MORTON — Hatchery fish have had the run of the Cowlitz River for decades, but now the agencies who manage it and the utility whose dams block it must return it to a naturally spawning fishery.
As part of a study that could reawaken the Cowlitz River with more wild fish, hatchery winter steelhead are getting the ax.
On Thursday night, representatives of Tacoma Power and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife met with a raucous standing-room only crowd in Morton’s Bob Lyle Community Center to discuss the ongoing and future developments of the utility’s Cowlitz River Hydroelectric Project.
As part of Tacoma Power’s federal relicensing agreement to operate dams on the river, the utility is required to build fish passage at Mayfield Dam if fishery studies show that native fish can return to thriving numbers in the upper reaches of the Cowlitz and Tilton rivers.
And that’s where the public is stumped. Many people question the authenticity of such a study when the utility and agency readily admit how poorly they’ve fared at moving juvenile fish — smolt — downstream. Those same people say the study is destined to fail, and a fish ladder will never be built and the natural fishery will continue to fade away.
“In fact, it’s not a very good productivity test on the upper Cowlitz — I’ll admit that,” said Pat Frazier, a fisheries biologist with Fish and Wildlife. “But the Tilton has a real chance of passing and succeeding.”
Proving a self-sustaining population of fish on either river is the agency’s only option for getting fish passage built, as designed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s license issued to the utility.
The meeting was an update on actions planned for this year and the future, but the public reacted scathingly to the report with shouts of “Unbelievable!” and “You’re killing the fish!”
What’s at stake is the release of hatchery winter steelhead. Those fish, as well as other species of hatchery fish, are trucked to the upper reaches of the Cowlitz and Tilton rivers and released primarily for fishermen’s benefit. But the productivity test will focus on wild winter steelhead. So to get true return numbers of wild winter steelhead, its hatchery counterparts won’t be released in the Cowlitz system until 2019. The Tilton River could potentially not see any hatchery winter steelhead until 2024.
“Hell, in 2024, everyone here will be dead,” said David Louck, noting the advanced age of the mostly gray crowd.
Ever since the Cowlitz Falls Dam — the highest impediment on the Cowlitz River — was built in the mid-1990s, fish and wildlife officials have struggled to net and truck downstream smolt that are spawned upriver but hit the retention barrier like a brick wall on their outward migration to the ocean.
The utility’s license agreement calls for 95 percent of all smolt to be netted and moved past the dams. But it doesn’t even come close to half of that.
Of the river’s three main species of anadromous fish, fisheries officials net on average 50 percent of steelhead, 35 percent of coho salmon, and 20 percent of chinook salmon smolt.
The rest never make it to the ocean to return as adults.
Stan Bartle said it’s unfortunate to hear that construction of a fish ladder hinges on the strength of a poorly managed fishery when most people can point out that it’s handicapped by the impediment to naturally spawned smolt.
“But they turn around and close their eyes completely,” Bartle said of the parties involved in Tacoma Power’s license agreement.
•••
Adam Pearson: (360) 807-8208
