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Build the Fish Their Own River, One Man Says by N.S. Nokkentved, Times-News - August 16, 1999

TWIN FALLS -- Recently Sen. Larry Craig and Rep. Mike Simpson presented three proposals to help endangered Snake River salmon and as alternatives to be considered instead of breaching four federal dams on the lower Snake River.

One proposal was for strobe lights that would steer salmon away from turbine intakes and toward bypass collection systems.

A second was for technology that keeps fish out of the turbines and other stream diversions.

The third was University of Idaho professor Ernest Brannon's proposal for a salmon migration channel along 140 miles of the Snake River from Lewiston to Pasco, Wash. It would bypass the four federal dams.

The channel would include rearing and feeding habitat with cover and food resources; it would be engineered to look like natural habitat and would use river water, Brannon said.

It would help young fish move downstream and would not replace existing fish ladders for returning salmon.

Fish entering at the upper end of the river would use the existing collection system now used to gather fish into barges for transportation around the dams. Fish from tributaries on the opposite side of the river from the channel would enter through the collection system at the next dam downstream, Brannon said.

In sections of the canyon too narrow or steep to dig a ditch, an open conduit or closed pipeline would be hung on the canyon wall, he said.

He is confident it would work, but nothing like has been done anywhere. The first step would be studying the feasibility. Then a test section would be built. If that works, the rest would follow, Brannon said. That should take about five years and the cost would compare to the cost of modern interstate highway construction -- $1 million to $3 million per mile, he said.

But the idea has its skeptics.

In the early 1990s, a small channel along side the Snake River was suggested as a way to improve salmon passage. Critics at the time noted the river was much more than just a conduit for the fish.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials looked at the proposed migration canal and rejected it. A proposed floating plastic tube in the water the length of the dammed river also was rejected.

It is not known whether Brannon's proposal would work any better than the existing system, said Greg Graham, the Corps' project manager of the Lower Snake River Juvenile Salmon Migration Feasibility Study.

Survival through the system is improving, how much more you would get with a migration canal is not known, he said.

Idaho Department of Fish and Game fish biologists have not yet had a chance to study the proposal in depth, said Ed Bowles, salmon and steelhead manager for Fish and Game.

The key to any option is to eliminate stress to the fish. The present system of capturing and transporting fish would work if it weren't for the stress, Bowles said. It is untried technology, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take a look at it, he said.

Others say the proposal offers only false hope.