SPOKANE, Wash. — For the past decade, it was one of the Northwest's hottest issues: Should four giant dams on the Snake River be breached to help rebuild endangered runs of salmon?
But when the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers finally rejected the proposal in early December, it was hardly noticed.
Political and economic realities in the past year--primarily the election of George W. Bush and the West's energy crisis--made it a foregone conclusion that the corps would decide to keep its dams.
Even though environmental groups insist that the fight to remove the dams will continue, the leader of a pro-dams group said it's time to find other ways to save salmon.
"The dam breaching issue is over," said Bruce Lovelin of the Columbia River Alliance, a Portland, Ore., group that represents business interests on the Columbia-Snake system, including bargers, manufacturers, farmers and utilities.
The dams--Ice Harbor, Little Goose, Lower Granite and Lower Monumental--are located between Pasco, Wash., and Lewiston, Idaho. They were built starting in the 1960s to provide electricity and irrigation water and to make the Snake River navigable from the Pacific Ocean to Lewiston.
Each spring and summer, millions of juvenile salmon and steelhead leave their home rivers in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and are flushed to the ocean, where they spend one to three years. Then they return to their places of birth to spawn.
Dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers disrupted the migration, exposing fish to predators, high water temperatures and electrical turbines.
Many people blame the dams for the decline in wild runs of salmon and steelhead, which were eventually placed on the endangered species list. The listing triggered studies on the best way to restore the fish runs.
Corps Looking for Other Solutions
In early December, the corps announced that it would not support removing the four dams. Instead, it will pursue technical alterations to the dams to improve the survival for migrating fish.
The fate of the dams was debated in the Northwest since the early 1990s. It pitted conservationists and Indian tribes, who insisted that the dams were killing salmon, against business interests, who insisted that ocean conditions, overfishing and other factors were more dangerous to fish.
The dams became an issue in the 2000 presidential election when Bush said he opposed the breaching.
