original article



Vacuum pressure may someday pull salmon over dams


The vacuum system being tested at the Roza Dam has the potential to move fish significant distances, and some believe the technology could be used to move live fish even over some of the region’s largest dams that lack fish passage, such as Grand Coulee.

By Kate Prengaman
Yakima Herald-Republic


YAKIMA — How fast can a coho go?

With experimental new fish-passage technology being tested at the Roza Dam collection facility, the fish can easily break 10 mph, zipping 40 feet in just a couple of seconds.

Using vacuum pressure — a flexible sleeve and gentle suction — a live fish can be safely whisked across the room and into a tank of water.

The 40-foot-long tube at Roza, 10 miles north of the city of Yakima, is part of a pilot project that will allow Yakama Nation fish biologists to study whether the transport causes any long-term problems for the fish.

“We’re trying to provide a cost-effective way to move fish over barriers,” said Todd Deligan, vice president of the fish transport division of Bellevue-based Whooshh Innovations. The company’s vacuum technology was created to transport fragile fruit during harvest, but a couple years ago, it decided to see if it could be used for live migratory fish, he said.

Installed this month, the biologists and engineers were testing and tweaking the new setup on Thursday with one coho, running it through the tube again and again, and it didn’t seem to mind.

The real test will be this spring when thousands of chinook run through the facility’s fish collection system, being identified and weighed by biologists before heading upstream.

Yakama Nation research scientist Mark Johnson said that using the vacuum transport system will save his team time: Sending the fish into the tanker truck through the tube is much faster than the current method of carrying them by hand. More importantly, it should reduce stress on the fish by getting them back in the water faster.

But the biologists and the Whooshh engineers agreed that in the long term, they are thinking about big-picture applications for this technology: next-generation fish passage.

“We’re excited about using something like this to get fish into reservoirs, over the dams,” said Dave Fast, senior research scientist for the Yakama Nation. “It could be a cost-effective and time-effective alternative to trucking fish in.”

Constructing traditional fish passage is expensive, especially for reservoirs with fluctuating water levels. The new fish passage planned for Cle Elum Dam, for example, will cost nearly $90 million, and that’s just to get fish out. To get the returning adults back in will still require driving them from the collection facility below the dam up to the lake.

The vacuum tube system, which relies on a generator to create suction, is basically just a soft, flexible sleeve inside a protective plastic pipe. When wet, the sleeve seals around the fish, so very little pressure is actually required to move them. When this reporter stuck her hand in, it felt like far less pull than a vacuum cleaner.

A physiological study done by USGS scientists at the Columbia River Research Laboratory found no negative impacts on the fish from the technology.

The vacuum system has the potential to move fish significant distances, horizontal and vertical, Deligan said. His company installed a 230-foot long system to move dead fish at a processing plant in Norway earlier this year.

He believes the technology could be used to move live fish even over some of the region’s largest dams that lack fish passage, such as Grand Coulee.

For now, the Yakama biologists will feed fish into the system by hand, after checking their vitals, but eventually, Fast said, the system could be designed so that fish swimming upstream would head directly into the tube.

Interest in the potential for the technology is building around the region, he said, but this Roza pilot project is the first step.

Cool!

Seems like getting smolts downriver is a harder issue to solve?

Thanks,

I bet it would feel good to stand in front of that tube......suckjob

Pretty cool read.

If successful, it would be interesting to see how much new habitat could be opened up at dams "that don't currently allow for fish passage"

I'm a little confused by the technology though…..



When I read the first part of the article, I picture the hose sucking up water & fish w/o the hose collapsing. The quote above makes it sound like the hose does collapse around the fish almost like a vacuum sealer. If so, wouldn't that distress the gills and slime coat?

Not knocking it, just trying to understand it. I'll be curious to see how this plays out in the years ahead.

Eric,

Remember those old department stores where they put cash and checks into a cylinder, stuck it in a vacuum tube, and it whooshed away to the upstairs accounting department? It's sorta' like that. The fish is placed in the cylinder that seals shut around the fish; then the cylinder goes whoosh, through the vacuum tube to its destination.

We don't know if these have real world practical applications for fish passage. My hydraulics engineer office mate has been reviewing and working with this part of the past year. Time will tell.

Sg

That makes more sense. Thanks.

Remember the chocolate vacuum tube the fat kid on Willy-Wonka got sucked up in.

If it works, it will be interesting to consider the logistics of smolt outmigration through somewhere like Lake Roosevelt. There's a lot of slack water up there. It would be cool if they were able to bring fish back to the Sanpoil. Maybe some decent gravel on the Spokane if the water fluctuations don't kill them.

The concept isn't new. WDFW uses pumps to move fish in their hatcheries. My understanding is that the first ones were converted pumps used to move tomatoes in canning facilities without damaging/bruising/breaking them. It is not a big jump to move fish.

Did a Google search and found the following link to a Canadian company that builds pumps to move fish of all sizes.

http://inventivemarine.com/canavac/

This sounds like a great idea for Grand Coulee, if it works of course.
I wonder how much it takes to maintain, and how cheap the price could be. Crazy idea, but perhaps in the future they could use this in areas that have natural barriers to spawning habitat as well, like waterfalls etc.

I agree this may help with getting fish to their old spawning grounds where there are man made barriers. Natural barriers are just that, and probably better left alone, else we (humans) ruin something else.

This project came as a proposal to the habitat committee that I sit on, with my employer providing the mitigation funds for habitat projects. While the idea was intriguing, it was voted down because the committee members had a hard justifying it as a "Habitat Project" even though everyone thought it had potential for fish passage around obstructions. I guess Grand Coulee would be the ultimate fish passage obstruction.