The Northwest Power and Conservation Council approved a half million dollars for fiscal year 2021 in projects to maintain the region’s investments in hatcheries and screens.
Drought can mean restrictions for watering the lawn, crop losses for farmers and an increased risk of wildfires. But it can also hit you and your power company in the wallet.
A process that has been in the works for more than a year is approaching the last opportunities for public input before approval by the full Northwest Power and Conservation Council at its August meeting.
On March 11 and 12, 2020, the week before COVID-19 international travel restrictions were put into place, Canadian and American negotiators reconvened in Washington, D.C. to continue discussions about a modernized Columbia River Treaty. This was the ninth round of talks since negotiations started in May 2018.
BPA exclusively markets the power from the Columbia Generating Station located in southeastern Washington. Owned by Energy Northwest, the nuclear power plant is the third largest energy producer in the Northwest behind Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams.
A recent study found that the stray rates of returning natural origin salmon and steelhead in the upper Columbia River basin differ by river basin, sub-basin and by stream, with the larger the area the lower the straying percentage.
Even with missing information, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council last week approved putting the draft Part I of the 2020 “Fish and Wildlife Addendum” to the 2004 Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program out for public comment. The addendum addresses program goals, objectives and measurements of progress.
Fisheries managers say the health of white sturgeon populations in the Columbia River is healthy, but there is a paucity of detailed abundance data from the Snake River, and that each zone – lower Columbia, Bonneville Dam to McNary Dam and the Snake River –has its own issues.
Over the past five years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been working on a number of structural upgrades at Lower Snake and Columbia river dams, all designed to make passage at the dams safer for salmon and steelhead. Those projects are nearly finished – the last will be new fish friendly turbines at McNary Dam in 2025 followed by new turbines at John Day Dam – and the Corps now plans to concentrate on operational improvements at the dams, while ending the more expensive construction.
The Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management announced today the approval of a proposal to construct and operate the largest solar project in United States history.
Since state shutdowns in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, fish and wildlife programs and projects in the Columbia River basin have seen a range of impacts, from no impact to project delays to an early hatchery release of Kootenai white sturgeon and burbot, and even some project cancellations, according to staff at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
If someone had told me a year ago, when I was planning to launch the new subscription-based Columbia Basin Bulletin, that in nine months the nation would be dealing with a pandemic striking a hard blow to the economy, I might have questioned the wisdom of the enterprise.
A new system installed at Lower Granite Dam to track migrating juvenile salmon has detected more than 10 times as many juvenile fish in its first several weeks of operation as could have been tracked before, biologists say.
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) joined 20 colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus in sending a letter to Acting Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought calling on OMB to indefinitely extend existing public comment periods and hearings until the public can safely gather after the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic have passed.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has written a letter to the Northwest congressional delegation objecting to proposals by the Trump administration to force the Bonneville Power Administration to sell electricity at market rates rather than its cost of generation and also sell the federal high-voltage transmission system, which BPA operates.
Willamette Valley landowners interested in permanently protecting their lands for fish and wildlife habitat conservation can apply by April 10 for funding through ODFW’s Willamette Wildlife Mitigation Program.
A disagreement between the Bonneville Power Administration and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council on the amount of money available through a cost-savings fund is resulting in underfunding what the Council says are two important Columbia River basin fish and wildlife projects – ocean salmon survival research and northern pike suppression.
Direct expenses in fiscal year 2019 by the Bonneville Power Administration for costs it incurred by funding the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Fish and Wildlife Program amounted to $240.4 million, some $19 million lower than its direct expenses in FY 2018, according to a draft report released this week for public review by the Council.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland District, is seeking public comment on the draft Finding of No Significant Impact for The Dalles and John Day Mitigation Program Limited Reevaluation Report and Environmental Assessment. The program produces and releases hatchery fall chinook as mitigation for impacts to fisheries.
Conservation groups filed suit in federal court Thursday to stop a process by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to allocate the water in its Willamette River basin reservoirs among irrigators, cities and fish, saying such an order is necessary to protect imperiled spring chinook salmon and winter steelhead.
Both a U.S. District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have recently ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must set temperature limits for the Columbia and Snake rivers to protect salmon and steelhead, but the agency is returning to the Appeals Court to challenge the latest decision.
Dam operating agencies released for public review this morning a long-awaited draft environmental impact statement that describes the impacts of 14 federal Columbia and Snake river dams on salmon, steelhead and lamprey.
A diverse group of river users, utilities and environmentalists is calling on Northwest governors to lead the way to find collaborative solutions to recover Columbia/Snake River Basin salmon and steelhead populations listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
“The science is clear that removing the earthen portions of the four lower Snake River dams is the most certain and robust solution to Snake River salmon and steelhead recovery,” said Oregon Gov. Kate Brown in a letter last week to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
In a now-famous July 13, 2015 story in The New Yorker magazine titled “The Really Big One,” Katherine Schultz shocked Northwest residents when she made the case that an earthquake along the Northwest’s coastline was imminent and that the magnitude of the quake would measure 8.0 to 9.2.
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