Stagnant water in a still dam
Washington State — The effects of last year’s floods have turned Pierce County’s White River pink. Thousands of pink salmon are stuck, jammed up against a damaged dam with nowhere to go. The salmon are trying to swim upstream in an effort to find their spawning grounds, but the bump in the road has been pushing them back down. “The fish are having to work a little harder to get up into the fish ladders,” said Richard Johnson, a fishery biologist And the fish are apparently tired of it. Thousands and thousands of salmon are milling below a diversion dam. “They’re expending energy everyday as they wait to move upstream,” said Jeff Dillon with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “So we need to move them upstream as quickly as we possibly can.” The problem is the White River’s low water level this season. Rushing water typically attracts salmon to fish ladders, but this year, the river isn’t flowing there. The wooden dam was damaged during last year’s winter storm, and the worn-down walls of the dam have spread on the flood of the river. “The water level dropped as it went through the hole that was damaged,” Dillon said. And that has confused the pinks in a record year. Fishery biologists expect 50,000 salmon to come through. Puget Sound Energy, which owns the dam, is using electrical pumps to funnel more water through the ladder. It also plans to fix the dam’s wooden wall. Neither will be an easy fix. “We have too much water to fix the dam as we have historically, and we have too little water to insure proper function of the fish trap,” Dillion said. For now, biologists are trapping the fish and driving them upstream to their spawning grounds. They say they hope to have a solution in place before the endangered Chinook salmon begin their run next month.