Salmon Plan Approved Allowing More Water Over Columbia River Dams
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A federal judge has approved a plan to spill more water through dams in the Columbia River Basin this spring.
It’s part of an ongoing lawsuit over how to manage dams to protect threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead.
Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon ordered dam managers to develop a plan to spill more water on the Columbia and Snake rivers to help fish.
Spilling more water means generating less power, which could raise the price of electricity.
EarthJustice attorney Todd True represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including conservation groups, the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe. He says spilling more water will help move baby salmon downriver toward the ocean while avoiding dangerous turbines.
“It’s something we can do immediately that will help salmon that are on the brink of extinction,” he said. “The federal agencies have refused to provide spill at this level in the past so the court has ordered them to do that.”
The court ordered as much spill as the law allows. State laws set limits on how much water can be spilled over dams before the gases produced in the process may become harmful to fish.
Dam managers with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers submitted their new spill plan to the court last month. They will start spilling more water through dams in April.
Copyright 2018 Earthfix
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Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
The deal, which took two years to negotiate, halted decades of lawsuits over the harm federal dams had caused to the salmon that had sustained those tribes culturally and economically for thousands of years. To enable the removal of four hydroelectric dams considered especially harmful to salmon, the government promised to invest billions of dollars in alternative energy sources to be created by the tribes.
This story comes to you from Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
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