Transporting Fish Vacuum Tube Style

Transporting Fish Vacuum Tube Style

Transporting Fish Vacuum Tube Style

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

If you’ve recently heard a story about a “salmon cannon” being tested here in Washington state, it’s not a joke. Whoosh Innovations located in Bellevue has been working for the past several years on developing a safe, efficient and cost effective method of transporting salmon to currently unreachable rivers through vacuum-pressurized tubes. Todd Deligan, VP of Whooshh’s fish transport program says the whole thing came about thanks to their mobile fruit harvest system, which basically incorporates the same type of vacuum tube technique to harvest tree fruit.

DELIGAN: A number of years ago we were testing the harvest system out in eastern Washington right along the Columbia River and all of the press came out again on hydroelectric dams and salmon and one of our guys back then said, “what happens if we put a fish in our fruit tube?” So, we put some experimental fish in and they transported very easily.

Deligan says with that they started discussing with state, federal and tribal agencies whether or not there was a need for such a device, and the answer was yes.

DELIGAN: We have wanted to be very inclusive here through the development process and allow all these interested parties to have some input, because without it we would be outright rejected. So, we have a very good partner Lacy with the Yakima Nation and we have been very fortunate to have something called the Roza Dam Fish Handling Facility as a place to test the transport of fish, and we have done that since last spring into about mid-summer with the spring chinook run.

Tomorrow Deligan will be back to talk about the system they just delivered to the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.

That’s Washington Ag Today.

I’m Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.

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