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Across most of the Columbia River basin, May brought cooler than normal weather with a mix of precipitation totals. Although providing a respite from this year’s typically lower than normal precipitation and higher than normal temperatures, water supply forecasts continue their downward trend into the summer months, according to the NOAA Northwest River Forecast Center June briefing.

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.

With lower-than-average water flow in the lower Columbia River expected during the spring juvenile salmon and steelhead outmigration, fishery managers at the interagency Technical Management Team last week asked for additional flow augmentation from Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir backed up behind Grand Coulee Dam on the upper river, to aid fish migration.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Walla Walla District, reopened navigation locks on the Columbia and Snake rivers on March 29 after an eleven-week outage. This extended outage allowed the district to perform routine maintenance and to replace aged equipment to reduce the risk of asset failure.

A new report says that the four lower Snake River dams are not as environmentally friendly as dam advocates tout.

Spilling instead of passing water through turbines at some Columbia/ Snake River dams to aid safe passage for juvenile salmon and steelhead began March 1, one month earlier than in past years, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) has introduced the Defending Against Manipulative Negotiators Act (DAMN ACT) to prohibit the use of federal funds from being used in breaching or altering the Lower Snake River Dams and to prohibit the implementation of the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative.

The precision of estimating salmon and steelhead smolt survival rates through Snake and Columbia river dams during the 2023 spring outmigration is remaining elusive. This is the fifth straight year that high levels of court-ordered spill at Columbia and Snake river dams have impacted detection rates of the tagged juveniles as they migrated downstream through eight dams.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and U.S. Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, this week sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urging them to finalize an agreement between the U.S. and Canada to modernize and strengthen the treaty.

The Burns Paiute Tribe of southeastern Oregon has sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission asking that action be taken to identify measures to return salmon to the Malheur River Basin upstream of Idaho Power’s three-dam Hells Canyon Complex on the Snake River along the Idaho-Oregon border. Idaho Power, in the midst of relicensing those dams, says salmon and steelhead were extirpated before the dams were built and the complex was not central to these losses.

The public was split at a listening session this week on whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should deauthorize hydroelectric turbines at its projects on the Willamette River, according to a small number of people who testified at the first of the Corps’ three listening sessions this week.

Low water in the upper reaches of the Columbia River -- and concerns about releasing water now from Grand Coulee Dam when it might be needed later for refill and to augment river flows -- has caused fisheries and dam operators of the interagency Technical Management Team to change Columbia River chum salmon operations at Bonneville Dam.

Facing the uncertainty of how it will operate the Columbia River hydroelectric system without the flood risk management controls and water storage space in Canada currently offered by the Columbia River Treaty, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it may need to switch to a “real-time” operation to ensure flood control south of the Canadian border after September 2024 when the Treaty expires.

A deep reservoir drawdown at Green Peter Dam in the Willamette Valley to improve passage for Chinook salmon and steelhead has killed thousands of kokanee salmon.

In a presidential memorandum released Wednesday, the Biden Administration emphasized salmon and steelhead restoration in the Columbia and Snake river basins and called for an all-hands-on-deck approach to recovery of the fish.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hold four virtual listening-only sessions this month and in October to describe how it will operate the Columbia River system of dams after September 2024 if the Columbia River Treaty negotiations fail to reach an agreement.

By legislative requirement, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Portland District is assessing whether it should continue to produce hydroelectric power at its Willamette Valley project dams.

Throughout the summer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been using the cool water from deep within the Dworshak Reservoir to maintain a maximum 68-degree Fahrenheit tailwater temperature at Lower Granite Dam on the lower Snake River. Temperatures higher than 68 degrees can be lethal to both adult and juvenile salmonids migrating in the river, including endangered Snake River sockeye salmon arriving in late July and early August.

A recent study funded by the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association concludes that breaching the four lower Snake River dams would impact the most vulnerable populations near the dams in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, leading to job losses, impacts to public services and degraded air quality.

As the 2023 sockeye salmon run into the Snake River winds down, fishery managers this week proposed allowing temperatures in the Lower Granite Dam tailrace to rise from the biological opinion upper level of 68 degrees Fahrenheit to a maximum 69.5 F in order to increase the chances that cold water will be available from Dworshak Dam through the end of August.

Even with a declining water supply forecast, Lake Koocanusa that backs up behind Libby Dam is still slowly refilling and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is near certain it will reach a refill target by September required by a sturgeon-bull trout biological opinion, according to the Corps’ Leon Basdekas.

The Washington State Legislature this week approved a $14 billion 2023-25 transportation budget that includes $8 million for studying what would be necessary to maintain energy, transportation and irrigation services now provided by the four Lower Snake dams should they be breached to recover Snake River basin salmon and steelhead.

Most of the 75 people testifying during their three minutes of allotted time at two White House-sponsored listening sessions advocated removing four lower Snake River dams as the only way to recover salmon and steelhead in the watershed, as well as to provide food for endangered Orca whales in Puget Sound.

U.S. House Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) have introduced the “Northwest Energy Security Act” aimed at prohibiting the breaching of the four Lower Snake river dams to restore salmon and steelhead runs.

An early estimate of the volume of water available from the upper Snake River basin this year to provide flow augmentation to aid juvenile salmon and steelhead passage in the lower Snake and lower Columbia rivers will for the second year running fall under the 427,000 acre feet required by NOAA Fisheries, according to Joel Fenolio of the Bureau of Reclamation.

There is so little water available from the upper reaches of the Columbia and Snake rivers that dam operators are dropping the tailwater elevation at Bonneville Dam to 10.2 feet above sea level. That’s a drop of more than 1.5 feet from the minimum tailwater elevation of 11.8 feet required to protect chum salmon nests, or redds, downstream of the dam.

Bonneville Power Administration will divvy up $500 million of excess revenue from its 2022 fiscal year, giving 70 percent to its customers to keep power rates down, 20 percent to pay down debt or for revenue financing and just 10 percent to its fish and wildlife program, mostly to help pay upkeep for hatcheries and fish screens, not directly for recovery of salmon and steelhead.

The Bureau of Reclamation began releasing extra water at Grand Coulee Dam over the weekend to ensure that protective flows for spawning chum salmon could begin Tuesday, Nov. 1 at Bonneville Dam, regardless of whether chum were present.

Did last week’s release of the final “Lower Snake River Dams: Benefit Replacement Report” by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray move the needle in seeking regional consensus on a comprehensive plan to improve the condition of Columbia/Snake River salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act? If public reaction is any indication, the answer is no.

Breaching the four lower Snake River dams to improve salmon runs is only feasible after state and federal officials have replaced or mitigated the benefits of the dams, said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) in releasing Thursday the final “Lower Snake River Dams: Benefit Replacement Report.”

If not for the flexibility provided by the federal Columbia/Snake river hydroelectric system, including the four lower Snake River dams, it is not clear how the Northwest could have balanced energy supply and demand during an extreme low water event in February 2019, according to a recent study commissioned by the Public Power Council, an opponent of breaching the dams.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is proposing to restore the lower Snake River federal navigation channel above Lower Granite Dam by dredging, including removing accumulated sediment near the confluence of the lower Snake and Clearwater Rivers near Clarkston, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho.

Days of heavy rain in valleys and slushy snow in some mountain areas of the Northwest has the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declaring a flooding emergency for the Columbia River basin this week.

Washington state’s Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray have released the draft “Lower Snake River Dams: Benefit Replacement Draft Report” that examines whether there are reasonable means for replacing the dams’ benefits so that breaching could be part of a comprehensive salmon recovery strategy for the Pacific Northwest. The report says ‘benefit replacement’ could cost as much $30 billion.

The extended drought in California could cut the state’s summer electricity generation from hydropower nearly in half compared with normal precipitation conditions, and will lead to higher electricity prices across the West, according to an analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. EIA’s analysis indicates that hydropower would produce 8% of California’s electricity generation in a drought year, compared with 15% under normal precipitation conditions.

In a “System Operational Request,” Columbia River basin fishery managers this week asked the Bonneville Power Administration for more clarity on its implementation of zero generation/nighttime flow at lower Snake River dams. The answer drew concerns about how future SORs might be received.

Feedback comments in the January 6, CBB from Mr. Fred Mensik regarding “Removing Lower Snake dams will not return salmon, steelhead to historic spawning habitat,” are inaccurate and misleading. 

One week after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee released a package of salmon recovery strategies that includes proposed funding for a study of the impacts of removing the four Lower Snake dams, Northwest RiverPartners released the results of commissioned poll showing nearly 60 percent of respondents opposed dam breaching.

The Bureau of Reclamation and the Bonneville Power Administration announced this week the completion of the major overhaul of three hydroelectric power units  at Grand Coulee Dam, the largest power generating complex in the United States.

Some 427,000 acre feet of water was available this year from the upper Snake River to augment flows for juvenile and adult salmon and steelhead migrating in the lower river.

In an exceptionally low flow and warm water year, Idaho’s Dworshak Dam water in 2021 was creatively preserved and used to help keep water cool downstream to aid salmon and steelhead migrating in the river at Lower Granite Dam on the lower Snake River.

The Bonneville Power Administration has closed the books on fiscal year 2021 with an annual report showing the agency exceeded its target net revenue number by $360 million.

Environmental conditions and management actions in 2021 resulted in a year with low flow, warmer than average water temperatures and an extremely high percentage of spill for fish during the spring migration season, according to a recent NOAA Fisheries preliminary memorandum on juvenile salmon and steelhead survival through Columbia and Snake river dams.

In an effort to recover salmon and steelhead runs in the Columbia River basin, Washington Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray and Gov. Jay Inslee announced today a joint state and federal effort to determine the impacts and benefits of breaching the four lower Snake River dams.

Pollution discharge limits were set this week by the Environmental Protection Agency on the four U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ lower Snake River dams.

After more than three years of review and analysis, the Bonneville Power Administration has decided to join the Western Energy Imbalance Market in March 2022, saying the move will increase BPA revenues through sales of surplus power.

In a quick vote at this week’s interagency Technical Management Team meeting, federal river operating agencies denied a fisheries managers’ request to delay their nighttime flow plan in the Snake River that is due to begin in mid-October. Fisheries managers want to delay the operation a month and a half to December when they say fewer salmon and steelhead are migrating in the river.

Specifically citing low steelhead return numbers to the Columbia/Snake rivers, fisheries managers are again asking dam operators to delay zero nighttime generation at Lower Snake federal dams – power peaking, no flow – due to the presence of migrating adult and juvenile salmon and steelhead. They say it’s the wrong time to turn a riverine environment into a lake with no flow.

After proposing numerous measures aimed at cooling Lower Granite Dam tailwater temperature to aid salmon and steelhead passage, hydro and fisheries managers agreed this week to a measure that would actually heat the tailwater by as much as 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit for the next few weeks.

Over 450 endangered sockeye salmon have entered the Snake River at Ice Harbor Dam and will either swim upstream past Lower Granite Dam and eventually find the Sawtooth Basin where they will spawn naturally, be trapped by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game at Lower Granite and hauled to the Eagle Hatchery, home to Idaho’s captive rearing program, or they could perish in the warming waters of the lower Snake River.

Last week, U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) introduced Senate Bill 2306, the Maintaining and Enhancing Hydroelectric and River Restoration Act of 2021, that would create new federal tax incentives to encourage safety, environmental, and grid resiliency upgrades for hydropower dams.

With record air temperatures looming for the next ten days in the lower Snake River, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began Tuesday releasing water from Dworshak Dam to cool tailwater temperatures at Lower Granite Dam. That is a week earlier than normal and at the rate the Corps is releasing water, Dworshak’s reservoir will run out of salmon augmentation water two weeks earlier than normal later this summer.

Two unlikely partners agree on at least one thing: two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hydroelectric projects in the Willamette River basin should no longer generate power and both have recently supported federal legislation to study deauthorizing that production.

Republican U.S. House members from eastern Washington and eastern Oregon are accusing Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of “in-depth coordination” with Oregon Gov. Kate Brown “behind the scenes” to “shepard” through Congress his proposal to breach the Lower Snake river dams to increase returns of salmon and steelhead to the Snake River basin.

Negotiating a transboundary water treaty is a complicated undertaking. There are many different, often competing, factors to consider. As Canada, British Columbia, and the Columbia Basin Indigenous Nations collaborate on positions and options for a modernized Columbia River Treaty with the United States, a new computerized model aims to help the parties understand just how these factors are interconnected.

With juvenile chinook and sockeye salmon, as well as juvenile steelhead, beginning their migration from the mid-Columbia River tributaries and hatcheries, but with very low water in the river due to a late spring runoff, salmon managers this week asked for augmentation flows originating from Grand Coulee Dam’s Lake Roosevelt.

After a week of increasing outflows at Idaho’s Dworshak Dam to support releases of juvenile salmon from Clearwater River hatcheries, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced last Friday (April 16) that it will now begin to decrease those flows so that it can be assured of refilling the dam’s reservoir.

As of April 3 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began a controversial operation that raises the Lower Granite Dam reservoir elevation to ensure that it can maintain a 14-foot depth in the federal navigation channel at the Port of Clarkstonwhen Snake River flows are low.

The US Army Corps of Engineers, Walla Walla District will resume use of bird deterring lasers, and will be testing a Long Range Acoustic Device to prevent birds from preying on endangered juvenile salmon passing through McNary Dam.

A strategy for boosting salmon and steelhead numbers in the Columbia/Snake river basins supported by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council in its Fish and Wildlife Program, as well as by Northwest Tribes, is to reintroduce the fish into habitats where salmonids once existed historically but are now blocked by high head dams. Known as trap and haul, capturing fish below a dam and transporting them into, hopefully pristine habitat upstream, is one mechanism for expanding salmonids’ ranges.

As a result of a seismic hazard analysis last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this year is proposing to restrict Detroit Dam’s maximum pool elevation by five feet. The proposal is out for public comment until March 30.

In August, fishery managers at the multi-agency Technical Management Team rejected a bid by the Port of Clarkston on the lower Snake River in Idaho to raise the Lower Granite Dam reservoir one and a half feet above the normal minimum operating pool (MOP+2) to provide more depth for barges loading grain at the port’s dock.

Idaho Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson’s $34 billion dollar proposed framework for breaching the four Lower Snake dams in 10 years to aid ailing Snake River salmon and steelhead, while mitigating for impacts to river users, elicited a degree of interest this week from two Northwest governors, support from tribes, and a range of reaction from key interests.

Five dams and reservoirs on the Columbia River in Washington State between McNary Dam and Chief Joseph Dam are being managed under a unique “No Net Impact” survival standard for salmon and steelhead.