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Removing dam good move, but not model for others
Friday, September 24, 1999
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
The decision to remove a dam that blocks salmon passage on the White Salmon River is simply a good business decision for PacificCorp, the Portland utility that owns it.
So too much shouldn't be read into this dam-breaching decision by either opponents or proponents of dam removal to save salmon.
The Condit Dam is tall but small: 125 feet high but capable of producing only 14 megawatts of electricity. That's enough for 13,000 homes.
But the dam does block fish passage to 13 miles of spawning grounds that might one day produce 10,000 salmon.
That's why the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission quite properly required, as a condition of re-licensing the 86-year-old dam, that its owners provide fish ladders and screens.
FERC's licensing renewal process is the venue that will help sort out which dams are worth keeping and which are not. In this case, it proved more cost-effective for the company to remove the dam than try to accommodate fish runs.
There is greater value in the river's fish than in the dam's power.
The White Salmon River flows into the Columbia River 60 miles upriver from Portland.
Unlike dams on the main stem of the Columbia River, the Condit has no transportation, irrigation or flood-protection function. So it's not a good model of what factors will govern breaching decisions at dams that do.
The four lower Snake River dams that are under U.S. Corps of Engineers study for breaching don't have flood control functions either, but they produce about 800 megawatts of electricity; Seattle uses about 1,100.
They also provide subsidized water to agricultural irrigators and a subsidized water highway for barge companies to move goods to and from the port at Lewiston, Idaho.
Excellent examples of other dams that clearly ought to come down are the Gines and Elwha on the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula. The fish the river could produce in a rare pristine habitat outweigh the value of the dams' easily replaceable power.
All that's lacking for that breaching to go forward is funding from Congress. The fish are waiting, and so are we.
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