McNary Dam on the Columbia River near Pendleton,
Ore., is known for its state-of-the-art fish bypass technology, but
that system didn’t prevent a recent fish kill of 145,000 young,
palm-sized salmon. Most of the fish were Snake River fall chinook,
a species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species
Act.
Most of the salmon died as they were
gathered to be barged around the fish-blocking dam. Fish kills have
happened at McNary before. Over a period of a few days in 1994,
90,000 fish died as they were collected at the
dam.
But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says
the dam is not directly killing fish. Doug Arndt, a Corps
biologist, explains the fish most likely died from stress caused by
high water temperatures, endemic to the Columbia system “with or
without Corps projects.”
The Confederated Tribes
of the Umatilla Indian Reservation say the Corps could remedy the
problem. Rather than forcing salmon through the collection and
barging procedure, the Corps could open the dam’s spillway. This
would allow fish to spill through when the water’s temperature
exceeds 68 degrees, the temperature standard set by the Clean Water
Act. The tribes have pressed federal and state agencies to put such
a policy in place.
“The stress of this whole
process is pretty high. The stress in the river is less. In the
river they can seek and swim to cooler water,” says Rick George, of
the tribes’ environment program.
Arndt insists
cooler water doesn’t exist in the river. “If your issue is solely
hot water, then I’d take the choice of getting out of it,” he says.
“I’d rather get them out of that system as quickly as possible” by
barging or trucking them downstream.
*Elena
Zlatnik
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Salvo over salmon.
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