Historic plan to save endangered salmon, steelhead

Buckley, Wash. —


It is a disturbing sight: Salmon struggling their way upstream to Mud Mountain Dam some 10 miles away on the White River. Last year, thousands of them never made it.

The seven species of fish get caught up at the Buckley Diversion Dam, west of the larger Mud Mountain Dam. That's the place where the fish are collected, then taken by truck over to the Mud Mountain Dam so they can continue their trip up the White River to Mount Rainier.

"They run into an old dam that's got rebar sticking out," said Mike Garrity of the American Rivers environmental organization. "They impale themselves."

Garrity said the Buckley Diversion Dam is why the White River is
.... http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/historic-plan-save-endangered-salmon-steelhead/nhdmS/

What, no one's excited about the Corps having to improve their derelict fish passage at Mud Mountain Dam on the White River?

What is the purpose of that dam? It clearly has virtually zero flood control space in the reservoir. It's likely filled with sediment, so the flood benefits are long gone. The Corps does flood control and navigation. But this facility contributes neither. So why it is still there?

Cohoangler,

Mud Mountain is a single purpose flood control dam, construction completed in 1948. The reservoir is kept empty almost all the time, so there is lots of flood control space in it. It provides flood control benefits to part of Sumner, City of Pacific, and especially the Port of Tacoma. Whether the costs of maintaining and operating the project (high) are worth the benefits depends on who you ask. Pretty typicial; it's always worth it to those who benefit but do not pay the costs.

Sg

Agreed, why replace it? Just take the dam thing out! At least that little piece that's all raggedy jaggedy.

My apologies for not being clear. I was asking about Buckley Diversion dam. That rickey excuse for a dam that was seen in the video.

It's been a long time since I've seen a dam in worse shape (that wasn't being torn down). Fish Doc is right. Just take it out.

Removing the Buckley dam without replacing it would mean that White River anadromous fish would migrate up to the base of Mud Mountain Dam, which has no upstream fish passage facilities on site. A site alternatives analysis about 10 years ago concluded that the site of the Buckley former PSE diversion dam is the best location for upstream fish passage facilities. Yes, the Buckley dam is deteriorated; it was built in 1912. Replacing it with an up to date fish passage facility is the best way to pass White River salmon and steelhead upstream of Mud Mountain Dam in a safe, timely, and effective manner. OK, the best way would be to remove both the Buckley dam and Mud Mountain Dam, but that ain't gonna' happen given the relative political strengths of the interests involved. Yes, I proposed dam removal and received a good laugh for my efforts.

Sg

Salmo,
on the Clackamas in Oregon, they have at least one dam that works on a diversion tactic. For flood control, would it not be much cheaper in the long run to just put some type of over flow system and allow the main river to continue to flow and just allow the dam to fill as needed. Maybe a channel through the main dam with a out flow that only allows a certain amount out. During low water it would be completely open, and during high water times the out flow lowered.

Okay, I will admit that smarter people than me have been thinking about this issue for a long time.

Having said that.......

If MMD is empty almost all the time, and Buckley is only used as a trapping facility, the solution seems obvious. Take out Buckley, open the gates on MMD to let the fish pass unobstructed. If high water presents a flood control issue, lower the gates at MMD to protect downstream areas.

Presto! No need to trap/haul fish. No need for Buckley. You maintained existing levels of flood control (@MMD). And you just saved a few millon dollars.

Krijack & Cohoangler,

Since this involves the US Army Corps of Engineers, making any significant project changes seems to start at around $100 million. Changes to MMD are influenced by the surrounding geography/geology which no consists of a high earthfill dam. Modifying it into a different kind of flood storage reservoir would be massively expensive, and potentially not possible due to the surrounding landscape.

The obvious solution of removing Buckley and allowing fish to swim through the open gate at MMD would be tempting. However, the "gate" through the base of MMD is a 9' horseshoe shaped tunnel, 1500' long, and sloped such that water velocities exceed 40 fps, a tad faster than the most ambitious chinook or steelhead, let alone the massively more numerous pink salmon.

So what about modifying the 9' tunnel to have a flatter slope so that fish could swim through it? A little math shows that decreasing the slope would significantly decrease the volume of water that can pass through it before filling and becoming pressurized. And even more significantly in the case of the White River is its humongous sediment load, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of tons per year. A flatter tunnel with lower water velocity would allow the settling out of larger sediment particles, like small boulders. (White River sediment ranges from glacial fine colloidal material up to and including boulders. It's a highly active glacial river.) If sediment settles out in the tunnel, it would soon clog and end up backing up the river behind the dam. BTW, the 9' tunnel is lined with 1" sheet steel that the sediment abrades away so it has to be replaced every few years.

In hindsight, it's apparent that it's a bad idea to build a dam on a glacial river like the White. But in the 1930s and 1940s when it was planned and authorized, Americans still felt that controlling nature was not only possible, but feasible, and an inherent part of our manifest destiny. It only seems stupid in hindsight. And now we're stuck with the very expensive option of operating and maintaining a project that is an inherent bad fit with the environment, not to mention, maintaining anadromous fish runs around this bad idea.

Would I prefer dam removal? Heck yeah. But that idea doesn't appeal to the few thousand people whose homes are protected by it and the Port of Tacoma, especially since the federal government covers all the O&M costs. Now if the beneficiaries of flood control had to pay the costs of that flood control, things might be different.

Sg