PORT ANGELES, Wash. - A water pump malfunction at a fish hatchery late last month killed an estimated 600,000 young coho salmon, the Peninsula Daily News reported Sunday.

The deaths accounted for 70 percent of the 850,000 newly hatched coho at the Lower Elwha Klallam tribal fish hatchery.

"It's pretty severe," said hatchery fish manager Doug Morrill.

The salmon were in their alevin stage, meaning they had freshly emerged from their eggs. At hatcheries, they remain in incubation trays while feeding from their yolk sacks, which hang attached to the underside of their bodies and provide vital nutrients until absorbed.

The pump apparently overheated late on Jan. 29 or early the next morning and prevented water from circulating as required by the alevins, Morrill said. The hatchery's failure-alarm system didn't catch the problem, because it was designed to detect power outages, not pump failures.

The hatchery is looking into a new warning system that should prevent another such incident, Morrill said.

The tribe is the only group which spawns Elwha coho, a non-threatened and unlisted species.

Hatchery officials are working with state scientists to replace as many of the lost fish as possible. Surplus juvenile coho -- perhaps up to 150,000 of them -- from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlifes Dungeness Hatchery have been targeted for transfer to the Elwha, but first, scientists want to ensure the transfer won't have negative genetic effects.

Even if the transfer is approved, the number of coho released into the Elwha River in spring 2005 will be less than half the norm.

Older coho in the hatchery's outside ponds, set for release this spring, were not affected by the malfunction, which was isolated to the pump supplying the incubation room, Morrill said. Steelhead eggs were not affected because they had not yet hatched and were able to survive in standing water.

Coho released from the hatchery return to the Elwha at a rate of 0.6 to 1.2 percent.

The lost alevin were spawned from adult coho which returned last October and November. Alevin emerge about six weeks after fertilization. The young fish are raised for a year before being released, and surviving adults return from their ocean voyage a year later in the fall.

However, a certain number of coho always return after only six months while others stay at sea for 2 years, and in all there are three coho runs that return to the river in alternating years.

"Over time, that overlap of the three cycles will back-fill any kind of a loss," Morrill said.

It's a shame. I've fished the river since I was a little kid and have seen some great runs.

Last season was horrible though due to the silt in the water. All winter long it's been gray and unfishable.

I wonder what condition the equipment is in? This should've been avoidable.

What a perfect example of total incompetance.

This is a sad but avoidable loss.

Anyone who designs equipment to care for perishable or living products should have enough sense to realize that support systems fail and put a simple pressure switch at the pumps outlet or better yet at the incbators supply line to trigger an alarm or backup.

Whoever is in charge there should be replaced and whoever designed the system should be held responsible.

Plunker,

Like with most everything, hindsight is so much better than foresight. While it always seems after the fact that most hatchery fish kills are avoidable, people who devote their professional careers to hatchery system work are among the most surprised to discover that the latest fail-safe system wasn't. It's been my observation that as long as there have been, and as long as there are, hatcheries, there will be periodic fish kills. As soon as the latest problem is corrected, another flaw in the system reveals itself. I think the result is that major facility fish kills are less common than they once were, reducing the frequency to zero isn't likely.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

Salmo,

In my experience with the design of storage systems built to contain millions of dollars worth of perishables such a mistake would have been unthinkable. Double redundancy was always my guideline in the design of safety systems.

In this case a backup pump probably would have been installed if a naturally pressurized alternative supply were unavailable.

The outlet pressure of the pump and the pressure at the supply manifold would have been monitored, float valves or flow monitoring devices would have assured that running water was present and that the outlet was unplugged.

Any failure of the primary supply would have triggered an alarm and activated the backups.

That would have been done because the hindsight from failures over the many years has led to the adoption of procedures to assure dependability where life and money are at stake.

Whoever designed that system failed to adopt basic engineering principles due to ignorance of what has been learned from the hindsight of the past.

As I said:
"Anyone who designs equipment to care for perishable or living products should have enough sense to realize that support systems fail and put a simple pressure switch at the pumps outlet or better yet at the incubators supply line to trigger an alarm or backup."

And:
"Whoever is in charge there should be replaced and whoever designed the system should be held responsible."

The ability to learn from the past is a necessary qualification for anyone in the positions of systems design or management.

I maintain that this loss was due to incompetence.

This is just a classic example of why it is a dangerous conceit to believe we can somehow manufacture salmon at will, and somehow do it better than Mother Nature.

Hey fishnquack, How many of the record return salmon on the columbia do you think are mother nature's? Get a clue.

Prior to the damns, timber mills, irrigation ditches and other habitat destroying forces, the annual return of Chinook salmon to the Columbia river was counted in the 10's of millions. There were so many salmon that they could only estimate the run was approx 60 million (based on the fact that they caught 20 million).

600,000 salmon is not a record return - it's pathetic. It's the best that modern technology has been able to produce, but it's only 1% of mother nature's capacity.

That's not just a clue, it's a fact.

It's not the hatcheries' fault the dams went in the rivers. The hatcheries are replaceing the resource that the dams "destroyed"

Plunker,

Actually, I don't know if this accident was the result of incompetence or not. I'm not familiar with the Elwha hatchery, and I don't know the personnel there. However, I have seen many state hatcheries get some serious upgrades over the last 20 years that used to be unimaginable. And the qualifications and skill level of hatchery personnel that I have known in that same period has increased remarkably as well. But ultimately state facilities are designed, constructed, and furnished by the lowest bidder, which isn't necessarily the way the people who work there would prefer it. Most state hatcheries exist because a state legislator wanted a hatchery in his or her district, not because they wanted to fund a flawlessly functioning one. Cutting corners on cost has been a perpetual plague in the state hatchery system. So I'm willing to cut the workers some slack unless I have facts indicating they were careless or negligent.

BTW, I agree that hatcheries hold as perishible a stock of goods as any facility ever could.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

pimpinshrimp

I never said hatcheries don't have a role in mitigating habitat impacts that are beyond all hope of repair. Hatcheries can manufacture juvenile salmon seemingly at will. They just do a piss poor job of producing returning adults. Incidents like this one illustrate clearly the perils of putting all our eggs in one basket (or should that be one hatchery?).... we can get burned in a big way.

Although he overstated the magnitude of its historic salmonid returns (it's a little closer to 16 million) CDSeattle is absolutely correct in his assessment of the Columbia as a broken ecosystem. What's alarming is despite all the billion$ and techno-fixes we have invested in terms of artificial propagation, we can't hold a candle to what this salmon superhighway was once able to produce when the habitat was intact. With the singular exception of URB kings spawning in the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia, the grand dame's wild fish populations continue to steadily decline. All our "restoration" efforts and billion$ have done nothing to reverse this trend. Instead all we have manged to accomplish in the past century is to substitute them with an inferior replacement, and in numbers that are but a fraction of historic productivity. Hence my "dangerous conceit" remark.

While the Columbia may be past the point of no return, I look forward to the day when the Elwha River is returned to its free-flowing state, and miles of prime spawning habitat are made available to its wild salmon. One day, she will no longer have to rely on a hatchery to sustain her bounty... and neither will we.