This article was prepared for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Subscribe to Dispatches to receive such stories as soon as they are published.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it can make hydroelectric dams on Oregon’s Willamette River safe for endangered salmon by building giant mechanical traps and transporting the fish downstream in tanker trucks. The Corps began pushing through the objections of fish advocates and heavy users, who said the plan was expensive and untested.
That was until this month, when President Joe Biden signed a law ordering the Corps to put its plans on hold and consider a simpler solution: Stop using dams to generate electricity.
The new law, completed on January 4, is as follows reports Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica in 2023 which highlights the risks and costs associated with the Corps’ plan. The agency is projected to lose $700 million over 30 years of hydropower production, and a scientific review found the type of fixes the Corps is proposing won’t stop the endangered salmon from disappearing.
The mandate says the Corps must delay projects for the fish harvesters — essentially massive floating vacuum cleaners expected to cost $170 million to $450 million each — until it finishes studying what the river system would look like without hydropower. The Corps should then incorporate this scenario into its long-term projects for the river.
New leadership in Congress could change the river that supports Oregon’s famously lush Willamette Valley. This is a step towards draining the reservoirs behind the dams and bringing the water level closer to that of the undammed river.
“There is a very real, very viable solution, and we need to get to it as soon as possible,” said Kathleen George, a council member of the Confederated Tribes of the Big Ronda, which has fished the Willamette for thousands of years. They urged the Corps to return the river closer to its natural flow.
George acknowledged the OPB and ProPublica reports and said she believes that without additional public pressure, the Corps would have continued to dwell on already overdue studies.
“Our salmon heritage is literally at stake,” she said.
credit:
Christina Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Asked how the Corps plans to respond to Congress, spokeswoman Carrie Solan said in a statement that the agency is still reviewing the language of the bill.
The 13 dams on the Willamette River and its tributaries were built with the primary purpose of holding back floodwaters in Oregon’s most populous valley, which includes the city of Portland. With high concrete walls, they have no special paths for salmon to migrate.
Draining the reservoirs into the riverbed would allow salmon to pass the same way as they did to the dams. This would leave less water for recreational boating and irrigation during periods of normal rain and snow, but open up more opportunities for water retention in the event of a major flood. And representatives of the energy industry argue that operating hydroelectric plants on the Willamette dams, unlike the money hydroelectric plants on the great Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest, does not make financial sense.
The dams generate less than 1% of the North West’s electricity, which is enough to power 100,000 homes. But lighting a home with electricity from the Willamette dams costs about five times more than dams on the great rivers of the Northwest.
Congress asked the Corps in 2020 and 2022 to study the possibility of shutting down hydroelectric plants on the Willamette. The agency missed deadlines for those studies while it continued a 30-year plan for river operations that included hydropower.
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Oregon State Rep. Val Hoyle, a Democrat whose district includes much of the Willamette River Valley, said in an emailed statement that it was “unacceptable” for the Corps to move forward without first carefully examining the hydropower shutdown, which lawmakers had requested.
“Congress needs to have the information it needs to decide the future of hydropower in the Willamette,” Hoyle said.
The bill also requires the Corps to study how it can reduce the problems that draining downstream reservoirs can cause.
Because of a 2021 court order to protect endangered salmon, the Corps has tried to make the river freer by draining reservoirs behind two dams each fall. The first time the reservoirs went down in 2023. they released masses of dirt that ended up behind the levees. Rivers turned brown and drinking water plants in small towns worked around the clock to purify the water.
Congress wants the Corps to study how to avoid causing these problems downstream. This may include designing new drinking water systems for cities located below the dams.
The Corps has the authority to build infrastructure for local communities and cover 75% of the cost of such improvements, but it has never used that provision in Oregon.
A week before Biden signed the new bill, biologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published their own 673-page report saying the Corps’ preferred solution for the Willamette — one that includes fish traps — would put salmon and steelhead at risk.
NOAA has proposed more than two dozen changes for the Corps, ranging from better monitoring of species to changing the course of the river to better accommodate migrating salmon. Solan said the agency is still reviewing NOAA’s opinion and deciding what action to take.
George, who has served on the Grand Ronde Tribal Council since 2016, said she is encouraged that recent developments on the Willamette point to a future where salmon and people can coexist.
“In the darkest days when our families lived here on the Grand Ronde Reservation, going back to the Willamette to get salmon was what helped our people survive,” George said. “It’s time and our role to stand up for our relatives and say that the future with the people and the Willamette salmon is very important.”
