05/08/06 Breaching the dams

Breaching the dams. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. The fight over breaching 4 Snake River dams continued last week as environmental and fishing groups were in federal court asking the judge to order the government to consider the upper and lower parts of the river together when deciding whether federal dams harm threatened and endangered salmon. But what would breaching the dams really mean for salmon. Chuck Tracy is with the Pacific Fishery Management Council. TRACY: Couple of reasons. There's a large mortality associated with particularly juveniles passing downstream through the dams and reservoirs that are warm water, slow water that increase susceptibility to predation. Just generally slowing the migration down for the salmon which may some effects. And then secondly it'll provide some more spawning area. Fall Chinook are a large water spawning fish and they do spawn in mainstem type of areas, mainstem Columbia and Snake River type areas so removing the dams would provide spawning areas for them. Breaching the dams has been a hot topic for years and how likely is it to really happen? TRACY: It would be a huge undertaking. There's certainly a lot of&obviously it's been talked about for years and it hasn't happened. It's in a political arena so you know that's very difficult to predict what's going to happen but I mean it's going to take congressional appropriation of funds. There's multiple challenges faced by trying to remove those dams. I mean they're in place, they've got a lot of, certainly a lot of support from transportation industry, agricultural industry, power production is an issue. It's certainly not a one sided argument so things like that don't happen quickly. And of course you have to consider the alternatives. Tracy has a laundry list. TRACY: There's lots of proposals from improving passage conditions. There's barging of juveniles, that's one of the chief solutions proposed. That's got its issues, it's positives and negatives. There's physical improvements to the dam structures to help fish pass more easily. There's depredation programs, pike minnow programs, there's supplementation proposals to increase the&try and jump start the natural production by supplementing with hatchery fish. There's lots of proposed solutions. What it's going to take, I don't know. The judge in the case said he would need a couple of weeks to write his ruling, but it "seemed more logical" to consider the effects on salmon of projects in both the upper and lower basins in one plan. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.