The Department of the Interior announced this week the establishment of the Willamette Valley Conservation Area in Oregon as the 572nd unit of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-managed National Wildlife Refuge System.
On July 11, 2024, Canada and the U.S. reached a milestone in the process of modernizing the Columbia River Treaty – an agreement-in-principle (AIP) that sets the stage for an improved treaty that supports people and ecosystems on both sides of the border.
Upper Willamette River spring Chinook salmon and winter steelhead are benefitting from long-running habitat projects downstream of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 13 Willamette Project dams, according to a recent presentation at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
In a forceful letter earlier this month, the Public Power Council urged the Biden Administration to include its members as a “meaningful part” of the Columbia Basin Task Force, which the Administration’s Council on Environmental Quality formed in June.
Crews later this month will begin installing the power and data cables that are essential to completing construction of a new wave energy testing facility off the Oregon Coast.
Idaho, Washington and Oregon are in line to receive $1,840,082 to upgrade or replace existing fish screens that prevent migrating juvenile salmon and steelhead from getting trapped in canals and irrigation ditches.
The Biden Administration this week released a controversial “Tribal Circumstances Analysis” acknowledging the harm 11 Columbia and Snake river dams have inflicted and continue to inflict on Columbia Basin Native American Tribes.
More than 1.6 million American shad have been counted at Bonneville Dam this year as of June 17 and a few of the non-native fish have even been counted as high in the river basin as Lower Granite Dam, the uppermost of the four lower Snake River dams, and Priest Rapids Dam in the mid-Columbia. For more than a decade they have outnumbered all other anadromous fish entering the river combined.
Aimed at protecting wild Pacific salmon, Diane Lebouthillier, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, announced this week that the Canadian Government will ban open net-pen salmon aquaculture in British Columbia coastal waters by June 30, 2029.
NOAA’s Office of Habitat Conservation says the agency and its partners are increasing numbers of threatened Upper Willamette River Chinook salmon by restoring habitat in Oregon’s McKenzie River watershed.
With a promised $200 million from the Bonneville Power Administration and nearly $100 million from other federal agencies and the state of Washington, Upper Columbia River tribes are moving into Phase II of a twenty-year effort to bring salmon back to blocked areas upstream of Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams.
The Bonneville Power Administration released its second official forecast of the expected financial performance for fiscal year 2024, with results showing $375 million below the financial performance target.
U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-WA, and other Northwest House Republicans have introduced a package of seven bills that, if signed into law, would make breaching of the four Lower Snake River Dams nearly impossible, develop alternatives to fish and wildlife funding to mitigate costs to Bonneville Power Administration ratepayers, and order the Army Corps of Engineers to acquire acoustic sound technology to deter pinniped salmon predators above and below the Bonneville Dam.
Nearly $5 million to move forward on the removal of northeast Washington’s Enloe Dam is included in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announcement that 29 states will receive just over $70 million to support 43 projects that will address outdated or obsolete dams, culverts, levees and other barriers fragmenting the nation’s rivers and streams. Another $8 million will go to projects in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.
American Rivers is leading a project team to remove the Kellogg Dam at the mouth of the Kellogg Creek, a tributary of the Lower Willamette River. The work will help threatened Upper Willamette River Chinook and steelhead, Lower Columbia River coho, and Pacific lamprey to access upstream spawning and rearing habitat for juveniles.
The status of southwest Washington salmon and steelhead listed under the federal Endangered Species Act is generally stable, although none of these fish populations are close to meeting recovery goals, says a recent report by the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
As states and tribes begin trapping and euthanizing sea lions in the Columbia River near Bonneville Dam this week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released its 2023 report on last year’s pinniped abundance and predation of salmon and steelhead. The report covers the period July 2022 through May 2023 and shows that the 104 sea lions observed during the 2023 reporting period is the highest since 2018, when the number was 134.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says that a report by a new group that recently asserted the four lower Snake River dams are a major source of greenhouse gases, particularly methane gas, largely used emission figures from dams and reservoirs outside of the Columbia and Snake river basins.
An estimated 1.4 million spring/summer Chinook salmon were lost after multiple dams were constructed on the upper Snake River, according to a loss assessment recently completed by the Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation.
Following a successful test blast, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation will proceed with the removal of the Copco No. 1 Dam, the second dam to be removed as a part of the Klamath dam removal project. The Copco No. 1 Dam, constructed in 1918 for the sole purpose of hydroelectric power generation, has blocked fish passage for over 100 years and is expected to be fully removed by the end of August.
On a research cruise focused on marine mammals and seabirds, Oregon State University scientists earned an unexpected bonus: The first-ever documented sighting of a hoary bat flying over the open ocean.
The Public Power Council has announced the Alliance of Western Energy Consumers will file a petition for review and join PPC’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals challenges of the Bonneville Power Administration’s decision to enter into a U.S. Government agreement and Memorandum of Understanding on Columbia River salmon recovery that commits BPA to various obligations.
The Biden administration, along with the governors of Oregon and Washington and leaders of four lower Columbia River tribes – the six sovereigns – formally signed an agreement last week that commits the federal government to as much as $1 billion to build infrastructure for eventual removal of four lower Snake River dams and to recover salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River basin.
An important population of listed steelhead in Idaho’s Snake River basin has been getting the help it needs to boost its numbers – removal of barriers, increasing habitat complexity, fewer scouring spring flows and higher and more consistent summer streamflows.
The Public Power Council this week filed a Petition for Review in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding a recently announced U.S. Government agreement that PPC and its members believe inappropriately binds the Bonneville Power Administration to significant actions and commitments that are outside BPA’s congressionally-authorized mission and related obligations.
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