For many of us, the defining image of the Pacific Northwest is a wild steelhead or Pacific salmon leaping white river rapids or darting through currents.
Though weary from swimming upriver and facing constant danger from predators, adult salmon and steelhead never stop. Only death prevents them from completing their lifelong journey from riverbed to sea and back again, where they spawn so the cycle can begin anew.
The scene embodies the region’s indomitable natural spirit as few others can. It’s found on many of the rivers that run from the mountains seaward, but not on the Northwest’s largest and most important river, the Columbia. Wild salmon and steelhead will likely never again leap the Columbia’s rapids.
Fourteen major hydroelectric dams clog the river. These dams produce much of Washington’s hydroelectricity and irrigation water, but have replaced rapids with reservoirs and turned the Columbia’s once-mighty current into a torpid crawl.
Very few of these wild fish are left. Just a century ago the Columbia’s steelhead and Pacific salmon runs were the world’s most populous, but have been so depleted that 13 stocks are now listed on the Endangered Species Act.
Despite spending nearly $8 billion since 1982, federal recovery efforts have largely failed to reverse dwindling fish counts. An estimated population of more than 10 million wild fish in 1900 now numbers fewer than one million, most of which are artificially bred in hatcheries.
"We didn’t mean to kill them," said Michele DeHart, manager of the Fish Passage Center in Portland. "As a society, our intent was never to destroy. But we deluded ourselves into thinking we could have it all. We thought we could have maximum development and healthy fish runs as well."
PEOPLE FIRST, FISH SECOND
On May 5, the Bush administration released its latest plan on how federal agencies are to operate dams in the Columbia River, and efforts to revive wild salmon and steelhead populations are nearing a critical tipping point, said Todd True, an environmental lawyer with Earthjustice in Seattle.
The plan calls for the Bonneville Power Administration, one of three federal agencies in charge of managing the Columbia, to spend approximately $600 to $700 million every year to increase stocks of hatchery-raised fish by controlling predatory birds, fish and animals and improving habitat damaged by development.
In 2003 and 2005, U.S. District Court Judge James Redden in Portland threw out similar plans because they didn’t address what he felt was the principal culprit behind the salmon and steelhead’s decline—fluctuating river flows.
The federal agencies manage the river system to control its depth and current so it fluctuates to meet market demand for electricity and irrigation water.
When demand is low, like at night when lights are off and people are asleep, the storage reservoirs rise and the current slows. The reservoirs fall and the current quickens as demand rises in the day.
This gives the agencies an economist’s dream of always having the right supply of product to meet the present demand, but devastates juvenile salmon migrating downstream, DeHart said. Those fish need consistent, natural flows to propel them to the ocean, she said. They need the Columbia to be like a river.
Judge Redden agrees, and said he has ordered the agencies to spill more water over the top of their dams, which wastes money — it’s water that could irrigate crops or produce hydropower — but helps fish.
The latest operating plan largely ignores his demand, said True, who represents Earthjustice in the dispute. Redden could again declare the operating plan not in compliance with the Endangered Species Act, sending the process back to square one.
The fight for increased flows for fish has gone on in federal courts for almost two decades, and doesn’t appear close to resolving itself. But the constant throughout has been: The lawyers keep arguing. Salmon and steelhead keep dying.
A BALANCING ACT
To DeHart, saving the fish boils down to a balancing act. The river remains a finite resource, so water must be reallocated to balance human uses with fish needs.
"The problems on the Columbia have always been there," she said. "And now we don’t have any easy little things left to do. Fixing this is going to require big actions that need courage."
On a river as big as the Columbia this is no easy task. The river is one of world’s largest; from its headwaters in the snowpacks of British Columbia, the river flows 1,200 miles to the Pacific Ocean. It has the greatest flow of any American river aside from the Mississippi. The 160 million acre-feet of water that flows down the Columbia every year could cover California a foot deep.
The number of people using the river’s resources further complicates the balancing act. People across the Pacific Northwest and as far south as Los Angeles depend on the Columbia for power. In Washington, hydroelectricity accounts for 72 percent of the state’s energy consumption, and the largest contributors are on the Columbia, according to an April 2007 report from the Washington Department of Ecology.
And with warming climate around the globe, greater pressure will be put on hydroelectric generation because it produces no carbon emissions, which leaves less water to be spilled over the dams for the fish, Dehart said.
THE OLD AND THE NEW
Since the late 1950s, when the majority of dams were completed, two generations of Pacific Northwest residents have lived never knowing the Columbia of old: before its flow became bloated pools, before its bottom was dredged to provide smooth passage for barges as long as football fields.
The difference between the old and the new is lost on most who haven’t lived here long enough to know or care, but not on the wild salmon and steelhead.
Of the Columbia’s 1,200-miles, only the 51-mile stretch of the Hanford Reach, near the Tri-Cities in Central Washington, resembles the river before it was dammed and dredged. Accordingly, it’s the principal spawning ground for the fall runs of Chinook salmon and steelhead.
These runs were the river’s largest and once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Today, about 50,000 mostly hatchery-raised fish will return to spawn.
The Hanford Reach is the last connection to the river they once instinctively knew. The Columbia has been so drastically altered by human hand in the last century it’s now alien terrain.
At first glance it’s apparent why this stretch is not dammed or dredged. Not even a mile away from the river, a small cluster of buildings resembling a barn and silo rise out of the desert. It’s the Hanford Nuclear Site, one of the most toxic and radioactive sites in America.
A tank buried in the desert at Hanford leaks radioactive waste, and ground water washes a small portion into the river – right past spawning grounds holding millions of salmon eggs. As the eggs hatch and some of the Columbia’s last born-in-the-wild salmon begin swimming downstream, they will first be propelled by a current tainted with radioactive particles.
This will be the least of the juveniles’ problems on their migration downstream. Still to come: predatory birds and fish, hydroelectric turbines in four dams, and the risk of being diverted into an irrigation canal and spit out on a farm in Northeast Oregon, dying from a lack of oxygen because the current meets the slack water of a reservoir, among many others.
Many will die. Some will pass through dams and be diverted through a series of pipes into the back of an Army Corps of Engineer truck or put on a barge. These will take them safely to the ocean, but will not instill the knowledge of the river’s terrain the fish need on the journey upstream. Few will actually navigate the river by themselves.
In 2000, by order of President Clinton just before he left office, the Hanford Reach became a national monument akin to the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument.
Whereas the monuments in our nation’s capitol enshrine its greatest heroes, this 51-mile stretch of free-flowing river, memorializes one of its greatest environmental tragedies.
THE FUTURE
Balancing the allocation of resources on the Columbia will not be easy, DeHart said. This task is not for the fish advocates or the government agencies, she said. It’s for the citizens of the Pacific Northwest and arrives on their doorstep every month in the electric bill.
"This would be hard for me to do everyday if I thought it was hopeless," she said. "There’s a lot of possibilities for the future. I think the people of the Northwest won’t let a resource like the fish, which defines life here, go."