Restoration Committee Update Winter 2024
by Ken Carloni….
Winchester Dam and Rock Creek Hatchery on the Ropes
The North Umpqua River is considered a “Salmon Stronghold” on the West Coast because it still has all of the salmon and steelhead runs historically found here. Its sister river, the South Umpqua, has not fared so well. Over a century of logging, mining, water extraction for farms and ranches, invasive smallmouth bass, and now climate change has had profound negative consequences for native fish in that river system. The South Umpqua summer steelhead run is extinct, and spring chinook are hanging by a thread.
Umpqua Watersheds’ motto to “Save the Best and Restore the Rest” obliged us to join with local and regional conservation partners to form the North Umpqua Coalition (NUC) several years ago to fight the two biggest challenges to maintaining healthy salmonid runs on this river: the Winchester Dam on the lower North and the Rock Creek hatchery farther up (see previous newsletter articles https://umpquawatersheds.org/blog/restoration-blog/). Fortunately, our legal and outreach efforts to end these challenges to our iconic native fish runs are paying off.
Rock Creek Hatchery: Readers of this newsletter will recall that the RCH burned down in the 2020 Archie Creek Fire. However, smolts continued to be reared in a Rogue River hatchery, trucked to acclimation tanks at the RCH, and subsequently released into the North. In 2022, the NUC used the latest science to convince the Fish and Wildlife Commission, the governor-appointed board that oversees the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife (ODF&W), to end the summer steelhead hatchery program at the RCH against the recommendation of ODF&W managers. This decision was immediately challenged by Douglas County and the Douglas Timber Operators, and an injunction was issued to allow the continued release of hatchery smolts into the North while that lawsuit worked its way through the courts.
The Conservation Angler, Steamboaters, The North Umpqua Foundation, Native Fish Society, Umpqua Watersheds, and Pacific Rivers all participated in that case as Amicus or “friend of the court” parties. In late October, a Marion County Circuit Court judge denied the County and Timber Industry’s motion for the injunction, and releases of summer steelhead smolts have been ended! After years of legal and legislative work by the NUC, we are incredibly gratified by this outcome.
For more background from our legal team, see the Native Fish Society’s press release: https://nativefishsociety.org/news-media/press-release-court-protects-wild-north-umpqua-river-summer-steelhead.
UW and our partners believe that the RCH should not be rebuilt and that the North Umpqua should again become an all-wild river for all native fish runs. We were therefore pleased to see that Gov. Kotek’s budget contains no funding to rebuild it. Unfortunately, governors’ budgets rarely reflect actual final budgets, so lobbying by special interest groups will undoubtedly intensify over the next several months. The NUC will continue our efforts to present scientific data to convince our legislators to spend our tax dollars on more important state priorities and to let this vestige of 19th-century technology fade into history.
Winchester Dam: This relic of the 1890s has been delaying and killing salmonids migrating to their spawning habitats for well over a century. It’s poorly designed fish, latter constructed in 1945, has not done enough to help fish negotiate this major barrier, and a series of botched “repairs” over the last few decades by the dam owners, the Winchester Water Control District (WWCD), have made the problem worse.
The NUC’s monitoring and legal efforts to compel regulators to do their jobs is finally paying off. Numerous violations were exposed during the WWCD’s most recent repair attempts, and a major fish kill of a half million lamprey larvae resulted in a $27 million fine levied by the ODF&W. The state Dept. of Environmental Quality also levied fines for water pollution during those “repairs”. The WWCD has chosen to contest the ODF&W fine, and a trial will be held in early to mid-2025 to determine the disposition of that case.
The NUC also compelled the state Water Resources Dept. to conduct a bathymetric study of the reservoir bottom that found that the WWCD was impounding an extra 91 acre feet of water that they did not have rights to. They have been ordered to lower the dam by 1.5 feet to rectify this over-allocation, but doing so would involve rebuilding the fish ladder at a cost of several tens of millions of dollars.
But the biggest nail in the Winchester Dam’s coffin came in mid-September: the WWCD was found to be non-compliant with Oregon statutes and ordered to install “fish passage at Winchester Dam consistent with applicable standards.” As noted, this would prohibitively expensive for the WWCD. One of our NUC partners, WaterWatch of Oregon, has a storied history of raising money to remove dams and has offered to secure the funding to have the dam removed at little or no cost to the owners.
I started this report with UW’s motto, “Save the Best and Restore the Rest.” Elsewhere in this newsletter, you will read about UW efforts in the South Umpqua Basin to monitor beaver populations, with the goal of rebuilding functioning ecosystems as we work to “…Restore the Rest.”
