[1] PRELIMINARY SNAKE RIVER DAM BREACHING COSTS BROACHED

The cost for breaching four dams on the lower Snake River could add up to almost a billion dollars, according to preliminary figures developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Breaching would involve removing only the earthen part of the dams. The estimate includes costs of up to $170 million to stabilize embankments, and possibly another $100 million to modify pumping plants. Taking out the concrete could cost over $300 million, but leaving the powerhouses and spillways in place puts the rough estimate between $500 million and $816 million to achieve year-round natural river drawdown on the lower Snake.

The figures were announced Jan. 21 at a Corps meeting in Portland on the feasibility of different drawdown strategies. An estimate for drawdown to spillway crest is still in progress, but it's a strategy that previous consultants like Harza Northwest found to be of dubious biological benefit.

The dam breaching theme was also the topic of a panel discussion at a Jan. 24 salmon recovery workshop in Seattle, sponsored by the Sierra Club.

Bob Heinith of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission told the group that taking out the dams was the only thing to do because "the dams overwhelm the other impacts."

Heinith said there was a regional dispute over future capital expenditures at dams. With $1.4 billion slated for spending over the next ten years, he said projects like the $149 million projected smolt bypass pipe (nearly 2 miles long) at Bonneville Dam should be stopped, other capital improvements at dams on the Snake canceled and the dams breached.

"Nothing is working in the Snake River now," Heinith said, pointing to continual declines in salmon runs since the dams were built in the 1970s.

Shawn Cantrell of Friends of the Earth said dam removal isn't something new. He said 580 dams have been taken out in the US for all sorts of reasons, with safety being the main issue.

The Sierra Club's Jim Baker told the group he was the "original Rodney Dangerfield of salmon recovery," and pointed to studies by the National Research Council and the Independent Scientific Group's Return to the River, which said the only way healthy ecosystems can be restored is by restoring watersheds.

Baker said transporting fish in barges past the dams for the last 20 years hasn't produced enough adults to restore any of the Snake stocks. Escalating costs for powerhouse rebuilding at dams that produce only a few percent of the region's power doesn't make sense, he said, when the dams are such an impediment to fish.

With only the remnants of original runs left, Baker told the group that even tearing out the dams may not bring the fish back. "They may have got too low," he added. But if the dams are removed and the runs don't come back, "fill them up again."

The panel's thrust was countered by fisheries scientist Jim Anderson of the University of Washington, who spoke from the audience. "I think you have misstated a lot of the science," Anderson told the panel, adding that none of the studies they had cited recommended taking any of the dams out. Anderson described the uncertainty in future benefits for fish from such actions. "The science is not that powerful," he said.

Anderson said closure of all in-river fisheries would be a better way to help bring fish back. He also noted that changes in climate may have masked whether dams have had much effect on the runs.

Baker told the gathering they should know Dr. Anderson received a lot of his research funding from BPA, and that proponents of keeping dams have an economic reason for supporting such a position. "The Sierra Club doesn't believe anybody who has an institutional tie," Baker said.

But Anderson said the science was too uncertain to call for dam breaching. "Whether or not the dams are removed, is not my business," he added. -Bill Rudolph

[2] LAST YEAR'S FISH KILLS BLAMED ON COULEE SPILL

A report released last week says that massive fish kills in the Columbia River were caused by water spilled from Grand Coulee Dam. The high levels of spill caused toxic levels of dissolved gas in the river and affected eight species of both wild and captive fish, according to a report written by Dr. Ralph Elston of AquaTechnics, Inc. of Carlsborg, WA for the Colville tribe and the Columbia River Fish Farm.

The report says that spilling water from outlet tubes caused the high levels of dissolved gas during April, May and June of last year, while Lake Roosevelt was being drafted for flood control.

The report also claims that high levels of gas produced by the outlet works spill is "largely independent" of gas content coming from upstream.

The Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Grand Coulee, said in a December 1997 letter to the EPA that high levels of gas below Coulee can come from spill at dams on the Canadian side of the border, 150 miles away. The Bureau admitted that spill releases from the outlet works at Coulee can add to that, noting that dissolved gas levels up to 138 percent were measured downstream of Coulee in June 1997.

But the Bureau told EPA that options to reduce gas levels without expensive modifications "are very limited." The Bureau said costs would probably be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars to make structural changes, Burec said.

Elston's report said that strict adherence to the "rule curves" caused much of the observed fish mortality. The fish farm reportedly lost more than one-third of its total production in 1997, over 50,000 captive steelhead, from gas bubble disease caused by the high gas levels. The report also said that up to 20 percent of the fish that survived had not grown after the exposure.

Elston said that tribal officials observed dead wild fish were observed almost daily between May and early June 1997, including walleye, kokanee, rainbow trout and other resident species.

The report went on to say that under certain conditions, spill at Coulee may cause "significant addition" of gas to the river below Chief Joseph Dam. Elston plotted gas levels from spring 1997 and found comparable levels as far downstream as Rock Island Dam three days after observing them at Coulee.

The report made several recommendations, including use of the "rule curve" to draft the reservoir more flexibly and minimizing use of the outlet works. The works are used when reservoir levels are low. When the reservoir is higher, water can be spilled over drum gates, producing much less gas.

Elston also said the potential for changing operations at Coulee should be "urgently reviewed" by a multi-agency review and fishery impacts should be evaluated with help from private, non-governmental groups.

"Federal efforts to address these violations and the ongoing fishery damage in a timely fashion have been inadequate and inappropriate," said the report. -B. R.

[3] COUNCIL OK'S HATCHERY, SPENDING REVIEWS

The Power Council met via conference call Jan. 21 and voted to fund studies of the Columbia Basin hatchery program and the Corps of Engineers capital construction program. Both will be evaluated by the Independent Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB). The studies were mandated by Congress last fall. It's taken since then to work out the logistics, and the studies must be finished by the end of June, which will keep the ISAB scrambling.

The Council also voted to continue funding for the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery, with $4 million in capital spending slated for 1998 and a total cost of $16 million when it's completed in a few years. The funding had been held hostage to the Council's general funding review, after the ISAB recommended that all new hatchery construction be suspended until a basinwide review of artificial production was completed. But the Council decided that the Nez Perce project had already undergone enough scrutiny. The feeling among Council members was reflected by Montana's Stan Grace, who said "they have jumped through enough hoops already."

After getting the green light from the ISAB, the Council also OK'd funding for a controversial hatchery PIT-tag study. The proposal's stated budget of $168,000 doesn't include more than a million dollars in other costs associated with the study, which are also part of other proposals, including more than $500,000 for PIT-tags and $300,000 for adult detectors included in the Fish Passage Center's budget this year. BPA's F&W director Bob Lohn said nobody was trying to hide anything, but they were working to improve the process so all parts of the study's budget would be in one place.

The Council's approval came after the ISAB recommended funding the study, which will look at survivals to Lower Granite Dam and, it is hoped, will include enough returning adults in two years to figure smolt-to adult returns for barged and in-river migrants. The scientists said having more PIT-tagged fish in the migration is useful for data collection during the juvenile migration, and they suggested more tagging of salmon and steelhead as well.

NMFS voiced concerns about the hatchery study in December 1996, when the agency said the original proposal was not going to tag enough fish to get valid results. NMFS also questioned the value of tagging fish at hatcheries when more than 40 percent of them would never survive to the first dam at Lower Granite. At the time, NMFS figured over 350,000 fish would have to be tagged at the hatcheries to achieve statistically valid results, almost twice what will actually be tagged at the four hatcheries. -B.R.

[4] SUPPLEMENTATION MAY "MINE" WILD STOCKS, LEADING TO EXTINCTION

Hatchery supplementation is considered the sure way to save wild salmon in the Columbia Basin--a solution to salmon decline that's endorsed by both tribal advocates fish agencies. There's plenty of fiscal support as well. Last year, the Power Planning Council approved $15 million in hatchery supplementation support, and over 40 percent of its 1998 budget ($52 million) has been earmarked for hatchery development.

But both the US Congress and the Council's own Independent Scientific Review Panel have recommended the Council review the impact of hatcheries on wild salmonids before releasing more funds for them. There's growing evidence that supplementation practices can even lead to the extinction of the very stocks they are meant to increase. By deferring funding to some hatchery projects still in the design stage, the Council has become the target of a lawsuit by Columbia Basin tribes who are trying to keep the projects on track.

But some projects, like the Yakima Hatchery near Cle Elum, are nearly online. Over the years, it's been one of the most contentious projects in the basin and has turned out to be the most expensive hatchery in the world. With $64 million spent on the project by the end of 1997, the final cost is expected to be in excess of $100 million.

Even though the final design has been changed and most of the money was spent on years of studies and changes that have restricted the size and scope of the original hatchery's plan, serious questions about the value of supplementation remain.

One of the newest papers to discuss these issues is a genetic risk analysis of hatchery supplementation recently published by Oregon State University. A Ph.D thesis presented to the university in 1997 by Kenneth Currens evaluates the genetic risk to wild spring chinook and steelhead in the Yakima River from the hatchery supplementation program slated for the basin.

Some conclusions worth noting are:

1. Hatchery and wild salmon are given different fitness values in models such as the System Planning Model used in the Columbia Basin (fitness relates to survival). The wild fish are given a fitness rating of 1 for wild x wild matings, 0.8 for wild x hatchery matings, and 0.5 for hatchery x hatchery matings. This suggests that interbreeding between wild and hatchery fish decreases fitness, and that hatchery fish fitness is two times lower than for wild fish. Translated into policy, one would think that the best possible outcome would be to keep wild and hatchery fish from interbreeding, but the goal of supplementation is to purposely increase hatchery and wild fish mating in nature.

2. Hatchery supplementation is expected to increase the rate of growth in a wild population of salmon because the hatchery fish are expected to have a lower death rate during the early life stages, that is, from egg to smolt. However, it has been found that from 40 to 100 percent of the hatchery fish do not survive from their release sites to a monitoring site, such as from Salmon River, Idaho hatcheries to Lower Granite Dam. Other studies have shown that in some cases, no hatchery fish spawning in nature have survived to the adult progeny stage. This information would suggest that hatchery fish survival is not increased at early life stages, following release from the hatchery or as progeny of adult spawners in rivers. The hatchery protects fish that under natural conditions would not survive; but once these fish are released into natural rivers, many, if not all, perish.

3. Hatchery supplementation is designed to take eggs from the native, wild salmon population to use in the hatchery. But if the hatchery fails to return enough salmon to replace the fish used as donors for an egg supply, the hatchery operates as a source of mortality in the wild population. Based on risk assessment analysis, there is no data to support greater returns of salmon from supplementation. Also, if the wild spring chinook population was not well above replacement values to absorb this loss, supplementation would lead to extinction of the entire population. In this case, the hatchery became another predator or source of mortality for the wild salmon population. It was estimated, through risk assessment, that for every 100 spring chinook taken as brood stock, 50 to 70 fish would return. The unsupplemented or wild spring chinook population, based on this analysis, is expected to remain productive longer than it would under hatchery influence.

4. The paper states: "The possibility that supplementation might lead to extinction has generally been ignored in Yakima Fishery Project planning documents, because it was assumed that reproductive success of hatchery fish would be greater than wild fish. Likewise, extinction may have been ignored because biologists assumed it was a lesser risk (probability) than other genetic hazards without considering differences in potential loss. The analyses in this report suggest that these assumptions should be reconsidered." -Bill Bakke

[5] CANADIAN FISH MINISTER STRESSES COOPERATION

After a bilateral US/Canadian report released last month killed stakeholder talks over the Pacific Salmon Treaty, considerable consternation exists about how to get negotiations started again.

When special envoys William Ruckelshaus and David Strangway recommended in December that "government-to government" talks ought to resume, they didn't spell out any particular format, other than suggesting the two countries should nail down a two-year interim fishing agreement.

But the logjam may soon break. A Seattle judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by the BC government to recover over $300 million in damages for alleged losses for catch imbalances between the two countries. Alaska negotiators had said they were muzzled by recent subpoenas that dealt with the case.

On Jan 20, US District Judge John Coughenour ruled that the BC suit was an attempt to have the courts "impose a foreign policy decision on the executive branch."

Government lawyers were reviewing the ruling and may refile with the Canadian government as legal ally, said BC premier Glen Clark, who told the Vancouver Sun the judge seemed to imply that their standing would be improved with the Canadian government alongside.

But the federal government has already taken a dim view of the BC lawsuit. A spokesman for fisheries minister David Anderson said on Jan. 30 that Canada was intent on negotiating with the US, not suing them.

Anderson himself visited the US less than two weeks, ago, and he spoke in Seattle about resolution of the salmon issues, stressing cooperation and optimism.

"I think the gentlemen have bumped us out of the rut we've been in the past four years," said Anderson, referring to the Ruckelshaus/Strangway report. In a Jan. 21 speech, he suggested Canada was ready to talk--pointing out the controversy was a "serious threat" to rebuilding stocks in the US, but conservation must remain a main focus.

Anderson cited recent Canadian efforts to cut catches of distressed coho stocks in southern BC where the harvest went from one million fish in 1996 to no directed catch at all last year.

Since about 60 percent of the Canadian catch of southern coho is bound for US streams, it's an action that helped weak Puget Sound runs as well. US negotiators had tried for years to get Canadians to reduce their interceptions of US coho as well as ESA-listed Snake River chinook, but Canada has only reduced effort on both stocks out of concern for its own weak runs.

Anderson pointed to Alaska as the bad guy in all this, because Alaska fishermen intercepted steelhead and coho bound for the Skeena River in northern BC. But state officials say the issue is really persistent management problems in Canada.

Anderson also noted his country was working to reduce the size of the BC salmon fleet by 50 percent, and has already spent $80 million buying out fishermen.

But it wasn't just conservation that he was concerned about. Anderson said the equity issue has to be resolved as well, claiming that Canada has been shorted $60 million a year--the value of catch imbalances between the two countries. "Our only response is in the south, when the problem is in the north," he said, pointing to Alaska as a main impediment to agreement.

But Alaska presented its position a few days later at a Sierra Club workshop in Seattle. Alaska Department of Fish and Game head Frank Rue told workshop participants that the discussion shouldn't be billed as conflict.

"It's not a war," he said, noting to an agreement with Canada over fish in the Yukon which shows that the treaty has worked.

Rue said two principles were shared by both countries. First, "we all want harvestable numbers of wild salmon." And secondly, "We're in this together--salmon cross all our boundaries." He said each side should respect each other's position," yet both sides must move away from their respective theologies."

He pointed to the salmon summit held in Sitka last year, where Northwest states and tribes formed a more unified position based on common goals of salmon abundance and conservation. He urged both sides to be flexible on the treaty.

NMFS consultant Rick Applegate, who chaired the southern stakeholders on the US side, told the Sierra Club audience that the recent stakeholder talks were not a waste. "We made more progress in five months than the governments did in years," he said.

Applegate said a deal had been close that would have cut the Canadian coho harvest in half. Terms included a buyout of 40 percent of the non-treaty fishermen in Washington state, which would lead to an "enormous" reduction in the US take of sockeye bound for BC's Fraser River. "We're going back to the stakeholder talks, somehow, somewhere..." said Applegate.

Art Goddard, from the Canadian consulate in Seattle, said Canada originally felt the treaty was a victory for them, since it gave them more management of the lucrative Fraser River sockeye fishery, but the US had clearly benefited from the inequalities in harvest. He said his country wants to reverse the harvest trend, but the US still refuses to address it. Goddard ended on a hopeful note, though, by pointing out some precedents for cooperation between the two countries, including the halibut agreement that was signed in 1926 and still working.

Both sides will be meeting next month in Vancouver, and they have already been quietly exchanging information on chinook issues. Though Minister Anderson said he thought the BC rhetoric was cooling, others are more skeptical.

The irony is now on two fronts. The Canadians have complained that the fragmented US position would not lead to agreement--but for the past two years, US states and tribes have come to mutual terms. It's the Canadian position that has come unglued. Fed by disruptions caused by their plan to cut the fleet and make fishermen pay handsomely to fish in different areas, BC fishermen seem as much at odds with their own federal government--whose Department of Fisheries and Oceans manages their salmon--as they are with the Americans. -Bill Rudolph

[6] UNCERTAINTY AND RISK DISCUSSSED AT HARVEST FORUM

"We are in the middle of a revolution in the way we manage salmon, " WDFW director Bern Shanks told fish managers at a seminar in Olympia last week. But judging from audience response, the revolution may be a long time coming. The Jan. 30 forum presented a look at new quantitative methods that could be used to deal with the uncertainties and risks associated with salmon management. Shanks said fish managers' old approach--to wait until they've got "more certainty," is largely responsible "for why we're in the position we are today."

The centerpiece speaker was consultant Lorraine Read, who presented a paper that used Bayesian Decision Theory to analyze Skagit River steelhead populations.

Read said her analysis incorporated uncertainty in its risk estimation and used all available information. It was also capable of objectively evaluating management alternatives and performance from different perspectives.

That's a far cry from how the department currently determines harvest. State fish managers use the concept of maximum sustained yield (MSY) developed from spawner/recruit relationships of salmon stocks to determine harvest rates for different stocks. The graphs that plot such relationships show, at some point, more spawners actually produce less recruits, due to crowded conditions in spawning areas. Catching fish at a maximum sustainable rate theoretically keeps too many spawners from streams, but the low numbers of many stocks may mean that harvest rates have been traditionally pegged too high.

Using MSY by itself is not appropriate for sportsfishing harvest that's measured as catch per unit effort, said geneticist Reg Reisenbichler.

That's why the state's new wild salmonid policy added a buffer factor to the MSY concept, he explained. Other uncertainties are not dealt with in the spawner/recruit relationships shown by the traditional Ricker Curve and Beverton-Holt Curve. "They both ignore the size and sex of spawners," he added. Age-3 spawning populations contain about half females, he said, but adults returning at age 2 are rarely female. Consequently, age-3 spawners would produce many more recruits.

But underestimating MSY can be tough on stocks as well. Crowded spawning beds could produce less fish. Less wild fish reduces a population's ability to cope with environmental change because it loses genetic diversity.

Some participants questioned the value of the data used in the assessments. Read was asked what happened when escapements were over-estimated in the field. She said such error from observers could be incorporated, but it was pointed out that data such as spawning indexes were not random. But spawning fish tended to be counted at certain places on rivers--around bridges, for instance. Jeff Cedarholm of DNR said there was "considerable error" associated with these counts.

Another important factor in fish abundance is nutrient levels in streams-and more particularly, nitrogen, potassium and carbon that comes from fish carcasses.

Weyerhaeuser's Dr. Bob Bilby discussed recent research he has conducted on some western Washington streams that showed the importance of marine-derived nutrients for entire ecosystems. The nutrients are returned via salmon carcasses and play a huge role in determining size of fingerlings--coho that grew up in nutrient-rich surroundings (carcasses provided by researchers) had a 41 percent higher over-wintering survival rate than fish in streams with few returning spawners.

Example of a Ricker Curve to display spawner/recruit relationships

Steelhead in enhanced streams had 50 times as much food in their stomachs as fish in non-enriched streams. They found that 90 percent of the food in their stomachs at age-1 was derived from carcasses.

Gary Morishima, a consultant to the Quinault tribe, pointed out problems that come with traditional harvest management, such as inconsistent and uncertain data, small numbers of observations, and uncertain assumptions. "Stock recruitment curves are very poor prediction tools," said Morishima, because of unknowns like carrying capacity and harvest rates.

Consultant Steve Cramer said he thought density dependence was not the key factor to stock recruitment analysis, but environmental variability played the biggest role. He pointed out huge "asynchronous" variations in watershed abundance. He said reducing harvest to 2/3 of MSY would be prudent. "The catch would be nearly the same, but spawners would double."

The forum ended on a harmonious note, literally, when NMFS scientist Grant Thompson described a mathematical exercise that may have been excruciating only to reporters. Borrowing from risk-averse economic theory, he developed a concept that showed using the "harmonic mean" of MSY would always result in a more conservative harvest rate than the arithmetic mean.

The forum was jointly sponsored by Washington Trout, WDFW, the Washington Department of Agriculture, the Flintridge Foundation, The American Fisheries Society and the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation. -B. R.

[7] WA GOVERNOR OUTLINES SALMON STRATEGY

Gov. Gary Locke has announced a "roadmap" for salmon recovery for Washington state designed to deal with upcoming ESA listings. The draft strategy has been developed by the Joint Natural Resources Cabinet with plans to have specific recovery plans in place for consideration by the1999 legislature. The plan was short on specifics, but he promised more details soon.

Locke said legislators involved in the issue are well aware of the "magnitude of the consequences." Borrowing from Oregon’s plan, Locke said he proposes to assemble teams of people to work with local governments on a watershed by watershed basis.

"If we don’t create adequate plans for recovery," said Locke, "the federal government could have a say in such things as what we build, where we build, how we use water, and fertilize our crops or even our lawns."

"We also have proposed funding to tap into tans of millions of federal dollars to work with landowners so that we can have a cooperative arrangement of basically buying easements to protect salmon," Locke said in a Jan. 28 address.

State legislators are wading through a flood of bills related to salmon recovery. Rep. Jim Buck (R.) said the strategy would have to blend voluntary efforts with state mandates. "If we go completely with voluntary efforts," Buck said, "NMFS will not accept the plan because they don’t believe that we can guarantee that we’re actually going to do what we say we do."

Gov. Locke had earlier announced a new website that will track the salmon strategy and provide a conduit for public comment. The state expects eight species of salmon, steelhead and trout to be listed under the ESA by the end of the year. -B. R.

Subscriptions and Feedback
Subscribe to the Fishletter notification e-mail list.
Send e-mail comments to the editor.

Link/Document Annex
Works Cited

LINKS/DOCUMENTS FROM NW FISHLETTER 052:: Below are listed links and documents referred to in the text of NW Fishletter issue 052 .

• Bureau of Reclamation Letter to EPA, Dec. 19, 1997
• NW Fishletter 51, Jan. 20, 1998
• Washington Wild Salmonid Restoration

THE ARCHIVE :: Previous NW Fishletter issues and supporting documents.

© 2005 Energy NewsData