the Corps to study shutting down the hydropower at the dams, most recently in 2022. The Corps submitted an initial analysis this summer.

Its conclusion: The hydropower should stay.

“The Corps’ analysis shows that some elements of the dams that generate hydropower, specifically the penstock outlets and the turbines, are important for overall dam operations,” the agency wrote. “Deauthorizing hydropower would require expensive structural changes to each dam to mitigate these issues for continued safe operation. These changes would not replace the need to address existing (Endangered Species Act) requirements. It would delay them and add cost.”