GOLD HILL — Jackson County is on the cusp of securing the final cash to remove Gold Ray Dam from the Rogue River next summer, should ongoing environmental studies conclude it’s the best outcome for the 105-year-old structure.
As efforts falter to save North America’s largest freshwater fish — a toothless beast left over from the days of dinosaurs — officials hope to stave off extinction by sending more water hurtling down a river so the fish can spawn in the wild.
Water flowing out of Applegate Dam could begin generating electricity in as early as four years under a new federal hydropower license issued Thursday to a Utah-based utility that is retrofitting small dams for electricity throughout the Northwest.
After seven years of studies, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officially issued its license to Symbiotics for attaching a 10 megawatt generating facility to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam on the Applegate River.
Since its completion in 1923, the Powerdale Hydroelectric Project has been a major obstacle for aquatic wildlife in the Hood River. The 200-foot-long concrete diversion dam is located just a few miles upstream from the Hood River’s confluence with the Columbia, meaning significantly restricted access to and from roughly 144 miles of upstream habitat for Hood River’s native fish population.
The Nez Perce Tribe delivered approximately 700,000 bright orange-eyed Clearwater coho salmon eggs collected and spawned at Dworshak National Fish Hatchery in northern Idaho to the Eagle Creek National Fish Hatchery in Estacada last week.
Green Douglas firs where the waters cut through.
Down her wild mountains and canyons she flew.
Canadian Northwest to the ocean so blue,
Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn,
So, roll on, Columbia, roll on.
— Woody Guthrie
No one ever wrote a song about the wonders of the 13 dams on the Willamette River. Somehow the joys of flood control navigation, irrigation and recreation (despite the handy built-in rhyme scheme,) never lent itself to a chorus of “So roll on, Willamette, roll on.” (more…)
Many hoped that more than 10 years of lawsuits over protecting Northwest salmon and operating Columbia Basin dams would come to a close in a Portland courtroom Monday.
It didn’t, but the end could be in sight.
Snohomish County Public Utility District has reached agreements with several key parties as part of the relicensing of the Henry M. Jackson Hydroelectric Project, located north of Sultan.
Idaho Falls-based engineer Ted Sorenson has designed or built hydroelectric projects around Idaho. Now he’s extending his expertise into Montana, where his companies, Sorenson Engineering Inc. and Turnbull Hydro, are building a $12 million hydro plant on an irrigation canal near Fairfield, Mont.
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