Talk of Demolishing Dams Yields Torrent of Debate

LEWISTON, Idaho — The river workhorse begins here in the northern Idaho farm belt, slicing a canyon through the rolling grasslands of the most productive wheat fields in the nation.

Here, the Snake River takes 722,000 tons a year of wheat and barley on its back and carries it down through the confluence with the Columbia River and on to the sea--465 miles of what was once the wildest river system in the West.

Woody Guthrie celebrated the taming of the Columbia in what remains one of the nation's premier engineering achievements: the construction of eight massive dams on the lower Columbia and Snake rivers--edifices of concrete, gravel and grace whose power plants opened up the development of the Pacific Northwest and transformed Lewiston, once an arid outpost of grain elevators and storefronts hundreds of miles from the ocean, into a seaport.

Now, in an unprecedented turnaround for the federal agency that has made its living boot-strapping nature to the whims of men, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking another look at its creations on the lower Snake River. In a study due to wind up next year, the Corps is thinking about demolishing four dams along the lower Snake--at an estimated total cost of $500 million to $800 million--and making the river wild once again.

That such a study is being done at all says much about the frustration of political leaders in the region, which has spent $3 billion trying to restore fabled salmon runs only to find the fish--one of the last remaining legacies of a truly wild West--still plummeting toward extinction.

Of all the reasons suggested for the decline of the salmon--changing ocean conditions, overfishing, denuding of the river banks by urbanization and logging--none has imposed a more visible threat than the 100-foot-high walls of concrete that kill thousands of salmon each year in their migrations between the rocky streams of the inland mountains and the sea. A wild Idaho salmon must negotiate eight dams on its way to the sea as a juvenile, and the same number on the way back before spawning.

Now even the Bonneville Power Administration, the agency that markets hydropower from federal dams in the Northwest, is beginning to ask: If fish and wildlife costs associated with the dams are averaging $252 million a year, might it be cheaper to pull them down?