Restoring the Lower Snake River
History: The Lower Snake River Project
To understand why we have four dams along the Lower Snake River, one must first understand Lewiston, Idaho's long love affair with inland navigation.
The gold rush of the early 1860s established Lewiston as the queen city of north central Idaho. Even after the short gold rush boom was over, though, it seemed to Lewiston boosters that the new city was extraordinarily well situated, if it could only take advantage of the Snake River that flowed nearby.
Sternwheelers had already provided a transportation network viable enough to haul more than 60,000 people to the Idaho gold fields between 1861 and 1863. But the Snake was a wild and unpredictable river. At many times of the year even a fearless riverboat captain could not get through. The Lower Snake had more than thirty rapids that steamers had to negotiate. Lewiston residents in the early 1860s began what would become a more than 100-year campaign to seek federal assistance in creating a year-round navigable waterway between that Idaho town and the Pacific Ocean.
Heeding the demands of Lewiston residents and others along the Lower Snake and Columbia, in 1876 Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to construct Cascade Locks around the boiling rapids of the Columbia downstream from The Dalles. Once completed, the locks proved their value; steamers carrying thousands of tons of materials now slipped easily past the Cascades.
Merchants and farmers lobbied for more navigational aids to allow steamers to pass all the way to Lewiston. The next obvious obstruction was Celilo Falls, upstream from The Dalles. Congress again authorized the Corps to construct a passageway, which it completed in 1915.
Yet hardly had Celilo Canal opened when Columbia and Snake River steamboating collapsed. Sternwheelers had become outmoded, unable to compete with the speed, efficiency and greater carrying capacity of trains.
Once tracks crossed into the wheat regions, the boats had no hope of seriously threatening railroad dominance. Railways simply lowered their rates until steamers lost their freight trade.
But by the 1930s marine technology had changed. Now powerful tug boats and barges could compete with railroads, and once again lobbyists clamored for an open river from Lewiston to the sea. No one proved more tireless at making those demands than Herbert G. West of Walla Walla, executive secretary of the Inland Empire Waterways Association (IEWA). For decades West badgered Congress about the need for a reliable navigation system to Lewiston. In 1945 Congress finally authorized the Army
Corps of Engineers to construct a series of dams on the Lower Snake River. There, between 1955 and 1975 the Engineers built Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental (which backs up a reservoir appropriately named after Herbert G. West), Little Goose, and Lower Granite. Together with the Corps' four dams on the Lower Columbia, these massive structures transformed an entire region. Prior to the dam-building era of the 1930s to 1970s, the Northwest was a sparsely populated region with an economy based upon agriculture and natural resource extraction. After the dams, the region has become a major industrial and trading center with millions of residents enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world.
And yet, not all dams were created equal. The four Lower Snake dams have always been rather poor cousins to the much larger Columbia projects. They have also always been controversial.
In the early years, as Herbert West and the IEWA struggled year after year to persuade Congress to authorize locks and dams on the Lower Snake, their most fierce adversaries, ironically, were representatives of the Army Corps of Engineers, who repeatedly testified before Congress that such a series of dams could never be economically justified based upon navigation alone. Not until the end of World War II could economists (often exaggerating future needs, as it turned out) envision a Pacific Northwest that would boom so dramatically that it could actually use all of the hydropower the great federal dams would produce. Thus, Congress authorized the Lower Snake project because of hydropower: 77 percent of project benefits were to come from hydropower and only l8 percent from navigation. These are still today dams that can justify their existence only because of their hydropower potential. In other words, while inland navigationists have always been the loudest advocates for the dams, these structures were built at taxpayer expense because of their perceived hydropower benefits. Navigation has always been the tail attempting (usually very effectively) to wag the dog. Yet determining whether or not these dams provide true benefits to society is a debate that must be waged largely upon whether or not society needs the power they produce.
While navigation interests were able to eventually woo the Corps to their side of the debate, they were never able to convince fish advocates that these dams would be anything other than fish killers. The contemporary controversy over endangered Snake River fish stocks did not suddenly arise; well over half a century ago fish advocates accurately predicted what would happen with the completion of the Lower Snake system.
As soon as Bonneville Dam went on line in 1938, biologists became very concerned about the impacts of a string of large dams between Bonneville and Lewiston. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, most public attention focused on the issue of getting adult fish over dams on their return to home waters to spawn. Finally, the Army Corps of Engineers found a good solution * effective fish ladders * that has been fine-tuned since the 1930s but not dramatically altered.
Yet invisible to the public who visited the fish ladders and cheered the adult fish were tiny juveniles trying to find a safe way to pass through the huge dams. As we were to learn, dams can kill these fish in a wide variety of ways-via turbines, via increased predation in warm water reservoirs, via nitrogen supersaturation poisoning, and via timing dysfunctions as tiny fish biologically programmed to rush to sea in a free-flowing river now have to somehow try to swim through warm water pools or catch a ride on a barge, something akin to elk migrating to the highlands via a Greyhound bus: it just doesn't work well, despite the best of intentions.
As early as 1934 the Bureau of Reclamation recognized the difficulty of attempting to get juvenile fish past a major dam. Largely because of this, the Bureau chose to provide no fish passage at Grand Coulee. In 1947 biologist Harlan Homes, working for the Corps, began studying juvenile mortalities at dams and soon discovered how lethal they could be. In 1952, when Holmes accurately estimated that Bonneville Dam killed 15 percent of juveniles passing through, the Corps refused to publicize his report. In 1948 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stated of the proposed Lower Snake dams: "Adequate facilities can be provided for the upstream passage of fish.... The potential loss of downstream-migrating fingerlings presents a more serious problem.... The Lower Snake dams collectively present the greatest threat to the maintenance of the Columbia River salmon population of any project heretofore constructed or authorized." Although later Corps of Engineers employees sometimes conveniently forgot their agency had arrived at this conclusion so early, by 1954 even the Corps came to recognize this position. Walla Walla District Engineer Colonel Fremont Tandy admitted that year, "The basic element of the anadromous fish problem as related to water resource development is the downstream passage of fingerlings .... We are confident ... that we can pass adult migrants upstream over dams of any height, but we have yet to learn how to pass them downstream successfully."
