Commercial fishermen on the lower Columbia River say they need more fishing time to take advantage of what is the third largest fall chinook salmon return on record and to help reduce what is a surplus of adult fish returning to the basin’s hatcheries.
Northwest Indian tribes aren’t waiting to see if Bonneville Power Administration administrator Steve Wright’s suggested cut of $50 million from BPA’s fish and wildlife budget is more than an abstract notion.
The Northwest Power Planning Council has nearly completed the first round in its newly created three-year rolling “provincial review” process for selecting projects to be funded through its Columbia Basin fish and wildlife program.
The Bonneville Power Administration says that power purchases and foregone revenues forced by federal hydrosystem operations to help migrating salmon and steelhead cost the agency’s ratepayers $1.5 billion during fiscal year 2001, according to a Northwest Power Planning Council report released Wednesday.
Although less strident than in the past, local residents of the lower Columbia River estuary communities still say the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ and Columbia River ports’ plans to deepen the river by three feet will cause irreparable harm to both the estuary and their livelihoods, while proponents of the project are calling it both an economic boon and a project that will help restore the estuary.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released this week a report prepared by a panel of seven economists that largely said the Corps’ economic analysis of its plan to deepen the Columbia River navigation channel by three feet is reasonable and prudent.
The Nez Perce Tribe’s hatchery supplementation program — and to some extent Mother Nature — can be credited for this year’s fall chinook salmon count at Lower Granite Dam, which is expected to set a record with a return of 10,000 adult fish.
On Monday, 604 fall chinook were counted at the dam, located 20 miles northwest of Lewiston, Idaho, on the Snake River. That’s higher than the total fall season counts in six individual years since the dam was built in 1975.
Tribal officials this week asked the Northwest Power Planning Council and the Bonneville Power Administration to help launch an effort to pinpoint sources of pollutants that a recent study says are contaminating the Columbia-Snake river system, its fish and the people who eat those fish.
The federal Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead recovery effort can list $3.8 billion in costs over the past 20 years, but can not identify a biological benefits bottom line, according to a report recently released by U.S. General Accounting Office.
A report by the RAND Corporation says removal of the four lower Snake River dams and replacing the lost power with at least 20 percent conservation and renewable energy would have a negligible effect on the Northwest’s economy and could even add up to 15,000 new jobs.
Northwest Indians have opened dialogue among tribal members that presents a paradox: Eating salmon, a traditional food with religious significance and many health benefits, in the face of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study that says consumption of polluted Columbia River fish likely causes illness.
Bonneville Power Administration administrator Steve Wright last week challenged the Columbia Basin’s federal, state and tribal fish and wildlife managers to identify potential cost reductions that could help the agency limit future power rate increases.
Anglers up and down the Columbia River are sharing the bounty as fall chinook salmon course their way upriver.
Sport and tribal and non-Indian fishers are hauling in chinook in numbers unprecedented in recent years. The fall chinook return to the river mouth was predicted to be 659,800 adult fish — the third highest since 1948 behind those of 1987 and 1988. That number is expected to include nearly 500,000 chinook from hatcheries and spawning grounds above Bonneville Dam.
Dam operators and fisheries managers this week agreed at a multi-agency Implementation Team meeting to swap a reduced level of spill in August at some dams so that biologists can conduct a spill test at The Dalles Dam in October.
The pieces of the Columbia River subbasin planning puzzle are slowly being fitted together, with the Northwest Power Planning Council over the past 2 1/2 months recommending funding for a variety of functions, persons and entities that will move the concept toward reality.
Researchers are taking stock as the latest batch of Snake River sockeye salmon begins to trickle back into Idaho’s Stanley Basin where a captive broodstock program aims to perpetuate a still-flickering genetic line.
The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission on Thursday directed state fishery managers to negotiate rules for next year’s Columbia River spring chinook commercial fishery that set a maximum size for tangle nets at 4 1/2 inches.
Public utility customers of the Bonneville Power Administration demanded this week deep cuts to the agency’s budgets and questioned the value of continued spill at federal dams to aid salmon recovery.
The anticipation of funding from the Bonneville Power Administration for fish and wildlife projects recommended by the Northwest Power Planning Council has become, in some cases, as maddening as Chinese water torture, according to one Council member.
Lower Columbia River treaty tribes are poised for what could be their most bountiful commercial fall chinook harvest ever in the mainstem waters above Bonneville Dam.
The Northwest Power Planning Council sorted through sometimes conflicting advice in making a decision to recommend that 10 projects be funded under its “innovative” fish and wildlife project category during the current fiscal year at cost of nearly $2 million.
Persistence has paid off for project proponents who will test whether a Umatilla River basin aquifer could, essentially, be pumped brimful in winter when surface water is plentiful and seep out during the summer’s dry months to enhance stream flows for fish and feed irrigation pumps.
A panel of economists handpicked by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and meeting this week in Portland, Ore., determined that the agency’s economic analysis of the Corps’ $149 million project to deepen the Columbia River shipping channel by 3 feet overall is reasonable and prudent.
Northwest Power Planning Council members from Idaho and Montana say they are willing to accept — with qualifications — a federal document’s prescriptions for running the Columbia-Snake federal hydrosystem as a baseline for the Council’s own fish and wildlife program mainstem strategy.
A list of 104 systemwide and mainstem fish and wildlife project proposals have started down the final gauntlet in the Northwest Power Planning Council’ “rolling provincial review” funding approval process, with only 14 passing muster in an initial technical review by the Independent Scientific Review Panel.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
