Fire Destroys Hay & Salmon Dying

Fire Destroys Hay & Salmon Dying. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report.

An early morning fire has caused some $50-thousand dollars worth of damage. The fire started around 4am in a back lot of the Farmer's Exchange business in downtown Kennewick, WA. The fire damaged a truck and trailer along with the hay loaded on the trailer and also damaged the wall of a storage shed near where the truck was parked. Kennewick fire officials are investigating. No one was injured in the fire.

First it was nearly a hundred sturgeon dying in the Columbia River and now thousands of salmon are either dead or dying due to rising water temperatures. Rick Swart is a Public Information Officer with Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and says that while the warm temperatures are the catalyst, that's not what's killing the fish.

SWART: Effectively what it does is it grows on the fish and basically smothers them. If you think of something like mold on the gills of the fish preventing the exchange of oxygen. There's no one silver bullet to fix the whole situation short of a month of big storm moving in and getting the temperatures down and the flows up and things sort of back to normal.

There are still restrictions for fishing on many of the rivers in the northwest including salmon and sturgeon.

That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.