SWEET HOME, Ore. — Susan Coleman, the mayor of Sweet Home, Ore., was enjoying the city’s annual harvest festival Oct. 7 until she looked at her phone.

“I started receiving text messages about dead fish, thousands of dead fish,” she said.

Linn County Commissioner Roger Nyquist saw a Facebook photo of kokanee salmon floating belly up below Green Peter Dam and figured it was a hoax.

“This cannot be true,” Nyquist recalled thinking.

A phone call confirmed the nightmare scenario was real — and far worse than the initial photo.

The South Santiam River, known for its clean water, then began running brown, clogging municipal water systems downstream.

“It was like pudding, it was so thick. There was so much mud,” Coleman said.

Court-ordered drawdowns of two reservoirs, meant to improve passage through two dams for endangered spring chinook and winter steelhead, left a “path of destruction,” local and state officials said.

Starting in October, the South Santiam River below Green Peter Reservoir was choked with dead fish, drinking water was tainted, some residents’ wells dried up and the region lost tourism dollars, officials said.

When reservoirs dropped, kokanee and trout were flushed through dams and killed by barotrauma — a rapid and extreme change in water pressure, similar to scuba divers experiencing the “bends.”

The reservoirs are now refilling with rain, but residents are worried they won’t reach previous levels by spring or summer, which would reduce river flows. And drawdowns appear set again for autumn or winter at Green Peter and Lookout Point dams, as well as others.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was forced to empty the reservoirs by a September 2021 injunction, the result of a lawsuit filed by environmental groups Northwest Environmental Defense Center, WildEarth Guardians and Native Fish Society.

The organizations didn’t respond to requests for interviews for this story, but a representative of WildEarth Guardians referred to its news release from November. In that statement, the environmental groups expressed their support for communities that bore the brunt of unintended consequences from the reservoir drawdowns.

“All communities deserve clean and reliable drinking water, and we are committed to working with state and federal leaders to help craft a solution that provides immediate relief for Sweet Home and other impacted Oregonians,” the news release stated.

“It’s imperative that we work together toward a holistic solution that benefits our wild fish, rivers and communities,” said Jonah Sandford, executive director of Northwest Environmental Defense Center, in the news release.

A Corps scientist said it isn’t clear — and won’t be for years — whether the drawdowns helped juvenile endangered fish make their way to the Pacific Ocean.

Government battle royale

The drawdowns’ effects aren’t expected to be as severe in the future, but local residents are urging U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez to modify his ruling.

Greg Taylor, Corps supervisory fisheries biologist, said a modification “is very possible and something we’re going to pursue.” A proposal could be submitted this spring.

Some municipalities are considering lawsuits.

In a letter to the Corps, Gov. Tina Kotek said she hoped the agency would work with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to mitigate the impacts.

The DEQ, however, intends to penalize the Corps for violating environmental law.

Meanwhile, a coalition of local and state officials blames the state, as the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife supported drawdowns. They’ve asked the state to pay $45 million to cover costs including cleanup and additional equipment required to make the water drinkable.

Kotek responded in a letter to the officials that those expenses should come from the federal government.

“There is no one stepping up to the plate and saying they’ll take responsibility for these astronomical costs,” said state Rep. Jami Cate, R-Lebanon.

“It fuels that urban-rural divide, that people feel like our voices aren’t heard, that what we need to survive as communities doesn’t matter,” Cate said.

Several officials said the drawdown impacts also “reeked” of hypocrisy, because a fisherman who took more than his limit or a timber company that polluted a river would face massive fines and other penalties.

Wildlife over people

Residents of the area on the east side of the Willamette Valley believe the government has prioritized an endangered species over people once again.

Communities impacted were part of the spotted owl controversy in the late 1980s and 1990s that damaged the Northwest’s timber economy, costing thousands of jobs. The spotted owl was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Some Cascade foothills towns reinvented themselves as outdoor recreation gateways, with the area’s reservoirs as prime attractions.

Last summer, the drawdown at Green Peter Reservoir started in July, and boaters deserted the area when they couldn’t launch due to low levels, said Coleman, the mayor of Sweet Home, population 10,000.

The water level kept dropping through the summer.

Water woes

Cities along the South Santiam are known for their award-winning drinking water, and Coleman said they were told it wouldn’t be impacted.

But after deep drawdowns that peaked in October, the water was tan or green and tasted like chlorine because of the chemicals added to make it safe to drink.

City employees scrambled and worked overtime.

“We didn’t get notified it was happening. The next thing that we know is that the water that comes into our system was quite a bit more turbid than normal,” said Chris Bailey, public works director for Albany, which has about 57,000 people.

“It took a while to figure this out,” said Max Baxter, public works director for the city of Lowell, Ore., population 1,200. Lowell is below Lookout Point Reservoir and draws water from Dexter Reservoir.

The water still isn’t back to normal, Baxter said.

Officials said the wear and tear on water treatment plants isn’t sustainable, so upgrades are needed.

Filtration ponds at Lebanon’s facility were clogged with 3 feet of silt in October. The city, which has a population of about 19,000, usually accumulates 4-6 inches of silt at its water plant annually.

Cate, the state representative, said cities can’t wait to see if the impacts are less severe this year.

“Even slightly less is so far beyond what our water treatment plants are capable of handling,” she said.

Denver Pugh, a grass seed farmer from Shedd, Ore., and president of the Linn County Farm Bureau, said he hadn’t heard of irrigation impacts from the deep drawdowns at Green Peter.

But he thought it could pose a problem, particularly in dry autumn, as farmers downstream still might be harvesting certain crops in October, or trying to give types of grass a boost entering winter.

Pugh worried about the reservoir not recharging fully, though, and problems with enough water flow for irrigation in the future.

Larger narrative

The conflict over endangered fish and the Willamette River basin reservoirs fits into a larger regional narrative about dams and endangered salmon.

Four lower Snake River dams in Washington state have been the target of another lawsuit against the federal government.

An agreement in the case, reached in December through mediation, includes more than $1 billion in new federal investments in wild fish restoration over the next decade and an “unprecedented” 10-year break from decades-long litigation.

Authority to breach the dams remains with Congress, but tribal leaders and agricultural stakeholders say the agreement is a “pathway” to breaching.

In Northern California in mid-February, Siskiyou County residents expressed concerns about water quality and the loss of reservoirs after four dams on the Klamath River were breached to improve passage for endangered salmon.

Willamette basin dams

Green Peter and Lookout Point dams, completed in the 1960s, are two of 13 dams in the Willamette River basin. Their main purpose is flood management, and the structures have avoided more than $25 billion in damage, according to the Corps.

During summer, stored water is released in the river downstream to improve water quality, produce hydropower, support fish and wildlife, to provide water for irrigation and for municipal uses.

Nine of the dams, including Green Peter and Lookout Point, generate enough electricity to supply about 300,000 homes.

During winter months, the reservoirs are kept at their lowest levels to make room for capturing rain runoff and snowmelt from the Cascades.

Fish passage

Taylor, the Corps biologist, said decisions on restoring native fish runs always involve trade-offs.

The outcome of the lawsuit determined the endangered fish needed help immediately, he said.

Turbidity and fish deaths were expected to a degree, Taylor said. “You don’t know exactly how these things are going to play out,” he said.

Under normal wintertime operations at most Willamette dams, there is little downstream fish passage capability for chinook and steelhead.

“If you do pass those fish, they are going through a turbine unit with high mortality. The only other way the fish can get out, at that time of year, is through that regulating outlet. Because the fish are surface orientated, they don’t find that,” Taylor said.

Reservoirs were lowered so endangered fish could find safe passage, but at the same time kokanee were sucked through the dam outlets first because they reside deeper in the reservoirs.

Kokanee, a sockeye salmon, were introduced to the reservoirs. They are a “landlocked” species, meaning they don’t travel to the ocean and back as part of their life cycle.

Michelle Dennehy, an ODFW spokeswoman, said Green Peter hasn’t been stocked with kokanee since 2015 and the population needs to be assessed before that’s considered again.

Taylor said the Green Peter reservoir level was dropped 142 feet below its normal set point, which hadn’t been done in more than 50 years. The remaining flow essentially recut its river channel, washing silt into the water.

Heavy storms also sloughed sediment into the reservoir and river.

Do drawdowns work?

A similar effort to restore fish runs at Fall Creek Reservoir near Eugene has included an annual drawdown to the stream bed and succeeded, biologists said.

“That population is sustaining itself above the dam. It was not happening before then,” said Taylor, of the Corps.

However, Fall Creek isn’t perfectly analogous, he cautioned.

“It can work. It doesn’t mean it’s going to work in these specific situations,” he said.

Dennehy, of the ODFW, said that without taking steps to provide passage, it won’t be possible to recover those chinook and steelhead populations.

The dams, she said, eliminated between 25% to 95% of historic spring chinook production in the area, depending on the river basin.

Alternative methods

Alternatives to dam drawdowns include using floating collectors so fish can be captured and trucked downstream or transported through a pipeline.

“Ones developed in the Pacific Northwest have not worked very well, and they are incredibly expensive,” Taylor said.

A stream passage structure operated at Green Peter Dam through 1988, but proved ineffective and was scrapped.

The Corps, in its draft environmental impact statement, identified drawdowns as the preferred alternative at Green Peter. At Lookout Point, a floating fish collector was deemed the best long-term approach.

Impacts on other wildlife

The trade-offs for drawdowns included negative impacts on other wildlife, as well as endangered chinook and steelhead living below the dams.

Besides silt washed downstream into spawning areas, the drawdowns resulted in the highest river temperatures since the dams were constructed, which is troubling for reproduction, Taylor said.

State officials stressed they wanted to help restore fish runs but balked at the cost to communities.

“We should come up with a balance, where we can get clean water and help an endangered species,” said Coleman, the Sweet Home mayor.

Nyquist, the county commissioner, said the government’s first priority, when making changes, should be to do no harm.

“If one looks at things in their totality here, it’s unconscionable,” Nyquist added.