It has been quiet on the “Breach the Lower Snake River Dams” front. There are facts that should be considered in the billion-dollar pipe dream whether you are for or against these dams.

Breaching the dams will provide NO additional spawning area for spring or summer chinook, steelhead, coho, or sockeye, and little if any for fall chinook. Most of their spawning habitat was upstream of dams without fish passage.

Fish facilities at the lower Snake River dams provide safe passage of over 99% for adult fish and over 96% for juvenile fish per dam.

The current use of spill is causing 50% or more mortality to outmigrating juvenile salmon that could be transported around up to seven dams with less than 2% mortality.

Adult migration is being hampered by over 300 miles of high dissolved gas and confusing flow patterns that delay their finding entrances to collection systems and fish ladders.

Juvenile salmon are debilitated or killed by prolonged exposure to high dissolved gas levels. Idaho is expecting a record steelhead return and the highest sockeye return since Lower Granite Dam was completed and all four dams were place.

Other dams, human degradation of habitat and prodigious over-harvest reduced Columbia River annual salmon returns more than 95% from 16 million fish historically to only 482,816 total salmon over Bonneville Dam in 1939.

It is time to get off the pipe dream not supported by the facts and focus on solving the real problems of the Snake River salmon.