Snake River dam removal (Boise, Idaho Falls: construction, gated, living)
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I forgot to add in my previous post that Washington is looking into removal of the dams downstream from Idaho and that an Idaho lawmaker is supporting this. If this were to happen, it would take years for removal and wouldn't happen anytime soon.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/north-l...snake-akeriver Idaho Congressman proposes bold dam removal project on Snake River
The $33.5 billion plan seeks to restore salmon while funding new energy projects and compensating farmers.
The argument over removing the 4 dams on the lower Snake is nothing new at all. It first began in 1948, and reached it's highest point of disagreement over 20 years ago in the late 1990s.
Here's the heart of the disagreement:
The dams were all funded in 1945. Final construction came in the 1960s.
They were all built for water storage for local irrigators and for slack-water river navigation for the barges that go up and down the Columbia.
Their power generation was never their main purpose, and all the generators in them are now so obsolete that their capability, which was always very limited, are much more limited now.
Back when they were built, the Corps of Engineers weren't worried about their effect on Idaho's salmon hatchery. Idaho's headwaters were always the most productive of them all, except for those in S. Alaska, which were actually no better, but just as good.
The salmon spawned in Idaho left for their ocean lives in greater numbers and in better health and size than in any other hatchery. They were always the backbone of America's salmon fishing industry, and Idaho produced so many for so long that salmon, a fish as valuable as tuna, allowed industrial fishing.
In 1948, however, no one ever thought the dams would ever threaten that industry.
They could be a threat, but that was over a century away. Ever since, one remedial step after another was taken to allow the fish to get over or around the dams to get to their spewing grounds.
All of them failed. Some fish always used the fish ladders and tunnels, but never enough to keep the spawning grounds in all the small headwaters so productive.
The problem wasn't ever with the fish ladders. It was the way the dams were built. Young smolts going down stream to the ocean never had a scent trail that directed them to the ladders. So they congregated along the dam faces, looking for a trail, and died before they found it.
The few that did came from parents who had found the ladders when they were smolts. And once those parents came back to spawn, they died, as all salmon do.
This meant increasing fewer smolts every year could find the scent trails. The smolts who did were taken by the commercial fishing, natural predators, and everything that eats salmon, so increasingly fewer adults swam upstream to spawn.
This was the reason why the hatchery crashed. Every hatchery has to be a 2-way street that allows the young little fish to come back as great big fish. A billion-dollar industry depends on every hatchery's 2-way ability.
There has been nothing humans have ever come up with that allows the fish enough scent trails to follow for the salmon to survive. One block was bad, but 4 was a guarantee of eventual extinction.
The argument for keeping the dams for so long was always agricultural before. The farmers who depended on the reservoirs vs. the wildlife managers. The farmers have legal rights to the water, and the managers didn't.
For the general public who was totally ignorant about the matter in dispute, it became a fight between the underdog farmers vs. big government. So the farmers continued to win the fight while the fish just died.
These days, those farms are just as dry as any others that depend on reservoirs. All reservoirs are running dry, all over the west. So the latest justification for the dams existence became their power generation.
What is most interesting to me is Mike Simpson's change of mind. Simpson was once 100% on the farmer's side.
But one of his greatest goals as a Representative has always been the protection of our wilderness and our wildlife. Simpson has done a wonderful job with that goal; he is the most effective Representative in Congress when it comes to keeping Idaho pristine.
I think it took him a long time to fully understand the dam's threat to our salmon's survival.
The farmers have other means to help them, but the fish don't.
Wind generation already produces far more electricity now in that region than the hydro from the dams. The greatest potential for electric generation now lies in solar power now there, as the land is a natural for them both.
All the water in the Snake River has major effects in Oregon. The Snake is the river than makes the Columbia as large as it is. So while the dams are in Washington, their removal will be a big benefit to Oregon, where their dams all have fish ladders and devices that actually work.
The salmon can swim the Columbia upstream successfully. Some can make it past the first dam, but far fewer. Increasingly fewer can make it past the other 3 dams. Only the super-fish can reach the headwaters. Even fewer of their smolts will live once hatched because they're born into increasingly sterile waters that cannot sustain them.
I think that if this was up to Simpson alone to make the dam removal happen, it would have already been done. But the dams don't like in Idaho territory. They are all in Washington, just over the border. One replaced an earlier dam that was built close to Lewiston.
Simpson had to build a coalition to get the dams removed. Now, he has Representatives from Washington and Oregon working with him.
The infrastructure law that just passed includes remedial funding for the Washington farmers' water that Idaho fish depend on.
Demolition of a dam can be quite fast and quite cheaply done. Taking them out right now could provide some much needed reservoir water downstream in this drought we are all stuck in for at least one more year.
The only potential upstream damage Idaho has to their removal may be the barge traffic in Lewiston, but knowing Mike Simpson, I'm sure he has taken that into consideration.
The guy never makes a move until he has everything lined up to the most benefit for all. He's a master at finding ways to meet conflicting needs.
Right now, Idaho's Coho Salmon are extinct. Our native Chinook Salmon are an endangered species as are our Steelheads, a separate trout species that is fished like salmon.
These are all our fish. Not a one of them will ever go to a spawning ground elsewhere. Genetically, they all are born Idaho and have to die Idaho. As species, they are as different from other state's salmon as can be, as they have been living and dying here for a million years.
The ocean may be their home, but they all are hard-wired to come back here to reproduce.
They once came back in millions, so many that Lewis and Clark said rivers turned red with the fish and they made river crossings difficult.
This year, only 16 adult Chinook made it back to Redfish Lake to spawn. Redfish Lake was literally red every fall when the spawning Salmon returned. No other lake in the northwest was as abundant as Redfish.
Our headwaters entirely depend on salmon as a key species.
The dead adult fish provide nutrition and fertilizer that feeds all the vegetation in our pristine waters, and the smolts are prey for our trout and our other game fish. The salmon also feed us and every other mammal in our state one way or the other.
If they all die out, we will lose many of our bears and other predators, our birds, and our wild vegetation.
Once they are gone, our best wild streams will lose their clarity and become nothing but sterile, cloudy muddy beds that cannot support life. In drought, they will all lose most of their ability to recover from the damages of low water.
And America will lose another important fishing industry resource.
I was once on the side of keeping the dams until a friend who's a fish and game guy explained it all to me around 1994. He doubted the dams would ever come down, and so did I until this year.
[mod note] Posts moved to a new thread per poster's request. [/mod note]
...Boise is blessed with the nations largest geothermal system....
Wow, that's very cool. Didn't know that. Certainly a "free" resource. And of course hydro is the cheapest -- there are a couple of working dams right near where I'm living. But after Mike's excellent posing, I can sure understand the argument about the old Snake River dams.
Wow, that's very cool. Didn't know that. Certainly a "free" resource. And of course hydro is the cheapest -- there are a couple of working dams right near where I'm living. But after Mike's excellent posing, I can sure understand the argument about the old Snake River dams.
Hydro is only cheap when water is plentiful. Times of low water can cause hydro some serious problems, and any power problem is expensive.
Idaho Falls has been power self-sufficient for 125 years because the cascades were a good (and easy) spot for a hydro power plant.
The 3 plants serviced the town very well from 1902 until 1980, when Idaho Falls Power decided the generators were so obsolete that they must be replaced.
That's when I learned about water turbines. By then, I.F. had 3 separate power plants along the Snake; one north of town, one in the middle, and one at the southern city limits.
I built a shop very close to the south plant around the same time as the turbines were being installed.
During slow times, I liked to the a short walk down there and talk to the engineers who were putting the turbines together.
There are 2 types of water turbines.
The old one is the high head turbine. It runs by gravity, operating by the flow of water from the top down.
This is the turbine that depends on high water and good flow.
During WWII, the Germans invented the bulb turbine. It actually looks like a big light bulb with a propeller at the narrow socket end of the bulb.
These are designed to go into the water, not close by in a dam structure. They don't need the dam nor its storage to operate.
The big bulb end is on the upstream side in a concrete housing that is similar to a cone. The water is forced around the bulb by the river current, and is powerfully increased in pressure by the time the water reaches the narrow end, where the propeller is.
The propeller spins like crazy and turns the turbine.
With half as many parts as a high head, and the bulbs need only to be covered by a few inches of water to operate, though not at its best. The propeller is geared, so the turbine can come up to speed in a slow-moving river or a fast running one.
These turbines are very popular all over Europe and Japan, but they never caught on in the U.S.
Until now, when every major river in the west is running low. They're a natural for Idaho's narrow stream beds and fast flowing, shallow rivers.
I.F. now generates so much power most of it is sold to the power grid. The bulbs have a lot to do with our cheap city electrical bills.
I asked Volosong if he could make this a separate topic that could be discussed as a single issue.
I'm glad he agreed.
Here's the thing folks:
The Snake River is one of the largest and longest rivers in the west that flows to the Pacific.
Everyone in Idaho depends on the Snake from the top to the bottom of the state, and so do most of the folks in Oregon and S. Washington as well.
But the Snake's importance isn't as obvious in NID than it is in Central and Southern Idaho.
We also have thousands of new folks who probably don't know anything about the river except its name.
But the fact remains; if the Snake river ever fails to deliver all the water that has been promised in it, our entire state could fail, along with much of the coastal west.
Like the more famous Colorado River's waters have been over-promised to conflicting water rights and have caused some potentially dangerous situations, so have the Snake's waters. Only to a lesser degree.
All disagreement over the removal of those 4 dams has equal justification on both sides of this issue.
Both sides have very sound reasons to keep things just as they are or to change them.
I hope this topic becomes a good source of information, as the argument is sure to become very complicated.
Everything becomes complicated as soon as water enters any discussion.
But sooner or later, I think that eventually, and possibly very soon, the issue of the dam's removal will be left up to all of us as voters, as Idaho has always chosen referendum as a way to solve problems our legislature cannot.
How is the Snake important to NID? We have our own rivers, and resultant lakes, up here.
I'm referring to the five northernmost counties. Don't know much about Moscow or Lewiston, other than passing through them on the way further south.
It's all in the drainage of all the other rivers in NID. All our rivers are interconnected and are more 2-way streets instead of 1-way streets. Our mountains and our fractured terrain make it so, as as much water runs underground as on the surface here, and it all moves around. A lot.
The Snake not only feeds the huge aquifer under the south end of Idaho, as it progresses northward, it also feeds the other underground water northward.
As far as I know, no one yet knows just how far those waters underground extend northward, because the rock is so fractured throughout NID.
The most unusual thing about the Snake is that the river turns and flows northward. The Snake is the only large river in the U.S. that does this; if it was like all the others, it would be likely the water would end up in The Atlantic, instead of the Pacific.
I wish I knew more about the major waters in northern Idaho. Central Idaho was never Idaho's only salmon hatchery; there were others north of Lewiston.
Idaho seems to be the farthest eastward the salmon could swim.
I wish I knew more about the fish. I still don't understand why Atlantic salmon just didn't swim up the easy drainages in the East.
They existed in the East; Lewis & Clark both knew the fish they walked on were salmon, as did everyone in the expedition. To them, salmon were a trash fish no one ate unless necessary.
Eating salmon daily made them all gassy, and they all complained a lot about that over the winter they spent in winter camp.
They all were forced to live on salmon, and they all hated and feared farting a lot.
To them a bad case of the farts was a sign of terminal illness.
So they constantly wondered how the Indians were so happy and fat eating a salmon-heavy diet without being plagued by gas all winter.
At the same time, the Indians were disgusted when they tired to eat the expedition's daily diet. The only thing the Indians liked were the rock hard loaves of brown sugar and the coffee.
Dr. Rush, the expedition's medical supplier, was the most famous physician of the time in the United States. His pills were loaded with mercury, which is both a violent purgative and very poisonous, but the expedition relied on them and swore by them.
They called the pills Dr. Rush's Thunderbolts. The relief they offered must have ben magnificent, as most of the time, the expedition only ate salt beef or red game meat and flour. They were all constipated for days and days at a time as they went westward.
A lot of the topography in the five northern counties was influenced by glacial Lake Missoula and the failure of the ice dam during one of the ice ages. Maybe multiple ice dams? Under the whole of the Rathdrum Prairie lies an aquifer. There is enough water in it to support the whole of the Rathdrum Prairie being urbanized, (Oh, the horror that would be!). Pretty sure we are still in the region named the Rocky Mountains. On the western edge, but still within. The hydrology here is determined by the mountains, excepting the prairie.
To the southwest lie the Palouse. I haven't studied the hydrology of that ecosystem yet, but do know that the Snake runs through it.
Probably already brought up but the agricultural industry in Eastern Washington is huge, and it depends on the Snake River dams.
How about diverting some of the river water into reservoirs for farms, rather than dams that stop the flow and make it nearly impossible for the Salmon to go up river for breeding.
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