Saving Seafood

Hydroelectric dams on Oregon’s Willamette River kill salmon. Congress says it’s time to consider shutting them down

January 16, 2025 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it could make hydroelectric dams on Oregon’s Willamette River safe for endangered salmon by building gigantic mechanical traps and hauling baby fish downstream in tanker trucks. The Corps started pressing forward over objections from fish advocates and power users who said the plan was costly and untested.

That was until this month, when President Joe Biden signed legislation ordering the Corps to put its plans on hold and consider a simpler solution: Stop using the dams for electricity.

The new law, finalized on Jan. 4, follows reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica in 2023 that underscored risks and costs associated with the Corps’ plan. The agency is projected to lose $700 million over 30 years generating hydropower, and a scientific review found that the type of fixes the Corps is proposing would not stop the extinction of threatened salmon.

The mandate says the Corps needs to shelve designs for its fish collectors — essentially massive floating vacuums expected to cost $170 million to $450 million each — until it finishes studying what the river system would look like without hydropower. The Corps must then include that scenario in its long-term designs for the river.

Read the full article at OPB

Portion of Washington hydroelectric dam harms salmon and must be removed, federal judge rules

February 21, 2024 — A portion of a dam on the Puyallup River in Washington, operated by the utility company Electron Hydro, must be removed because it harms fish protected by the Endangered Species Act, a federal judge ruled Friday morning.

In December 2020, Electron Hydro attempted to replace a central portion of the dam, which lies on the Puyallup River near Tacoma. A temporary bypass channel was lined with field turf, rubber and other materials. Then it ruptured, spilling its contents into the river.

Once authorities were notified of the spill, Electron Hydro was ordered to clean up the river before continuing any construction on the dam. Where the temporary bypass channel once stood, Electron erected a temporary rock dam which remains in place to this day.

The Puyallup Tribe, a federally recognized tribe in western Washington, sued Electron Hydro in 2020, claiming that the company polluted the river with toxic materials when the the temporary bypass ruptured.

The tribe also claimed the rock dam impeded the upstream travel and spawning of endangered Chinook salmon, bull trout and steelhead trout. This amounts to an illegal taking of the fish, the tribe says, because Electron Hydro does not possess permits to take any of the fish.

In an 11-page opinion, Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour found the tribe presented extensive evidence that the rock dam impedes safe passage for the fish. (Electron Hydro had not argued otherwise.) Since the case is an Endangered Species Act case, he wrote, the tribe needs only to prove that irreparable injury has occurred.

A Reagan appointee, Coughenour pointed to evidence presented by the tribe of “attraction flows” — that is, accelerated water which attracts migrating fish to the rock structure and away from the fish ladder that would allow them to continue upstream.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Hydroelectric power plants taking bigger toll on fish than expected

November 27, 2020 — Since 2014, a research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) led by Jürgen Geist, a professor of aquatic systems biology, has been investigating the effects of hydroelectric power plants on aquatic habitats and fish moving downstream. What they discovered in the process may improve future dam planning, as well as retrofitting of existing hydroelectric power plants.

While fish moving upstream can get around a dam using a fish passage, those migrating downstream often enter the machinery. Conventional power plants equipped with Pelton, Kaplan, or Francis turbines have high fish mortality due to their high rotation speed, pressure changes, and shear forces, the researchers noted.

Read the full story at Seafood Source