Obama Administration backs Bush-era plan for Columbia Basin salmon

[depakid]

After a court-ordered review, the Obama Administration today submitted its update to a 2008 Bush-era plan that tries to square dam operations with protecting wild salmon in the Columbia Basin, making relatively minor changes that are unlikely to satisfy the plan's opponents.

The NOAA Fisheries Service said it found "no major surprises" in its review of the http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/Salmon-Hydropower/Columbia-Snake-Basin/Final-BOs.cfm\">Bush Administration's 2008 biological opinion and only "modest changes" in the science governing fish recovery.

The plan, which covers 10 years of hydropower dam operations, is "not likely" to jeopardize the fish or damage critical fish habitat, the fisheries service said.

Thirteen runs of wild salmon and steelhead on the Columbia and Snake rivers are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

U.S. District Court Judge James Redden has twice rejected earlier plans, and will now consider whether the updated plan meets legal muster. He requested the review in February, giving the government three months to conduct it.

The plan is supported by a majority of Northwest tribes and states. Its opponents include the state of Oregon, the Nez Perce Tribe and a coalition of fishing and conservation groups, who argue it favors power production and shipping interests rather than threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead.

Oregon has argued that the fish need higher flows in the Columbia River than the plan envisions, while salmon advocates contend the surest way to save the fish is to remove four federal dams on the lower Snake River.

More: http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/05/obama_administration_backs_bus.html

[Submariner]

1. The Pacific salmon runs are pretty much decimated

the hydro-power utilities have effectively stalled any meaningful mitigation over the past 30 years. The day Ronny Raygun and Jim Watt took the helm the salmon runs were doomed. Hydro-power is big money in the Pacific Northwest, and the republicans have made sure money trumps wild salmon.

Even if all the dams were knocked down today, it would not make much of a positive difference over the next few decades or century. The wild salmon returns are being supplemented by hatchery-reared salmon, which is a drop in the bucket in relation to the damage already done to the migrating species.

Farm-raised salmon escapees are now competing for the same resources as wild salmon, further diluting the wild gene pool.

All this posturing so many years after the damage was done, and so many years after mitigation should have occurred, is just a continuation of the status quo.

Can't blame Obama for this one. This goes back to the Raygun/Watt days of forest clear-cutting with no riparian buffers between the tree line and stream edge, and token efforts of the hydro-power utilities with fish-ladders and fry transport between dams, which is not much more than a public relations feel good ploy.