Ruralite - November 2003
A newsletter for customers of Klickitat PUD

Where have all the fish gone?

Actually, the fish made it up the river quite nicely this year. It was a good year to be a fish or a fisherman. We again had record numbers of returning salmon. The fish I am referring to are the juvenile fish migrating down the river. Actually, they had a pretty good year too. They all pretty much made it down the river by the end of July. That must have upset a few bureaucrats. I guess the fish didn't read their schedule, which showed fish migrating through the month of August. The bureaucrats had scheduled spills over the dams at a cost of more than a million dollars a day to help the little critters down the river.

Now, I'm not here to debate the virtues of in-stream migration verses other methods. I may not subscribe to the over-the-top method as the only, and best, method for migrating salmon. Predators and nitrogen super-saturation are two perils of that method. However, for this discussion we will assume that spilling is good for the fish. It still boggles the mind that we would waste a million dollars a day for five fish. That's right, I said five (5) fish. By all estimates there were only five ESA listed juvenile salmon trying to make it down the river in August.

So any sane, rational person would say our job is done and we can now go back to the job of producing clean, renewable hydropower for a region caught in a really tight water year. But oh no, apparently we now had a management issue. BPA pointed to the Corp. The Corp pointed to NOAA. NOAA pointed to the fish people (that's what we call all the agencies that line up for money BPA doles out to save the fish). If you're like me, you may not be convinced that they have as much to do with the salmon coming back as does mother nature, but you at least believe and hope that they are spending your money as efficiently and effectively as they know how.

But no one was willing to make the tough call to put reason back into the equation. The biological opinion says spill until the end of August. So spill they did. A million dollars a day of your money. All because no one was willing use common sense. Where's 60 Minutes when you need them? All these people should have put their collective heads together and come to the logical conclusion that they are entrusted with the publics' money to do a job.

We better hope these people can get their act together before this happens again next year. We here at Klickitat PUD are working with our allies and trade groups to call on BPA, the Corps, NOAA, and the fish people to use common sense. We will be going back to Washington DC and around the region asking to stop summer spill. Join us, if you have an opportunity, and talk to legislators and other leaders. Ask then to support an end to summer spill. Stop the insanity, stop summer spill.

Tom D. Svendsen, Power Manager