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Dams have such immense economic and agricultural usage. Why aren’t we investing as much money as it takes to save the salmon but keep the dam? The PNW has some

Dams have such immense economic and agricultural usage. Why aren’t we investing as much money as it takes to save the salmon but keep the dam? The PNW has something like 80% of its power coming from clean hydro. It’d be a shame to lose that.

zwieback 3y ago
I think we do for the big ones on the Columbia, etc. The small ones that are aging anyway get torn out.
- twothamendment 3y ago
  I'm in Montana and the river here during the spawn looks red with salmon. I don't know how many ladders they climbed, but it seems like they can work. These fish would have to have come up the Columbia river. Somewhere up the thread, a 3% success rate was thrown out, so maybe some designs are better than others.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Where in Montana? Salmon generally don’t make it up the Colombia through ID into the Clark fork: https://www.mtpr.org/2022-09-28/why-arent-there-salmon-in-the-clark-fork-river https://www.mtpr.org/2022-09-28/why-arent-there-salmon-in-th... East of the divide is the Mississippi basin so that’s a whole different story.
    - twothamendment 3y ago
      The NW corner, but not part of the Clark Fork drainage. It is a sneaky little corner that refuses to flow with the rest of the state. Salmon snagging is a thing for us and the bears.
      - kortilla 3y ago
        If you’re referring to the Kokanee from Kootenay, they are a land-locked sockeye. I don’t think any ocean-goers make it to Libby.
czinck 3y ago
As zwieback said, a lot of the dams just aren't that useful, for a bunch of reasons but biggest is that they're just too small. On top of that, at least for the Washington dams I'm more familiar with, the power generation doesn't match up with need. Most of the river flow is over the winter and spring (that's when it rains/snows and then more rain and melting snow) and in the late summer when electricity use is highest the dams don't have enough water flow to be really productive. Worse yet, some of the oldest dams are even more limited because there's too much mud in their reservoirs. Nothing insurmountable (dredge the silt, build them bigger so the reservoir lasts until the fall, etc), but it just means the most cost effective way to help the salmon is tear down a lot of these dams.
rootusrootus 3y ago
> Why aren’t we investing as much money as it takes to save the salmon but keep the dam? This is a good question I'd like to hear more about. The fish ladder at Bonneville, for example, is fairly steep all considered. For the kind of money we have invested in the facility, would it be reasonable to invest some serious effort in making a more usable ladder?

zwieback 3y ago

I think we do for the big ones on the Columbia, etc. The small ones that are aging anyway get torn out.

twothamendment 3y ago
I'm in Montana and the river here during the spawn looks red with salmon. I don't know how many ladders they climbed, but it seems like they can work. These fish would have to have come up the Columbia river. Somewhere up the thread, a 3% success rate was thrown out, so maybe some designs are better than others.
- kortilla 3y ago
  Where in Montana? Salmon generally don’t make it up the Colombia through ID into the Clark fork: https://www.mtpr.org/2022-09-28/why-arent-there-salmon-in-the-clark-fork-river https://www.mtpr.org/2022-09-28/why-arent-there-salmon-in-th... East of the divide is the Mississippi basin so that’s a whole different story.
  - twothamendment 3y ago
    The NW corner, but not part of the Clark Fork drainage. It is a sneaky little corner that refuses to flow with the rest of the state. Salmon snagging is a thing for us and the bears.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      If you’re referring to the Kokanee from Kootenay, they are a land-locked sockeye. I don’t think any ocean-goers make it to Libby.

czinck 3y ago

As zwieback said, a lot of the dams just aren't that useful, for a bunch of reasons but biggest is that they're just too small. On top of that, at least for the Washington dams I'm more familiar with, the power generation doesn't match up with need. Most of the river flow is over the winter and spring (that's when it rains/snows and then more rain and melting snow) and in the late summer when electricity use is highest the dams don't have enough water flow to be really productive. Worse yet, some of the oldest dams are even more limited because there's too much mud in their reservoirs. Nothing insurmountable (dredge the silt, build them bigger so the reservoir lasts until the fall, etc), but it just means the most cost effective way to help the salmon is tear down a lot of these dams.

rootusrootus 3y ago

> Why aren’t we investing as much money as it takes to save the salmon but keep the dam? This is a good question I'd like to hear more about. The fish ladder at Bonneville, for example, is fairly steep all considered. For the kind of money we have invested in the facility, would it be reasonable to invest some serious effort in making a more usable ladder?