This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for First Look to get stories like this one delivered to your inbox six days a week.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it could make hydroelectric dams on Oregon’s Willamette River safe for endangered salmon by building gigantic mechanical traps and hauling baby fish downstream in tanker trucks. The Corps started pressing forward over objections from fish advocates and power users who said the plan was costly and untested.
That was until this month, when President Joe Biden signed legislation ordering the Corps to put its plans on hold and consider a simpler solution: Stop using the dams for electricity.
The new law, finalized on Jan. 4, follows reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica in 2023 that underscored risks and costs associated with the Corps’ plan. The agency is projected to lose $700 million over 30 years generating hydropower, and a scientific review found that the type of fixes the Corps is proposing would not stop the extinction of threatened salmon.
The mandate says the Corps needs to shelve designs for its fish collectors — essentially massive floating vacuums expected to cost $170 million to $450 million each — until it finishes studying what the river system would look like without hydropower. The Corps must then include that scenario in its long-term designs for the river.
The new direction from Congress has the potential to transform the river that sustains Oregon’s famously lush Willamette Valley. It is a step toward draining the reservoirs behind the dams and bringing water levels closer to those of an undammed river.
“There’s a very real, very viable solution, and we need to proceed with that as soon as possible,” said Kathleen George, a council member for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, which have fished the Willamette for thousands of years. They’ve urged the Corps to return the river closer to its natural flow.
George credited OPB and ProPublica’s reporting, and said she believes that without additional public pressure, the Corps would have continued to stall on already overdue studies.
“Our salmon heritage is literally on the line,” she said.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers biologist Doug Garletts carries an anesthetized Chinook salmon to a loading chute where it will slide into a holding tank before being drained into a tanker and trucked upstream to the other side of Oregon’s Cougar Dam. It’s one of many methods the Corps has tried to keep threatened fish from dying because of hydroelectric dams on the Willamette River system
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
Asked about how the Corps planned to respond to Congress, spokesperson Kerry Solan said in a statement that the agency was still reviewing the bill’s language.
The 13 dams on the Willamette and its tributaries were built for the main purpose of holding back floodwaters in Oregon’s most heavily populated valley, which includes the city of Portland. With high concrete walls, they have no dedicated pathways for migrating salmon.
Emptying the reservoirs to the river channel would let salmon pass much as they did before the dams. It would leave less water for recreational boating and irrigation during periods of normal rain and snow, but it would open up more capacity to hold back water when a large flood comes. And the power industry says that running hydropower turbines on the Willamette dams, unlike the moneymaking hydroelectric dams on the larger Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest, doesn’t make financial sense.
The dams generate less than 1% of the Northwest’s power, enough for about 100,000 homes. But lighting a home with electricity from Willamette dams costs about five times as much as dams on the Northwest’s larger rivers.
Congress asked the Corps in 2020 and 2022 to study the possibility of shutting down its hydroelectric turbines on the Willamette. The agency missed its deadlines for those studies while it proceeded with a 30-year plan for river operations that included hydropower.
Oregon Rep. Val Hoyle, a Democrat whose district includes much of the Willamette River Valley, said in an emailed statement it was “unacceptable” for the Corps to move ahead without first producing the thorough look at ending hydropower that lawmakers asked for.
“Congress must have the necessary information on hand to decide the future of hydropower in the Willamette,” Hoyle said.
The bill also requires the Corps to study how it can lessen problems that draining reservoirs might cause downstream.
Because of a 2021 court order to protect endangered salmon, the Corps has tried making the river more free-flowing by draining reservoirs behind two dams each fall. The first time the reservoirs dropped, in 2023, they unleashed masses of mud that had been trapped behind the dams. Rivers turned brown and small cities’ drinking water plants worked around the clock to purify the supply.
Congress wants the Corps to study how to avoid causing those problems downstream. That could include engineering new drinking water systems for cities below the dams.
The Corps has the authority to engineer infrastructure for local communities and cover 75% of the cost for such improvements, but it has never used this provision in Oregon.
A week before Biden signed the new bill, biologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published their own 673-page report saying the Corps’ preferred solution for the Willamette — the one involving fish traps — would jeopardize threatened salmon and steelhead.
NOAA proposed more than two dozen changes for the Corps, ranging from better monitoring of the species to altering the river flow to better accommodate migrating salmon. Solan said the agency is still reviewing NOAA’s opinion and deciding what action to take.
George, who has served on the council of the Grand Ronde tribes since 2016, said she was encouraged that the latest developments on the Willamette pointed to a future where salmon and people could coexist.
“In those darkest days of our families living here on the Grand Ronde reservation, it was truly returning to the Willamette to get salmon that helped keep our people alive,” George said. “It is our time and our role to speak up for our relatives and to say that a future with people and Willamette salmon is essential.”
OPB editor’s note: Kathleen George is a member of OPB’s board of directors.
