PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) – The federal agencies that run 14 dams in the Columbia River Basin released a long-awaited analysis Friday on how they will keep salmon from going extinct. Not included in the suite of measures is the action the agencies said would help salmon and steelhead most – breaching four dams along the Snake River.
Salmon are struggling to survive in the Pacific Northwest. They face poor ocean conditions, less water in streams and rivers and a network of dams that block their passage, heat the rivers and encourage predators. An average of just two million salmon and steelhead return to the Columbia River and its tributaries each year – a fraction of the 16 million annual return estimated in the 1800s. And nearly half of today’s returns are hatchery fish that won’t spawn in the wild. Bull trout, sturgeon and lamprey are also in decline. Despite decades of work and billions spent trying to make the dams less harmful to salmon and steelhead, the same 13 species listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1992 remain there.
Salmon aren’t the only iconic species at risk. Southern Resident killer whales, a species of orca that live in the Salish Sea near Seattle, are critically endangered, in part because they are starving for Chinook salmon. They also face a barrage of toxic water and noise from ships that interferes with their sonic ability to communicate and detect nearby fish.
The dams inundated important cultural sites for area tribes, like the major fishing spots at Celilo and Kettle Falls. Declining salmon also imperiled tribes’ ability to fish for subsistence – a major condition of their agreements to cede their land to the U.S. Government and a right guaranteed in the treaties memorializing those deals.
Dave Johnson, manager for the Nez Perce Tribe Fisheries Department, underscored that point at a January hearing on dam removal.
“It always seems as if somebody else’s livelihood is more sacrosanct than others,” Johnson said. “And we are the only ones with a guaranteed livelihood. In the treaties it said, ‘You’re always going to have that livelihood.’ The U.S. got millions and millions of acres of land yet we haven’t really had any harvest for years.”
A lawsuit launched in 2001 by the National Wildlife Federation and since joined by states and tribes has forced the government to reevaluate its operation of the 14 federal dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Since then, the government has written five different plans on how to operate its dams without violating the Endangered Species Act. All have been struck down by federal judges.
In 2016, U.S. District Judge Michael Simon ordered the government to perform a sixth redo of its environmental impact statement. He criticized the agencies for insisting that measures similar to those already in place would work to recover salmon, saying the system “cries out for a new approach.” This time, Simon wrote, the government was required to fully evaluate breaching four dams -- Ice Harbor, Lower Monument, Little Goose and Lower Granite – that impede the Washington reach of the Snake River, the Columbia’s largest tributary.