The combine tracks are still fresh in this wheat field, like the marks in a just-vacuumed rug. The waters cruised by orca whales hundreds of miles away seem impossible to imagine, amid these waves of gold, rather than blue.
Yet the Snake River winding through these fields connects the critically endangered killer whales to this dryland wheat country. The river is home to some of the salmon orcas need: chinook, swimming home to the mighty Columbia and its major tributary, the Snake.
Now, a decades-long battle to take down the dams is finding new energy. The dam busters are seizing on a new star witness: mother orca whale Tahlequah. She swam with her dead calf through the Salish Sea for weeks in July, in a searing vision of loss watched around the world. Then came J50, a 3-year-old orca wasting away, the third orca dead in four months.
The losses galvanized orca champions now joining forces with those who have long wanted the dams gone because they hurt salmon. A new hybrid social movement is stirring. The word orca has become its own hashtag. Restaurants and markets have yanked chinook. Tahlequah is turning up in street art. On Friday, mourners staged an orca funeral procession in downtown Seattle, wearing black and white as they marched to the federal building, where they remembered Tahlequah and her calf and rallied for dam removal.
Pressure is also coming from changing power markets and shipping trends for wheat and other products, undercutting the benefits of the Lower Snake River dams and the reservoirs they create.
The dams have staunch advocates who say they are part of the economic lifeblood and way of life in the Northwest: wheat growers that use the waterway to get their crop to market, and farmers that use irrigation from one of the dams to grow grapes, apples and other crops. They also include barge and tug companies, ports, utilities — and their backers in Congress.
But each time an orca has died this summer, Ken Balcomb, founding director of the Center for Whale Research, has called for dam removal. Time is running out for the whales, now down to 74 animals and at grave risk of extinction, who need more food fast.
“We are looking at the twilight of this population,” he said.
Hydropower, some irrigation and an inland seaport
A tugboat twirls in the lake that once was the Columbia River, and a tanker truck used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to haul juvenile salmon past the dams is all shined up for display.
This recent rally for the dams in Kennewick drew more than a thousand people. At dozens of booths sponsored by utilities and agribusiness, dam boosters celebrated the benefits of the Federal Columbia River Power System — hydropower, irrigation and flood control.
First built beginning in the 1930s, the dams create hundreds of miles of slack-water reservoirs, including behind eight dams on the Columbia and Lower Snake that provide about 4,300 megawatts of power, enough to light about four cities the size of Seattle. The reservoirs also create a seaport in Lewiston, Idaho, 465 miles from the Pacific.
At a recent congressional field hearing in Pasco, at the center of dam country, schoolchildren kicked things off outside city hall with a sweet-voiced rendition of “Roll on Columbia Roll On,” as a giant American flag, unfurled from a public-utility-district bucket truck, flew.
In a morning of testimony Marci Green, president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers and a sixth-generation farmer, was among those praising the dams, particularly barging on the waterway to get wheat to market. “Barging is one of the lowest cost, most environmentally friendly modes of transportation we have,” Green said.
Yet transportation on the Lower Snake has been decreasing over the years, as products increasingly move by truck and rail. Total tonnage shipped on the Lower Snake River dropped 37 percent in less than a decade, as of 2016, continuing a long-term trend.
Even as the waterway and the whales endure their own declines, the agency that sells power from the federal dams is struggling, too. Booming production of natural gas, and a surge of renewable energy, including wind and especially solar power out of California, has created an unprecedented glut of cheap power throughout the West.
That’s a problem for the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which sells electricity from the federal network of dams.
BPA used to cash in on the wholesale market, especially in the spring, as rivers swell with runoff, and Californians turn on their air conditioners. California’s surge into solar-power generation has cratered the lucrative sales BPA used to count on. Today BPA sells power for about $34 a megawatt hour, while the price for the same amount goes for $20 on the wholesale market.
Tightening the revenue squeeze is the agency’s worry that its customers under long-term contracts, including public-utility districts around the region and Seattle City Light, will flee BPA’s higher prices when those contracts expire in 2028.
As both demand for its power and revenues plummet, the agency has blown through its cash reserves and hiked its rates four times in 10 years.
But its problem remains and is basically pretty simple, said BPA deputy administrator Dan James. “They have choices,” James said of Bonneville’s customers. “Who ever thought California would be offering us power in the daytime?”
The utility is slashing costs, including its fish and wildlife program intended to address damage done by the federal hydropower dams all over the region. In the 1990s NOAA Fisheries listed the first Northwest salmon and steelhead under the Endangered Species Act. Eventually 13 stocks in the Columbia River Basin were listed as threatened or endangered. By now federal agencies spend $500 million a year on fish and wildlife programs to make up for environmental damage caused by the dams.
