5,479 Days of Tower Ops: 15 Years of Broken Promises
It’s 2025, and as the days lengthen, by mid-April, Lake Billy Chinook will take on the green hue depicted here. Since late 2009, that sickly green water comprises the bulk of the flow into the lower Deschutes River.
The End of 2009, The Beginning of Tower Troubles
The end of 2024 marks the 15th anniversary of the operation of Portland General Electric’s Selective Water Withdrawal Tower. The DRA, its board, staff and supporters like you have spent the bulk of those years contributing in myriad ways to tracking how the Tower’s operation has fallen far short of what was promised by PGE. The two main twin trends affecting the lower Deschutes River that we’ve watched in dismay:
Water quality has markedly declined. While the lower Deschutes River prior to Tower installation had some challenges in meeting state water quality standards, violations of temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen have proliferated since 2009. In 2024, the pH standard was violated 224 out of 229 days at the DRA’s monitoring station. Violations of temperature and dissolved oxygen standards haven’t been as frequent as that, but occur during sensitive trout salmon and steelhead spawning periods.
Fish Reintroduction has abjectly failed. In all fifteen years, fewer than 3,000 adult sockeye, spring chinook and steelhead have returned to the trap below Pelton Dam with the maxillary clip that indicates they were “project origin” (that is, reintroduced) anadromous adults. Recovery targets would have fish returning in the thousands every year.
Managing the River for Positive Results
As the timeline below depicts, what has been done in the aftermath of these failures could kindly be described as the tactics of delay and obfuscation. The official reaction to the developments described in this timeline has been silence, or statements that don’t align with any available data. Some more recent statements strain credulity, if not a shared sense of reality. DEQ spokesman Antony Vorobyof, as quoted in Willamette Week’s recent cover story: “The selective water withdrawal tower largely achieves what it was designed to do.” Despite these kinds of claims to the contrary, the result of status quo tower operations has been that one of the West’s most tantalizingly solvable environmental dilemmas continues to plague one of its most iconic rivers.
The western writer Wallace Stegner once remarked that western states blessed with landscapes that tug on the heartstrings ideally would pursue “a politics to match the scenery.” The management of the Tower, left unchecked and unchanged, will eventually do just the opposite: downgrade the quality of the water and the health of fish, so that the compromised riverscape appears as disturbed as the politics that made it sick in the first place. The DRA will continue to do its level best that doesn’t happen.
Timeline: PGE’s Selective Water Withdrawal Tower
April 2009: During construction, a tower segment fails and sinks to the bottom of the reservoir. No reports inform the public about the cost of the repair or the compromise to the original design, but when the tower is completed, PGE reveals that a key condition of its license to operate the tower with 100% bottom draw when needed has been lost. 15 years later, no cogent explanation has been given for this reduced capability to put the maximum amount of cold water into the lower river.
Late December 2009: The Tower becomes operational, and water quality violations follow almost immediately.
2010: Fishing guides and recreational anglers notice and begin to report unusually warm, off-color water in the lower Deschutes River.
2011: In a tacit admission that the Tower isn’t working as planned, DEQ and PGE enter into the first of a series of “interim agreements” which grant PGE exceptions to water quality limits they would otherwise be required to meet as a condition of its federal license to operate the dams. The last arrangement of this kind was signed in 2017. The agreements side-step rules spelled out in Oregon’s public meetings law, which stipulates such changes are subject to public comment and deliberation.
2013: An email exchange between officials at DEQ and PGE outline the company’s request to relax permit limits for dissolved oxygen . The company’s rationale is that meeting the permit costs them revenue. DEQ grants the exception.
2015: A record heat wave in July leads to fish kills on the lower river. Though salmon die in epic proportions throughout the Columbia Basin, the lower Deschutes’ erstwhile utility as a cold-water refuge is lost due to Tower operations. On the lower Deschutes, water temperatures for days at a time hover in the low 70’s.
2016: In the wake of the heat-wave induced disasters of 2015, PGE steadfastly refuses to implement emergency cold-water release plans. Shortly after, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issues recommendations for river managers to proactively manage the next heat wave. Cold water releases, the federal agency’s experts urge, should be strongly considered.
2017: The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission votes to declare the lower Deschutes River a “no bag limit fishery” for bass. Simultaneously, reports of walleye caught, and soon enough, photographed, are recorded from as far as seven miles upstream from the mouth of the Deschutes.
2018: A report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes how hatchery steelhead plants on middle Deschutes tributaries, McKay and Whychus Creeks are not making it to the collection facility at the forebay of Lake Billy Chinook. Instead they are residualizing in these tribs, diluting the important and increasingly rare genes of pure strain redband trout in these creeks.
2018: The Oregon Business Journal publishes an article about the Tower and its damaging effect on the economy of Maupin.
2020: After only 47 “project origin” spring Chinook and 53 sockeye return to the Pelton trap as adult salmonids, ODFW responds by declaring it has no numeric goals to measure the success of the reintroduction project.
2021: Steelhead season on the lower Deschutes River is closed for the first time since 1978.
2021: The DRA petitions the Environmental Quality Commission to reinstate a more stringent dissolved oxygen standard to protect spawning trout. At the EQC hearing on the matter, after 40 minutes of mischaracterization of the more stringent standard, and an unequal time allotment of 5 minutes for the DRA to rebut, the EQC declines to hear the petition.
2022: The DRA’s Executive Director Sarah Cloud joins the Rules Advisory Committee of DEQ’s Aquatic Life Use Rule Making Process. DEQ proposes permanent changes to aquatic life rules that would lower standards for water quality, especially for spawning resident trout statewide.
2023: DRA supporters spearhead a public outcry over DEQ’s proposed relaxing of water quality standards. Over 300 comments help influence the agency’s decision to stick to a more stringent pH standard where they were proposed to be relaxed. However, other proposed rule-changes skirt public scrutiny. The DRA appeals these changes to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. A ruling from the EPA isn’t yet forthcoming.
2024: 225 of 229 days, the pH standard is exceeded at the DRA’s water quality monitoring station near Maupin.
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