A Rebuttal to the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association’s “The Costs of Keeping the Four Lower Snake River Dams: A Reevaluation of the Lower Snake River Feasibility Report”

In the 1960’s and 1970’s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed four dams on the lower Snake River without specific measures to allow juvenile salmon and steelhead to migrate downstream and out to the ocean. As a result, these dams killed millions and millions of juvenile salmon and steelhead every year. In the 1990’s all four salmon and steelhead runs on the lower Snake River were listed under the Endangered Species Act. In 1995 the Corps began a long-term study purportedly to resolve the problem. In 2002 the study, the Lower Snake River Juvenile Salmon Migration Feasibility Report, was released. While this study and especially the biological information therein can support a decision to breach, a non-breach alternative was selected.