What the dam WON’T do:
• Prevent flood damage for residents throughout the basin
• Generate hydro power for Lewis County residents
• Supply irrigation water to Chehalis basin farmers
• Create new recreational fishing and boating opportunities

What the dam WILL do:
• Require significant logging and costly ongoing debris removal
• Drown six miles of critical salmon and steelhead habitat
• Worsen the Chehalis River’s existing water quality issues
• Increase the risk of future flood damage, if it triggers more floodplain development

Having no dog in the fight this. If you look at the map developed as to spawning areas it is not the large number impacted. One never knows about unforeseen consequences which are always around. After that this whole thing started due to desire to keep I-5 from being closed again. The flood that hit them last time was more or less a flash flood and a dam will not effect that at all. Lots of rain / short time frame you got trouble.

Take the Satsop 4 in two days in a row you have a big flood but normal. Now if the 4 in come down back to back such as 8 pm to midnight and then midnight to 4 or 5 am you get a bloody 100 year flood. If the river is already at or near flood stage when this happens you get a 10,000 year flood. At to the mix in the 1930's ES ( he lived in the valley ) said that when that flood happened he had 18 in of snow on the ground and everyone was snowbound when the rain hit blowing like hell. He went to bed and when he got up to stoke the fire at daylight none, all gone. That day the water got in his barn which he had never seen before and has not happened since.

After that there was nothing anywhere in that event that was the drive for the event but rain. Rain in record amounts in a small area ( in geographic terms ) in a short time span. It was simply a world class flash flood that took out everything in its way downstream.

I remember being told by Salmo that this dam would NEVER happen.

I sure hope he is right.

I hope I am right that enough of the state legislators will see the financial stupidity of the project and never agree to budget for it.

Salmo said that it wouldn't happen as a federal flood control project because under four separate analyses by the Corps of Engineers it doesn't meet the benefit - cost requirements. Lewis Co. representatives have co-opted a few other legislators in Grays Harbor and Thurston Counties and are trying, and succeeding so far, to make this a state project. With no federal cost share (usually 75%), the entire 100% will have to come from the state budget. I hope I am right that enough of the state legislators will see the financial stupidity of the project and never agree to budget for it.

http://www.chronline.com/news/chehalis-b...e0b17d196c.html
Unfortunately, flood mitigation comes at the direct expense of fish habitat. The 50:50 appropriation would simply cancel itself out and the state will have foolishly wasted $700 million over the course about three chinook life cycles. Forrest's mama said it best... stupid is as stupid does.
The most troubling part of the article?
“I think we could support this bill if we get some language in it, that I don’t need the word guarantee, but that dictates that we split the $700 million as equally as we can with flooding and habitat restoration,” said Harry Pickernell, board member and chairman of the Chehalis Tribe. “That’s the only concern the Chehalis might have.”
Tyson Johnston, representing the Quinault Indian Nation, agreed.