SEATTLE — Federal officials on Thursday set the stage for another far-reaching and potentially bruising Pacific Coast environmental struggle over a dying species and traditional industrial use of the Northwest's vast resources.

This time the species is the region's famed salmon, and the resource is its mighty Columbia/Snake river system.

The National Marine Fisheries Service in Portland, Ore., announced it has accepted for consideration petitions from environmentalists and fishermen asking the government to list four wild salmon migrations as endangered. Earlier this summer, it accepted a petition for a fifth run of wild salmon on the river system.

These are the first steps in a process similar to the one that led federal officials to designate the northern spotted owl as endangered.

The law requires the government to take action to prevent extinction of species listed as endangered. With the owl, this has engulfed the entire region in a bitter debate over wilderness preservation and logging, or as some people here see it, owls vs. jobs.

With the salmon, some experts believe the results of listing the salmon could be just as profound for the region.

The Columbia and its tributary, the Snake, make up the region's biggest, most important and most heavily industrialized river system. It generates 70% of the area's famous low-cost electrical power, provides a vast water highway and allows irrigation of huge tracts of arid farm land east of the Cascade Mountains.

Any change in management of the system--which today is more a series of lakes impounded behind dams rather than a free-moving river--is bound to have an impact on power rates. Currently, Northwesterners pay about half the national average for electricity, and this inexpensive power is a cornerstone of the region's economy.

On the other hand, nothing symbolizes the Northwest like the silver-skinned, red-fleshed salmon, a fish that begins life in fresh water streams, migrates to the ocean and then returns in runs to its home river to spawn and die.

Development on the river has affected the fish in fundamental fashion. Some of the early dams were built without effective salmon bypasses, and river flows are sometimes too small during crucial periods of the salmon life cycle to allow the fish to make the change from fresh water to salt.

Additionally, upstream logging is blamed for spoiling the spawning beds.