Weighing the costs

Columbia-area dams would take toll

Rich Landers, Outdoors editor

Spokesman-Review, October 14, 2007

Proposed water storage projects on tributaries to the Columbia River would create winners and losers among Washington's sportsmen, landowners and taxpayers.

Winners would include certain types of boat-based reservoir anglers, irrigators and many businesses that benefit from increases in irrigated cropland and from massive dam construction and maintenance.

The losers could include almost everybody else.

Trout anglers could lose three high-quality trout lakes – Lenice, Nunnally and Merry – under one proposal for a dam on lower Crab Creek.

Hunters and wildlife could lose thousands of acres of important habitat in that proposal, including 18,000 acres of wetlands on portions of state lands and the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge.

Chinook salmon and threatened runs of steelhead could be impacted by several proposals, including a massive reservoir on the Similkameen River. Ironically, this dam proposal is just above Enloe Dam, which has been considered for removal to boost the river's run of summer chinook salmon and a threatened run of steelhead.

And some people, such as Yvonne Geissler-Eyler, would lose their land so that land owned by other farmers could be irrigated.

Geissler-Eyler, a third-generation landowner in Hawk Creek northwest of Davenport, was in Washington, D.C., recently with John Osborn, a Spokane physician and Sierra Club representative. They met with staffs of Washington's congressional delegation and other groups to lobby against the dam proposals.

"My father still lives on the place, and it's well known by turkey and deer hunters," Geissler-Eyler said. It's only about 440 acres, which is not a lot in the scheme of things, but it's ours, and it could soon be under water."

"We found a huge amount of interests in these projects because of the wildlife habitat at stake as well as the sheer cost which runs into the billions," Osborn said.

Washington currently has five separate processes under way that could lead to new dams in the Columbia drainage. Confusion about the various dam proposals is common, considering that some of them originate from different entities and are in various stages.

The project proposals include:

            •  Shanker's Bend on the Simikameen River, proposed by an Okanogan County Public Utility District for hydroelectric power and storing 1.7 million acre feet of water. The project could affect summer chinook salmon and endangered steelhead, as well as a prized smallmouth fishery at Palmer Lake. Cost for preliminary studies alone: $15 million.

            •  Black Rock Reservoir, proposed to boost Yakima Valley irrigators and developers by storing 1.6 million acre feet of water. The site, five miles west of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, could raise the water table enough to saturate Hanford's contaminated soils and spread radioactive materials into the Columbia River near Washington's last great wild chinook spawning area. Cost: About $6 billion.

            •  Walla Walla drainage dam proposals from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

But Geissler-Eyler and Osborn were in Washington, D.C., primarily to discuss other water storage projects.

Hailed as a breakthrough in the 30-year stalemate over water needs in Eastern Washington, the Columbia River Management Plan was approved by the Washington Legislature last year and spearheaded by Gov. Chris Gregoire.

American Rivers and the Washington Environmental Council were in on the closed-door sessions in which the package evolved. Funding for some conservation projects is included in the $200 million authorized to study dam and reservoir proposals.

Beyond Olympia, however, some environmental groups are concerned that the public has not had adequate say in the process and the costs and threats to wildlife are huge.

This project was activated in 2004 under Gov. Gary Locke. The initial list of 21 potential Columbia River tributary storage sites that has been narrowed to three:

            •  Sand Hollow Creek, in Grant County, a tributary near Lake Wanapum. Potential capacity: 1.1 million acre-feet. Cost: $2 billion.

            •  Lower Crab Creek, in Grant County near its confluence into the Columbia's Priest Rapids Lake. Potential capacity: 2.3 million acre feet. The dam would slice through Nunnally Lake and inundate Lenice and Merry lakes and lands in the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge. Cost: up to $2.76 billion.

            •  Hawk Creek, in northern Lincoln County near Lake Roosevelt. Potential capacity 1.4 acre feet. Cost: up to $10 billion.

While the state is paying millions for the proposal process, Congress would have to approve funds to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for the high cost of proceeding into the feasibility stage.

Congressional offices of the Washington delegation, as of last week, had not yet received formal requests from the bureau and the Washington Department of Ecology.

"The Bureau of Reclamation is the lead agency on any kind of project proceeding," said Joye Redfield-Wilder, DOE spokesperson in Yakima.

"The state has determined it's prudent to look for short term and future needs for water and whether climate changes will affect our needs. The scenario calls for saving one-third of any new stored water for fish and wildlife benefits."

That's what Rachel Paschal Osborn, director of the Spokane-based Center for Environmental Law and Policy, calls the "Trojan Fish Argument" for justifying dams.

"Solar-heated slack water would not be of very good quality for fish for lot of different reasons," she said. "And they haven't given any thought to the timing issues involved with releasing that water for the benefit of fish."

Teresa Scott, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife policy coordinator in Olympia, cited concerns for the projects.

"The inundation of Crab Creek has potential to be so huge, the question of impacts affects every species, not just what species," she said. "This isn't our favorite choice of all the options, for a number of reasons. It's not far enough upstream, for one. We would rather it be farther upstream to provide better fish benefits in main stem Columbia.

"That said, we understand why Lower Crab Creek is attractive. It's mainly public land down there purchased previously for other mid-Columbia mitigation projects."

But Scott said WDFW has not taken a strong stance against the Crab Creek proposal.

"We see climate change coming," she said. "We see the need to do something about the need for water supply. If what we need is to build his huge reservoir, then that's what we need to do. We're looking at what makes sense for wildlife and people in the broader sense."

Managers of the 29,000-acre Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, citing severe under-funding for refuge operations, see a silver lining to the lower Crab Creek proposal.

"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service perspective at this point is that we don't really know that much about the entire area down there and all the possible impacts – cultural, socio-economic and wildlife," said Rick Poetter, refuge station manager in Othello.

"The next step is to request authorization from Congress for a feasibility study. It would do good for us to get that critical information on this site and other sites in the process of producing an EIS."

In other words, moving to the next stage of the dam proposal might be the only hope for refuge managers to get the funding they need for properly managing the refuge assets in lower Crab Creek.

The Columbia Refuge and surrounding farm lands are hosts to the largest concentration of sandhill cranes found in the Pacific Flyway during their spring migrations.

"Cranes do utilize lower Crab Creek, so there would be impacts," Poetter said.

Joe Miller, WDFW regional fisheries manager in Ephrata, said it's too soon for his agency to comment on specific impacts the dam proposals might have on fisheries.

"In some cases, we know there are huge implications to anadromous species (such as salmon and steelhead)," he said. "But we can't be specific, yet."

The agency plans to continue managing Lenice and Nunnally lakes as though nothing will happen to them, he said.

"Theses lakes are some of the gems of fly-fishing opportunity in the state," he said. "We want to do everything we can to keep them working."

Paschal Osborn said citizens should take a different view of the proposals.

"The state isn't laying out all its cards on these proposals, but you don't put out tens of millions of dollars into studies if you're not planning to build a dam," she said.

Considering the ailing fisheries, taking more water out of the Columbia River system for irrigation and other development is not prudent, said her husband, John Osborn, citing 2004 recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences.

"The water conflicts need to be resolved through conservation, water markets and water efficiencies, but instead Washington is choosing to go the path of really big dams that will cost ratepayers and taxpayers a lot of money and critical habitat," he said.

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Copyright 2007 The Spokesman-Review