Dam Stupid

At least in the United States, the age of big dams is over. But the age of removing obsolete, resource- and money-draining dams is barely underway; and progress has been all but halted by an administration that defends obsolete dams as if they were religious monuments.

Economics and politics protect almost all big dams for our life spans, and perhaps the life spans of the dams as well. For example, not even the most radical elements of the environmental community are talking about breaching the four big dams on the Columbia River, once the world's mightiest salmon and steelhead river. These dams came at enormous cost in fish, and with the closing of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1941 all salmonid stocks of the Columbia wing were instantly extinguished.

But we still had the free-flowing Snake River, which once produced an estimated eight million salmonids, including almost half the chinook spawned in the Columbia system. Counting hatchery fish, which now comprise about 90 percent of all salmonid returns, the average spring chinook run at the fourth (farthest upstream) Snake River dam over the past decade has been just 51,737 while the average summer chinook run has been 9,688. In 2007, there were 31,987 spring chinooks, (including 9,085 jacks) and 7,312 summer chinooks. And while there were 157,214 steelhead (up from the 10-year average of 146,214), only 32,998 of these were wild fish.

Today, 13 Columbia/Snake stocks in 78 populations are listed as threatened or endangered, Snake River coho are extinct and sockeyes functionally extinct (four returned in 2007, nowhere near enough to maintain genetic integrity).

According to most fisheries scientists, the four lower Snake River dams pretty much guarantee extinction of all remaining stocks within the next 20 years (with the possible exception of a few steelhead). This is hardly breaking news.

Nine years ago, 206 fisheries scientists wrote President Clinton as follows: "The weight of scientific evidence clearly shows that wild Snake River salmon and steelhead runs cannot be recovered under existing river conditions. Enough time remains to restore them, but only if the failed practices of the past are abandoned and we move quickly to restore the normative river conditions under which these fish evolved."

Among the signers were the University of Idaho's Dr. Richard Williams, chair of the independent scientific study group hired by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana to advise on salmonid management, and Dr. Robert Behnke, the world's leading salmonid authority.

The four lower Snake River dams, completed between 1961 and 1975, are vestigial appendages from the age of pork-barrel river manipulation and cold-war trepidation. Built mainly for navigation, they were hawked to Congress as a means of barging wheat to the tiny community of Lewiston, Idaho (current population 31,293). An additional justification was their extremely modest power generating capacity (less than 5 percent of the Northwest's current power grid), which was collected by Hanford, Washington (now a radioactive ghost town), the better to fashion plutonium H-bomb triggers for excision of the Soviet Union -- which went extinct without our help in 1991, three years after the Snake River coho.

None of the dams provide flood control, and only one provides irrigation, which could be pumped from a free-flowing reach merely by extending intake pipes. Railways and highways, by which wheat could more efficiently be transported, parallel the 130-mile-long navigation channel aptly defined by novelist, essayist and fly-fisher David James Duncan as "an insanely misplaced Panama Canal" and "a flaccid, desert-heated, predator-filled slackwater."

These four artifact dams are a major drain on U.S. taxpayers and the economy of the Northwest. Their creator and most ardent defender, the Army Corps of Engineers, proclaims that breaching them would cost $1 billion. Even if one accepts this grossly inflated figure and even if one doesn't care about fish, breaching is a no-brainer.