Five Means for Breaching 4 Lower Snake River Dams

September 2017
Prepared by Jim Waddell

This paper lays out five existing essential components or means that the US Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps) and Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) can utilize immediately to avoid further financial and biological losses created by the four Lower Snake River Dams (4 LSRDs). The focus is on policy, instead of litigation, now in its fourth decade, or new legislation. The five means are likely the simplest way to “break the back” of an intractable process of narrowly evolved arguments between constituent groups, influential far beyond what the demographic calculus would suggest. The arguments created a mythology of phony rationalizations perpetuated for the benefit of a few “special interests,” at the expense of the many. While this paper describes some of the economic, financial, and biological reasons for breaching the 4 LSRDs, its primary purpose is to show how, not why, the dams can be breached very quickly without undo fiscal hardship on any one group, such as BPA ratepayers

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