The endangered Southern Resident killer whale population in Washington state barely even exists in the eyes of the federal authorities who hold their fate in their hands, it seems. At least, that’s the impression created by the draft Environmental Impact Statement just released by the federal agencies overseeing the fate of the four Lower Snake River dams, concluding predictably that the dams should remain in place. The whales (whose numbers declined to 72 this winter) depend on the salmon runs being destroyed by those same dams, but only two sentences in the entire section of the EIS on its effects on wildlife are dedicated to addressing their plight—or rather, abjectly failing to.
The three agencies involved in the EIS—the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bonneville Power Administration—are dam-centric authorities well-known for guarding their bureaucratic turf, and they have always been hostile to environmentalists’ pleadings to remove the dams for the sake of the salmon, whose runs are also highly endangered.
So the EIS’s conclusions were not a surprise to anyone. Orca Network founder Howard Garrett predicted the outcome last fall, warning that the EIS “absolutely will not recommend breaching the dams. The Save Our Salmon coalition warned: “This process is being badly manipulated—with pre-determined outcomes, skewed analyses, and significantly limited opportunities for public input.”
That accurately describes what the draft EIS contains. It obliquely mentions that their comments were flooded with concern from Northwest residents about the fate of their endangered orcas. But then it only addresses the killer whales’ plight by referencing outdated studies to claim that dam removal would not improve their prey availability.
The orcas go largely unmentioned through the EIS’s description of the effects of its “preferred alternative”—namely, not just leaving the dams intact but investing more money in them—until the very end of a section on wildlife that claims the Southern Residents aren’t really dependent on the Snake River salmon:
In addition, the southern resident killer whales may have a slight increase in available food around the mouth of the Columbia River. However, this increase in food availability would have a negligible effect on killer whales, given that the Snake River and Columbia Chinook populations constitute a small portion of their overall diet.
This declaration is based on a federal fisheries study, conducted over a decade ago with no data at all from river-specific orca-feeding studies, that claimed that the amount of time the orcas spend at the mouth of the Columbia feeding on Chinook is negligible, and that their primary food source is Puget Sound salmon. That study has long been discarded by orca scientists who have data demonstrating that, in fact, Columbia River salmon comprise the largest portion of their diets for most of the year, and that Puget Sound salmon are only important to them during the summer months.
NOAA scientists have been working hard to try to figure out which river systems the whales mostly feed from in the wintertime, because they need the scientific data in hand before they can begin to establish the mouths of these rivers as the orcas’ critical habitat in the wintertime, the first step in any federally funded recovery program. NOAA Northwest’s chief whale scientist, Brad Hanson, first collected a handful of fish scales from an orca feeding at the mouth of the Columbia in 2010, and kept gathering data on orca feeding behaviors there through 2016.
The remainder of the EIS similarly erases orcas from the picture it tries to create of a perfectly acceptable status quo. Its sections examining the various alternatives declare that each one was not expected to adversely impact habitat or individuals using the habitat in the study area.” It similarly declared that even dam removal would have a “negligible effect.”
“We’re seeing recognition that how we’ve been doing business in the Lower Snake and the Columbia is just leading us on an extinction path for salmon and steelhead,” said Tom France with the National Wildlife Federation.
Julian Matthews, a Nez Perce tribal member, told Crosscut that said the dam removal is the permanent fix the salmon runs need.
“Most of the people that are talking against breaching are worried about how much money they are going to lose. Tribal members, like me, are not about money,” Matthews said. “We just want to make sure salmon can come back, as they did before the dams were introduced.”