[1] BiOp Judge Tells Feds To Add More Water To Salmon Recovery Recipe
BiOp Judge James Redden told federal agencies last month that they will probably have to come up with more irrigation water from Idaho for ESA-listed salmon in the Snake River than they have proposed so far. The message was clear in his 12-page remand order dealing with the 2005 Upper Snake BiOp, where NOAA Fisheries judged that water storage operations at Bureau of Reclamation projects did not jeopardize ESA-listed stocks downstream.
The issue of water, and how much of it needs to be added to Snake River flows to benefit fish, has been a topic of hot debate for years, but some water from the Bureau projects has been part of the feds' recipe for saving salmon for a long time.
Currently, 487 KAF from Upper Snake reservoirs is poured for downstream fish needs--the amount the feds recently told the judge they would analyze in their remand. It just happens to be the exact volume of water specified for fish as spelled out in the agreement between Idaho, the Nez Perce Tribe and water users over Snake River water, years in the making.
Last year, after the water litigation heated up [American Rivers v. NOAA Fisheries], most parties to the Snake River Agreement said that calling for more water from the Upper Snake for fish needs would kill the deal. That theme was echoed last month by Idaho Sen. Larry Craig in a statement released by the state's congressional delegation saying that Redden's ruling could lead to dewatering millions of acres of irrigated land.
"We have said it before and we will say it again; let there be no mistake," Craig said. "We will protect Idaho's water and the Snake River Basin Agreement at all costs. Yesterday's decision has more to do with establishing a personal judicial legacy than saving a species. This court continues to ignore the big picture and all the factors that are in play. We're not makin' biscuits here, so just adding water isn't the answer."
Plaintiffs in the Upper Snake BiOp litigation said in a recent filing that the federal agencies shouldn't restrict themselves to that one option, and should analyze scenarios that include more water from the Upper Snake reservoirs and other sources.
In one brief, the feds said the judge can't tell them what to study. But Redden took issue with that notion, noting that his ruling against NOAA's judgment on the Upper Snake operations wasn't the first time the federal fish agency had failed to produce a valid BiOp for Snake River fish.
"In fact, NOAA, BOR, the Corps, and BPA have repeatedly and collectively failed to demonstrate a willingness to do what is necessary to 'halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction [in both the Columbia and Snake River Basins] whatever the cost,'" the judge opined in his Sept. 26 order.
Redden said that he wouldn't ignore the feds' history of noncompliance with the ESA simply because they had split their analysis into two BiOps--one governing the Upper Snake and the other one, the lower Snake and Columbia. He said they were segmented to satisfy terms of the Snake River Agreement--"designed to guarantee water to specific users in the Upper Snake River despite evidence that ESA-listed Snake River salmon and steelhead populations were declining due, in part to already insufficient water flows from the Upper Snake River."
By storing 2 million acre-feet of water, Redden said, the BuRec projects help kill salmon by reducing the quality of salmon habitat, boosting water temperatures, impacting water quality and "interrupting" juvenile migration in the river below the projects--and that is why flow augmentation from the Upper Snake has been included in all previous FCRPS BiOps.
The judge put the entire state of Idaho on notice that more water was needed. He pointed out that NOAA, from its own 2004 administrative record, had estimated that a million acre-feet would be needed to mitigate depletions caused by the Bureau's Upper Snake operations.
Hot Water, Hot Topic
At a salmon recovery conference in Boise last November, the Upper Snake water issue was a hot topic. The University of Washington's Jim Anderson explained that flows and survival, especially for spring chinook, may correlate at some low level, like those found during the drought year 2001, but there is scant evidence for any within-year benefits from flow augmentation.
Citing an analysis by his group, Columbia Basin Research, that was completed for Idaho water users, Anderson stated that fish survival correlated with water temperatures, not flows. As rivers heat up, so does predator activity, he said, and fish survival goes down. He said he had published a peer-reviewed article on the issue.
At the same conference, Ken Pedde, retired deputy regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation, presented a table showing that the water required by the plan offered by enviros last year could conflict with storage needs. The flow prescriptions would take another two million to three million acre-feet in the Columbia, and 0.4 million to 0.6 million-acre-feet in the lower Snake to increase water-particle travel time by 10 percent, the amount that environmental groups had requested for improving conditions for fish in the summer of 2005.
To accomplish that in the Columbia, Pedde said, the extra water would have to go into storage, where "space may or may not be available." But it would involve putting water in a space normally reserved for flood control, which would increase the risk of flooding. Such storage could also have potential effects on power generation, and for reducing flows to aid listed chum salmon below Bonneville and fall chinook at Vernita Bar in the Hanford Reach.
The Judge's hard line on flows puzzled some participants in the ongoing legal battles, since Redden ruled against the 2005 request by environmental and fishing groups for more flow augmentation than called for in the FCRPS BiOp. He said the environmentalists failed to make their case for more flows, citing a 2003 study by the Independent Scientific Advisory Board that found the "prevailing rationale for flow augmentation is inadequate" and new information did not agree with the "prevailing flow-augmentation paradigm" that says inriver fish survival is "proportionally enhanced by any amount of added water."
Now Redden says he "may well" direct the feds to consider "certain steps" during the remand if he feels it's necessary to ensure the next Upper Snake BiOp complies with the ESA's substantive requirements.
"Given the precarious condition of the Snake River salmon and steelhead runs, the consequences of another failed biological opinion will be serious indeed," Redden wrote in his latest opinion, implying that with no Upper Snake BiOp in place, any taking of ESA fish by Bureau operations would be illegal, and subject to criminal charges. On the other hand, with no BiOp in place, one regional attorney pointed out, the environmentalists could ask for anything they wanted.
Redden also reiterated that he would not order the feds to write separate BiOps, but if the feds aren't doing the kind of comprehensive analysis required by the ESA, he wouldn't hesitate to modify the remand order.
The judge ordered that the 2005 Upper Snake BiOp stay in place during the remand, and he gave the feds four months beyond the February 2007 deadline for completion of the FCRPS remand to finish the Upper Snake remand, with a possible extension if progress is evident. Like the FCRPS remand, he wants quarterly status reports beginning on Oct. 3, when the next FCRPS review is due.
At last year's water conference, water users' attorney Scott Campbell, said if environmental groups filed a supplemental complaint, there would be a new fight "to the death," and he promised a cross claim against NOAA Fisheries that would address the taking of endangered fish in the harvest sector. Campbell filed that claim, but it was thrown out by Judge Redden.
It will probably not be the last attempt to rein in the harvest of the ESA-listed Snake River fall chinook, with ocean and inriver harvest rates adding up to 40 percent or better. There have been rumblings that even the state itself may initiate a lawsuit over harvest issues. As one attorney said, "Redden isn't the only judge in town."
Last fall, the Nez Perce Tribe also promised litigation if they felt the Snake River Agreement was in danger. Right now, the tribe is waiting for Congress to vote on appropriations bills that would begin channeling millions their way. It's unlikely the tribe wants the SRA to fall apart since the proposed 2007 budget calls for this year's funding of the Nez Perce settlement in three different agency budgets. The BIA would give $20,041,000 for the Nez Perce/Snake River settlement, the BLM would grant $200,000 for mitigation of Bureau land transfers, and the USFWS would provide $4,917,000 for the Idaho Salmon and Clearwater River Basins Habitat Account.
Environmental groups were ecstatic over Redden's latest order.
"The court is saying all the cards are on the table, including Idaho water, and the government better get it right this time and do what the law requires," said Michael Garrity of American Rivers. "There is a clear path to salmon recovery that doesn't require redirecting water from Idaho farmland, and it is removing four high-cost, low-value dams on the lower Snake River." He said Redden's order, along with the fact that the dams can be "affordably replaced," should spur regional leaders and the feds to take a fresh look at restoring a free-flowing Snake.
At last fall's conference in Boise, environmental spokesman Tom Stuart, a board member of the Boise-based conservation group Idaho Rivers United, said the groups weren't out to get more water as their previous lawsuit tried to do, nor did it try to overturn the Snake River agreement. He said the new lawsuit simply wanted the Upper Snake and lower Snake BiOps to become one, "with a comprehensive baseline analysis from the headwaters to the ocean."
Water users' attorney Campbell responded by telling Stuart that either he didn't understand the lawsuit, or one of the group's attorneys had misrepresented it. "Because, if you are saying your suggested supplemental complaint does not directly attack the Nez Perce settlement, you haven't read the Nez Perce settlement or you haven't read the lawsuit, because in fact, it does exactly that."
James Buchal, representing the Snake River Irrigators Association, submitted a letter to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel deciding the government's appeal of the FCRPS BiOp.
The letter says Redden's latest opinion in the American Rivers case confirms the judge's bias towards increased river flows, which are contrary to the "best available scientific information" provided by the irrigators, as does his bolstering a ruling by citing a case [IDFG v. NMFS, 1994] that turned out to have been vacated by the court. Buchal said it was apparent that the judge "continues to attempt to steer River operations in a fashion incompatible with the judicial role." -Bill Rudolph
[2] BiOp Updates Show Evidence Of Little Progress
Federal agencies have sent BiOp Judge James Redden their latest update on the "collaborative" effort to produce a new hydro BiOp. They also issued their first update on the Upper Snake remand, ordered by the judge on Sept 26.
The latest update to the FCRPS [Federal Columbia River Power System] remand includes several pages of schedules to show the judge that technical and policy workgroups are continuing to meet nearly daily, but nothing was produced to show results from passage modeling work that estimated fish survival from different operating scenarios. The meetings are still off limits to reporters and the public.
One participant said progress was being made "at a snail's pace," but they had all got to know each other better after two retreats and a few friendly basketball games.
In the last remand update, filed three months ago, the feds said they expected preliminary results by the third week in July. There was even some discussion that the results would become public, but they have not.
The Oct. 3 update says the Policy Working Group was still narrowing issues and identifying some items for additional discussion--including a review of passage modeling results.
Several months ago, sources said the passage model did not show much difference in the survival results from different hydro scenarios currently under consideration.
The PWG is "continuing to consider how a range of survival-based estimates of relative human impacts (direct and indirect) of various sources of mortality, as well as how the differing opinions, interpretations and methods that such estimates (e.g., latent mortality) are based upon, should be incorporated and applied within the 10-step framework," according to the remand documents.
The PWG is also reviewing information from another workgroup on goals and gaps in survival that need to be filled in each ESU.
The latest report noted that a subgroup of the PWG is working to develop an ESU-by-ESU template that attempts to link management actions in each of the four Hs to ESU-specific goals, gaps and limiting factors.
The subgroup has taken up the work of the regional coalition that expanded a matrix developed by NOAA to develop key limiting factors for each ESU and then management actions to recover the stocks. The coalition, which includes Washington, Montana, several upriver tribes and the BPA customers' group, used the matrix to shift the focus on salmon recovery away from a more hydrocentric position, because it felt that little improvement in fish survival could be gleaned from the kind of changes in dam operations that federal agencies had the authority to implement.
The upper Snake update reiterated the feds' previous position that the proposed action will be limited to whether current operations at water storage projects operated by the Bureau of Reclamation jeopardize ESA-listed fish in the lower Snake and Columbia. The strongly-written Sept. 26 order by Redden suggested that more water may be needed than the 487 KAF now released per the Snake River Agreement between the state of Idaho, the Nez Perce Tribe and water users.
The feds said they would write a separate BiOp for the upper Snake, with effects from proposed FCRPS operations in the environmental baseline, and analyze proposed FCRPS operations with the upper Snake operations in the environmental baseline of that analysis. -B. R.
[3] Upper Columbia Recovery Plan Released For Comment
A $154-million, 10-year proposed recovery plan for ESA-listed chinook and steelhead for the Upper Columbia region was finally released at the end of September for a 60-day public comment period.
It's been coming out in bits and pieces over the past two years. One portion came out nearly two years ago, but it didn't include any specific recovery actions. Now a detailed product has been delivered to the public, and it's already been given the once-over by NOAA Fisheries after a long struggle by local entities to complete it under the aegis of the Upper Columbia Salmon Recovery Board. The board, made up of representatives from Chelan, Douglas and Okanogan County, and the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Colville Tribes, coordinated the effort, soliciting input from watershed and farm groups, and other interested parties.
It's mercifully much shorter than the 2000-page lower Columbia plan-it's less than one-fourth the size of that document, which deals only with the Washington side of the river and is still waiting for a price tag to be attached.
With the plan in place, NOAA Fisheries has judged that it will take about 10 to 30 years to recover the listed spring chinook in the Upper Columbia region with a minimum goal of 4,500 naturally produced spawners as one of several recovery criteria, with more specific goals for the Wenatchee, Entiat and Methow populations.
About 1,600 natural-origin spawners were estimated to have returned to the Upper Columbia in 2002, considerably better than the less than 300 fish returning in 1999 when the ESU hit the endangered species list. In 1995, the return was under a hundred fish.
Along with other criteria for recovery, listed steelhead will have a minimum goal of 3,000 spawners among four local populations. In 2002, it was estimated that about 3,000 natural-origin steelhead returned to the Upper Columbia. In 1996, the year before they were listed, about 600 returned.
The upper Methow goes dry in many average water-years.
(Photo courtesy Steve Devin)
The feds will no doubt hear more from residents of Okanogan County, where the county farm bureau has complained mightily during the years-long process. Some locals are still worried about possible infringements to private property rights as the implementation shapes up. And the plan includes the battle-scarred Methow River drainage, where NOAA Fisheries battled local water users for years to add more flows for fish by modernizing leaky irrigation ditches.
With 12 hatcheries in the region, the plan's $154-million budget includes the expense of operating them, which makes up about one-third of the recovery plan's cost over the next 10 years. But one of the recommendations for each distressed stock is to reduce the numbers of hatchery fish on spawning grounds to boost fitness of wild spawners. There is no mention of possibly curtailing hatchery production, since it is part of the mitigation effort to make up for Grand Coulee forever blocking the Columbia to migrating salmon.
The plan repeats what former Douglas Country senior natural resources planner Chuck Jones told NW Fishletter in early 2005--that habitat improvements by themselves aren't going to recover these stocks. Now a consultant, but still working on the issues, Jones said some costs still need to be plugged into the plan, one reason why they are considerably lower than other plans in the works.
Nobody expects everything in the plan to be implemented--even the planners admitted that. But they said the $154-million estimate over 10 years is still a lowball estimate, since it doesn't include the costs to Mid-Columbia PUDs, which, they say, far exceed $100 million for implementing their habitat conservation plans. The estimate also leaves out other costs for improving survivals at mainstem federal dams and in the estuary.
Using the EDT [Ecosystem Diagnosis and Treatment] analysis tool developed by regional consultant Lars Mobrand, the planners examined potential costs and benefits, and found that fish benefits tapered off considerably after the first third of the plan was implemented. With the habitat plan implemented at one-third "intensity," it was estimated that spring chinook numbers could increase 3 percent to 25 percent. At 100-percent intensity, the estimate was a 3 percent to 36-percent benefit in fish numbers.
Without any empirical data to back them up, the planners suggested that hatchery improvements could achieve a 3-percent to 5-percent increase in naturally produced spring chinook and steelhead in the Wenatchee-Entiat stocks, and a 5-percent to 10-percent improvement for salmonids in the Methow and Okanogan.
Using another tool developed by the EDT folks called the "All-H Analyzer," they said preliminary results suggested that hatcheries may play a big role in the fitness of naturally produced chinook and steelhead. They said wild spawners would probably benefit by reducing the numbers of hatchery fish on spawning grounds "through removal at collection points or selective harvest."
The plan also estimated a 10-percent boost in productivity of spring chinook if all harvest (mostly in the lower Columbia) stopped, but they said wild steelhead numbers might actually decrease, since a reduced harvest could swamp spawning grounds with hatchery steelhead.
The plan estimated up to a 50-percent improvement in productivity for juvenile chinook and 40 percent for steelhead after improvements are made at PUD projects and federal mainstem dams.
Although mitigation hatcheries are securely funded, the plan says such funds "fall well short" of paying for the entire program. Help will be needed from the state's salmon recovery funding board, PUDs, BPA's fish and wildlife program, the federal hydro BiOp, and more money from the state legislature to boost agency budgets, the Pacific Salmon Recovery Fund, federal appropriations from Congress, local government mechanisms through state appropriations, other NGO funding, and voluntary public and private partnerships.
But the plan says every dollar spent on salmon recovery will generate thousands more for local, state, federal and tribal economies. "Importantly," says the document, "the general model for viewing costs versus benefits must be viewed in terms of long-term benefits derived from short-term costs."
But some local residents feel that the plan has less to do with developing a realistic road map to recover local stocks and more to do with satisfying the federal judge who is overseeing the development of the next hydro BiOp in the mainstem Columbia and Snake. Darlene Hajny of the Okanogan County Farm Bureau said her group feels they are just pawns in the big game, and pointed to comments in a local citizens' coalition August newsletter as a accurate portrayal of their feelings.
"The Upper Columbia fish recovery plan has been hijacked," says the newsletter. "It is now part of the BiOp Remand negotiation process, to develop a court-ordered 'jeopardy analysis,' which goes beyond ESA. The Upper Columbia plan is now being used as a poster-child, to placate Judge Redden and a bevy of litigation-filing environmentalists. NMFS hopes these proposed changes, actions, off-site mitigations, and implementation of the Upper Columbia plan will be enough. We're afraid it's too much!" -B. R.
[4] Groups File Suit To Reduce Harvest Of ESA Chinook In Puget Sound
Several Northwest conservation groups who have already tried to reduce the harvest of ESA-listed chinook by going to court, filed another action this week that focuses on Puget Sound. They say the Sound's harvest management plan approved by NOAA Fisheries is illegal because it allows too much fishing for some stocks to recover.
"NOAA Fisheries acknowledges that these harvest rates are too high for the salmon to recover," said Gary Loomis, president of the Salmon Spawning and Recovery Alliance, in an Oct. 10 press release, "but it approved the harvest plan, anyway. That's a violation of their responsibility under the ESA."
The suit charges that NOAA Fisheries and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are not basing their management of the salmon harvest on the correct abundance criteria necessary for the recovery of the Puget Sound stocks. "In fact," says the complaint, "the NMFS-derived viable thresholds are an order of magnitude lower than the TRT's [Technical Management Team] abundance ranges for the same populations, and are lower than the RMP's [Resource Management Plan] upper management thresholds. As a result, the NMFS viable thresholds tolerate even higher harvest rates and lower escapement than do the RMP upper management thresholds."
Simply put, says Seattle attorney Svend Brandt-Erichsen, the TRT numbers are based on what the team considers necessary for the stocks to be sustainable over the next 100 years, while the NMFS harvest rates are based on current population numbers supported by existing habitat--about 10 percent of the numbers needed for viability.
Brandt-Erichsen said after conferring with NMFS and staff from the Shared Strategy process that has developed the recovery plan for Puget Sound, the philosophy of the current harvest plan is based on a simple notion that if more fish would get back to the spawning grounds than now return, they will be wasted because the current habitat can't handle any more. "We don't think their science is all that good," said Brandt-Erichsen.
The complaint also charges that overall harvest levels of Puget Sound chinook are "much higher" that NMFS predicted because of significant changes in the timing of the Canadian fisheries. It points to an August 2006 report from the Pacific Salmon Commission that acknowledges this shift (see NW Fishletter 219).
The groups say their litigation shouldn't affect tribal fishing in the Sound at all. "We don't see any necessary conflict between treaty fishing rights and reducing the impact of harvest," said Kurt Beardslee, executive director of Washington Trout, one of the plaintiff groups. "But NOAA does have the ability and responsibility to regulate non-tribal fisheries to avoid jeopardizing chinook recovery." The Portland-based Native Fish Society has also joined the action against the feds.
In other harvest news, Brandt-Erichsen said the Salmon Spawning & Recovery Alliance has filed its motion in the US Court of International Trade that claims the US Customs Service has ignored its obligations under the ESA by allowing both sports fishermen and commercial shippers to bring ESA-listed chinook born in the US, but caught in Canada, back across the border. The ESA prohibits the import of endangered animals.
The motion argues that by allowing the import of ESA-listed fish, government agencies are facilitating the killing of listed salmon. "Defendants do not appear to have ever evaluated their obligation and ability to enforce the prohibition against imports of threatened salmon," argue the plaintiffs, who said the feds mustered a one-page response after being presented with a detailed description of the problem that tried to pass the buck from Customs to NMFS.
The same groups also sued the federal government to force reconsultation with Canadians over the interception of ESA-listed, US bound stocks. But a federal judge in Seattle ruled that they did not have standing because his court didn't have the authority to get Canadians to change their harvest regime. Attorney Brandt-Erichsen said its likely that his clients will appeal that decision. -B. R.
[5] Early Forecast Calls For Below-Average Water Year
Government forecasters and scientists from the University of Washington are both pointing to a warmer, probably drier winter this year in the Pacific Northwest.
At a daylong presentation last week in Kelso, Wash., they showed strong evidence for a mild winter ahead with below-average snowpack, after what turned out to be the hottest May-through-July period in the Northwest since 1895. The June-through-August timeframe was the third hottest on record, according to Nate Mantua, climate researcher from the UW's Climate Impacts Group.
They pointed to a mild El Niño brewing in the tropical Pacific, where water temperatures have been above normal for several months.
Steve King from NOAA's Northwest River Forecast Center said that his group's forecasting tools estimate a 96 percent of normal water year at both Grand Coulee and The Dalles.
The weak-to-moderate El Niño that federal forecasters announced last month comes on the heels of a mild cooling event in the tropical Pacific last winter that shifted quickly into a warming trend during spring.
But some experts have questioned the robustness of associating El Niño events with seasonal weather conditions compared to past years, since the official definition of El Niño has changed from the early 2000s. Less warming in the equatorial Pacific will now garner an event a full-blown El Niño designation that it wouldn't have gotten five years ago.
The change has made some scientists question the value of the moniker. "Our core point is that the new NOAA definition has identified as El Niño a number of seasons that have substantially different U.S. seasonal weather impacts from those conventionally identified," said two federal researchers in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters in July 2005 (Larkin et al., 2005).
They said lumping these new periods in with the older, conventional El Niños not only reduces the statistical power of the seasonal associations, but obscures more robust impacts as well. They cautioned that, "it is best not to expect the conventional associations to apply" until all familiar regional associations with El Niño are reexamined using the NOAA definition, "both globally as well as in the U.S."
The new definition says an El Niño occurs when sea surface temperatures rise in the equatorial Pacific by a least 0.5 degrees C from normal for three consecutive months. It has been adopted by the World Meteorological Organization Region IV to replace a fuzzier definition that most researchers had agreed upon in general terms--that 11 of these warming events had occurred since 1950.
NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has modified the new definition to extend the anomalies to five consecutive months before it officially dubs a warming event an El Niño.
The latest El Niño Advisory, updated Oct. 5, said the latest sea-surface temperature anomalies are all above 0.5 degrees C. The advisory also stated that more than two-thirds of the other predictive models used by El Niño researchers are also indicating El Niño conditions through next spring. -B. R.
[6] Columbia Fish Numbers Still Strong, Others Miss Forecasts Big Time
Relatively slow but steady trickles of chinook, coho and steelhead are still passing Bonneville Dam, lengthening the salmon season for both fishermen and fish watchers.
By Oct. 11, more than 285,000 fall chinook had passed the dam, about 17 percent below the 10-year average. Toward the end of last week, daily numbers were running twice the 10-year average, but have tapered off lately.
On Sept. 29, harvest managers updated the fall run size to 391,000 chinook (to river mouth), which included 208,000 upriver brights, and boosted it again on Oct. 2 to 412,000 fish overall, including 222,000 URBs. On Oct. 10, their estimate went up once more, to 421,400 fish, including 226,000 URBs.
The preseason estimate was 474,000.
Lower river commercial fishermen had caught about 24,000 chinook and 27,000 coho by Oct. 9, and another 5,800 chinook and 36,000 coho in their select area fisheries.
Tribal fishermen above Bonneville Dam were expected to catch about 83,000 chinook by Oct. 6, with about 46,000 upriver brights, which would put them within 3 percent of their 23-percent impact limit on the upriver stock.
The tribes also landed nearly 21,500 steelhead, and 6,400 coho. A seventh week of fishing took place last week.
Coho numbers at the dam were about 81,000, 7 percent above the 10-year average.
Steelhead were running above the 10-year average as well, with about 326,000 in by Oct. 11, and close to harvest managers' pre-season forecast of 313,000 (to the dam).
Overall, spring and summer chinook returns beat expectations, with the springers coming in 40 percent above the pre-season estimate and the summers nearly doubling expectations.
That was not the case further north, where the famed Fraser River sockeye run flamed out, ending at about half the strength (8.7 million) of preseason forecasts (17.4 million) from the Pacific Salmon Commission, which said most of the losses were attributable to the Quesnel and Late Shuswap stocks.
But that poor forecast is nothing compared to what happened with the pink salmon run in Southeast Alaska this year. With fishermen and processors geared up for a return of 52 million fish, only 12 million showed up. ADFG biologists say drought conditions in the late summer of 2004 were likely responsible for the poor showing, because a lack of rain that year had seriously delayed pinks from entering streams and stressed the fish that were able to spawn. The department no longer surveys smolt production, so managers weren't able to temper their rosy prediction with any field data from the following spring.
Meanwhile, the Bristol Bay sockeye run was one of better news, coming in pretty much as expected, with an excellent catch of more than 33 million fish. -B. R.
[7] Washington Calls For Comment On Water Management Plan
The state of Washington has released a draft programmatic EIS on several early elements that may play a part of a major overhaul of managing Columbia River water, one that includes development of new water supplies for both instream and out-of-stream uses.
The three actions in the draft EIS include the additional drawdown of Lake Roosevelt for municipal water supply, irrigation and flow enhancement downstream of Grand Coulee Dam. During drought years, even more water could be used to help junior water rights holders and for flow augmentation.
In non-drought years, the added drawdown is estimated at one foot, and another .5 feet in drought years. Any agreement would also include an accord with the Colville Tribe over the action.
The second element is to study the possibility of using supplemental feed routes to carry water from Banks Lake to Potholes Reservoir to supply the South Columbia Basin Irrigation District.
The last element involves a voluntary agreement submitted to the Department of Ecology by the Columbia-Snake Irrigators Association that proposes to undertake conservation and other measures to free up new sources of conserved water in exchange for new uninterruptible water rights on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers. -B. R.
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