'Doomsday Clock' Speeds Up For Snake River Chinook


April 25, 2001

By KOMO Staff & News Services

GRANTS PASS, ORE. - A closer look at the Doomsday Clock for wild chinook salmon in the Snake River offers even less time to reverse the trend toward extinction, according to a study done for a national conservation group.

Unless dramatic steps are taken to reverse the trend, wild spring/summer chinook in the Snake will effectively be extinct by the year 2016, a year earlier than predicted two years ago, the study for Trout Unlimited said.

Titled "The Doomsday Clock 2001: an update on the status and projected time to extinction for Snake River wild spring/summer chinook stocks," the study was being released Wednesday in Portland.

'Really In Trouble'

"The message is these fish are really in trouble," said Jeff Curtis, Western conservation director for Trout Unlimited. "We've got to make the hard decisions now. We can't come up with a plan that says we play around the edges for the next eight or 10 years and see where we are."

Curtis was referring to the National Marine Fisheries Service plan for restoring Columbia Basin salmon, which stops short of calling for breaching four dams on the lower Snake in Eastern Washington, while relying heavily on improving survival of young fish before they migrate to the ocean.

The Fisheries Service plans to reassess the question of dam breaching again in five years. A study by Fisheries scientists published in the journal Science suggested that improved survival of young salmon would do more to restore populations than dam breaching.

The Energy Crunch

Meanwhile, a federal mandate to spill extra water over Columbia Basin hydroelectric dams to help young salmon migrate to the ocean has been suspended so that more water can be devoted to producing electricity to meet the demands of an energy crunch in drought conditions.

The risk of extinction could be lessened if the same ocean conditions that have produced strong returns of hatchery chinook to the Columbia River continue, and the drought gripping the region this year is reversed, the study said.

"The burden or risk continues to be on the species, and the burden of risk is an issue to be addressed not by models but by decision makers," the study said.

40 Years Of Salmon Counts

The study was done by Gretchen R. Oosterhout of Decision Matrix, Inc., a specialist in risk assessment.

Based on more than 40 years of salmon counts, the study predicts the weakest runs, located in Marsh Creek and the Imnaha River, will be functionally extinct by the year 2007, while the strongest, in Poverty Flat, can hold out until 2033.

The mean year for extinction for all runs is calculated to be 2016. The overall probability of functional extinction within 24 years was calculated at 66.8 percent.