Explore these perspectives by clicking on the image below or in the Perspectives menu. Moreover, returning the lower Snake River to a near natural flow resolves most of the issues created by the four dams. Firefighters search for survivors in the mud unleashed by a 2019 tailings dam failure in Brazil. And the barriers are often made from a mixture of rock and the tailings themselves, rather than a more uniform and predictable material such as concrete. “The question is, can we predict that, can we get ahead of the curve?”. They alone power 1.87 million homes across the state. By 1999 NMFS’ results demonstrated that for the ESA listed Snake River fall Chinook and steelhead, dam breaching by itself would likely lead to recovery. While Puget Sound chinook make up the bulk of their diet, the orcas rely on Snake River spring chinook during their annual coastal migrations. The funding was recommended by Governor Jay Inslee’s Southern Resident Orca Task Force, convened last year to come up with ways to save the imperiled orcas. Already, there have been two Snake River dam removal studies conducted in recent years by NOAA Fisheries. He called the talk over dams "a distraction" that continues to divide the state. Why not just let these existing projects carry out other methods to save these species? If you're interested in submitting a Letter to the Editor, click here. Jeff Friedman, U.S. president of the Pacific Whale Watch Association, said "the dams are not everything but it's a big piece. In June, mining giant BHP said it would spend $10 million to study such reuse of copper tailings. Aren’t Governor Inslee’s Washington State Task Force & the federal CRSO process already on top of the salmon and orca issues? Filtered tailings systems can cost five to 10 times more than a conventional dam, says Harvey McLeod, a geological engineer who designs tailings dams for Klohn Crippen Berger, a private firm. Worldwide, such a policy could mean the demise of thousands of mines and tailings dams (which could be replaced by dams with different designs). Returning the Snake River to natural condition will help salmon and whales, and save money. His fellow Democrats quietly kept their distance from him on the issue, aware of the serious economic consequences at stake for Eastern Washington. Morgenstern notes that similar reforms he and others suggested in the late 1990s, after an earlier string of dam disasters, were never fully embraced. So, the governor’s task force linked the Snake River dams to orca survival and they prescribed a closer look at dam breaching. The leftovers can still be toxic, but there’s less danger of a devastating flood, says Jan Morrill of Earthworks. We could mark this incident down as just a silly gaffe made by a flustered candidate near the end of a long campaign. Even many of the Army Corps of Engineers’ internal documents recommend that returning the river to natural or normative conditions may be the only recovery scenario for Snake River fall Chinook salmon, and it will also benefit other salmon populations. The time is now.". We will have to wait and see. Just 74 animals remain in the small group. McDermott never could get the support of his state’s delegation, and his bills went nowhere. All four runs were listed as threatened or endangered under the ESA by 1997. There was no point in our continuing upstream to Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite dams to take photographs and videos of fish passage, because that was not allowed.