Hatcheries like the Carson National Fish Hatchery, pictured here, breed millions of salmon and let them grow until they are mature enough to be released so they can try to swim to the ocean. Photo © Kristyna Wentz-Graff, Oregon Public Broadcasting 

The U.S. Has Spent More Than $2 Billion on a Plan to Save Salmon. The Fish Are Vanishing Anyway.

Hundreds of government funded hatcheries in the Northwest United States were supposed to stop the decline of wild salmon.

They haven't. 

Federal officials have propped up aging hatcheries despite their known failures, pouring more than $2.2 billion over the past 20 years into keeping them going instead of investing in new hatcheries and habitat restorations that could sustain salmon for the long term, an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica has found.

These failures are all the more important because hatcheries represent the U.S. government’s best effort to fulfill a promise to the Northwest’s Indigenous people. The government and tribes signed treaties in the 1850s promising that the tribes’ access to salmon, and their way of life, would be preserved. Those treaties enshrined their right to fish in their “usual and accustomed places.” The pacts between sovereign nations did not stop the U.S. from moving forward with a massive decades-long construction project in the middle of the 20th century: the building of 18 dams that transformed a free-flowing river into a machine of irrigation, shipping and hydroelectric power.

The dams meet nearly 40% of today’s regional electricity needs. But they decimated wild salmon.

Even in Canada, Where Water Prices Are Low, Aging Infrastructure and Rising Costs are a Problem

Canadians living in the Great Lakes basin have become spoiled.

In taking the seemingly endless availability of water for granted, topics like the material cost of it or the amount listed on someone’s water bill can be seen as immaterial and unnecessary to discuss.

But in many respects, water is also a fairly traditional resource commodity, one that governments have invested billions in maintaining. There’s a cost to all this, and not just for the liquid itself.

When it comes to the cost of water, then, much is determined by the state of pipes and other infrastructure — so much so that it’s often challenging to separate the cost of the resource itself from the infrastructure necessary to use it. This, perhaps more than anything, determines the cost of water in Ontario.

And that cost is rising. Some of the highest rates for water in Ontario are in cities and towns within the Great Lakes watershed, including Thunder Bay on Lake Superior, Windsor on Lake St. Clair, Kingston on Lake Ontario, and Chatham-Kent on Lake Erie.

This rise is hitting low-income families hard, with more than 130,000 low-income households in 22 of Canada’s largest cities already paying more for residential water use than they can afford, Great Lakes Now reports. 
 

Bureau of Reclamation Fisheries Biologist Zak Sutphin checks a fish trap set in the San Joaquin River near the town of Newman in California's Central Valley. Photo © Matt Black / Circle of Blue
 

Fish Screens Are Part of The Answer to Saving Sacramento River Salmon

Before the founders of the Family Water Alliance began installing metal screens at the end of the big pipes that draw water from the Sacramento River to irrigate Colusa County’s rice and vegetable fields, seasonal salmon runs often included sizable helpings of fresh fish flopping in the brown dirt of farm furrows. The pumps that transported water were powerful enough to suck migrating fish into the pipes and toss them out the other end, typically startled and very much alive.

Drought, warming water, big dams that block spawning grounds, and contaminated runoff from cities and farmland are said by wildlife researchers to be the primary causes of salmon deaths in the Sacramento River. Installing fish barriers at the end of irrigation pipes, though, is a small, elegant, and not terribly expensive step to help prevent California’s salmon runs from disappearing.

Hundreds of fish screens have been installed on northern California’s other salmon spawning rivers. The result is that in the struggle to sustain California’s imperiled chinook, coho, and steelhead fishery, hundreds of thousands of spawning adults, newly hatched fry, and migrating juveniles are not perishing in irrigation systems.

“The lessons here are easy to explain,” said Debra Lemburg, the project manager at Family Water Alliance, during a 2015 interview with Circle of Blue. “Farmers can pump water from the river. Fish are protected. They are not being killed.”