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Salmon Recovery CSRIA Pt 2 by Bob Larson AgInfo.net, January 1, 2020

I’m Bob Larson. To save the Puget Sound Orcas, you need to save the salmon. And to save the salmon, we need to tear down dams on the Lower Snake and Columbia rivers.

But, Darryll Olsen with the Columbia-Snake River Irrigators

Association says this entire discussion would be much different if it weren’t for the careless mishandling of the Juvenile Fish Transportation Program in 2015 that prevented most of the salmon from ever reaching the Orcas …

OLSEN … “Same time that was going on, NOAA Fisheries scientists, I mean the Montlake PhDs, were telling the fish managers to start the program. In fact, they told them to start the transport program early, but instead of doing that they threw the fish in the lethal river system and the end result of that, which what you see is the 2017 adult returns and the evaluations indicate the transported fish actually survived four times higher than the non-transported fish. And, in a year when there should have been maximum transport, the fish managers had the lowest transport-collection rate ever!”

Olsen says there was absolutely no reason it should have happened …

OLSEN … “This is just incompetence. It is recklessness and if the governor and the Orca Task Force really want to focus on positive accomplishment for salmon production then they need to make sure that the juvenile transport program is in full gear which means you need those dams in place to operate.”

Olsen says if that’s not enough, the courts get involved and harm the program further.

Tune in tomorrow for more on the CSRIA solution to saving the salmon.