February 25, 2004

The Council this week took the unusual step of appealing to the regional directors of five federal agencies to stop delaying their collective decision on whether to test new dam operations in Montana and the lower Columbia River this summer.

In a letter to the directors of the Corps of Engineers, Bonneville Power Administration, NOAA Fisheries, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Reclamation, the Council says continued delay will make it difficult to complete the necessary analyses and conduct the tests this summer.

“We want to determine the type of operation that provides the best benefits for enhancing ESA-listed and non-listed fish populations over the long term,” said Council Chair Judi Danielson of Idaho. “If it were better understood why certain operations were beneficial to fish it would be possible to adjust the operations to provide better survival.”

The federal agencies established the current dam operations in their two Biological Opinions on hydropower operations issued in 2000. Those operations include rapid releases of water from Hungry Horse and Libby dams in the spring and summer months and corresponding water spills at dams on the lower Columbia and Snake rivers to aid juvenile salmon and steelhead migration to the ocean.

“By releasing essentially the same amount of water from Hungry Horse and Libby dams between July and the end of September, rather than the end of August as the Biological Opinion calls for, fisheries resources in the two reservoirs and the rivers downstream would be protected and additional flow augmentation would be provided for fish immediately below the dams and in the lower Columbia River,” said Ed Bartlett, a Montana member of the Council and chair of the Council’s Fish and Wildlife Committee. “The tests at Libby and Hungry Horse should focus on determining the benefits to resident fish in Montana. We’ll keep looking for ways to evaluate whether flow augmentation from the upper Columbia storage projects has any effect on levels of survival of fish downstream. The tests also would help determine whether a flow/survival relationship exists.”
Last summer, in amending its Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, the Council recommended that the agencies test certain assumptions in the biological opinions as they relate to spill, flow augmentation, reservoir drafting, predator control, and harvest. The tests at dams would help determine whether alternative operations could provide similar, or more effective, biological benefits for fish at reduced cost to the hydropower system. The tests proposed by the Council could be carried out within the operational flexibility in the biological opinions.