Editorial: Debate regarding Snake River dams is far from over

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

It’s not water over the dam.

In other words, don’t assume the word “final” in three federal agencies’ Final Environmental Impact Statement regarding salmon and steelhead preservation strategies on the Columbia and Snake rivers has ended the debate over the fate of four dams on the lower Snake River in Eastern Washington.

At the end of last month, three federal agencies — the Army Corps of Engineers, Bonneville Power Administration and the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversee management of the Northwest’s hydroelectric dams — released their final analysis and recommendations on how best to preserve threatened and endangered runs of salmon and steelhead on the rivers.

For more than 20 years, environmentalists and regional tribes have advocated for river habitat enhancements, including the removal of the four Snake River dams built in the 1960s and 1970s between the Tri-Cities and the Washington-Idaho border. Removal of the dams is seen as the most effective way to save and rebuild declining runs of the fish on which tribal, sport and commercial fishing depend, as well as other endangered species, especially the state’s orca whales, which spend part of the year at the mouth of the Columbia feeding on salmon before returning to Salish Sea waters in Northwest Washington.

Currently, 13 runs of salmon are listed as endangered or threatened species; four of them return to the Snake River to end and begin their life cycle.

But the dams’ removal has been opposed by many who warn that the loss of the dams would bring a decrease in available electricity and higher costs for the region’s ratepayers and difficulties for Eastern Washington farmers who depend on the dams for irrigation and barge shipping.

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https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-debate-regarding-snake-river-dams-is-far-from-over/

[yonder]

1. Rec'd for visibility

[abqtommy]

2. kickety kick

[2naSalit]

3. K&R

It's way overdue to undo the damage done by these dams. If the salmon, a keystone species, can;t return to their upland spawning grounds, it will destroy what's left of the forests. The only way phosphates and nitrates get to central Idaho from the ocean is via salmon bodies. Since the forests have been starved of these nutrients since the dams were built, we have given the forests aids, unable to fend of disease and vermin. Ridding the waterway of these dams would be one of the best major environmental moves we could make for most of the northern Rockies.