The Search for Truth
Evaluating Portland General Electric’s “Plain Facts” about the Pelton Round Butte Complex
“ The structure itself is a marvel of engineering. It stands 273 feet tall–just five feet short of [sic] the Statue of Liberty–with all but five feet sunken [sic] in the waters of Lake Billy Chinook, located just east of the Cascade Mountains at an elevation of 1,932 feet above sea level. The success of this project serves as an important advancement in the area of fish migration and biology and will serve as a model for future efforts aimed at restoring fish passage around the nation.”
Shakespeare wrote, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” In light of this adage, claims made on PGE’s website about its efforts on behalf of the Deschutes should leave visitors to the company’s website feeling impoverished. Let’s start with a fact check of the passage quoted above. The Statue of Liberty is 305 feet tall, making it 32 feet taller than the Selective Water Withdrawal Tower. Here, the truth is stretched by 27 feet to make an aspirational comparison between globally recognized beacon of freedom and a far lesser known failing fish passage experiment. Elsewhere on PGE’s website, the truth gets stretched a lot further than that.
A downloadable PDF from PGE’s website titled “The Plain Facts” is packed with such misinformation. Almost every statement in “Plain Facts” is truth-challenged. Let’s deal with two of the most egregious claims here:
The first claim: “The Deschutes River is not in decline.”
Actual facts tell a different story. Tower operations began in December 2009. Water quality violations of temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen followed immediately. Over the ensuing 14 years, the Deschutes River Alliance has documented hundreds of these violations of state water quality standards. Oregon Department of Environmental Quality data show the same violations.
Degraded water quality due to tower operations caused stalk diatom algae to proliferate in the lower river. Trout began to display black spot disease, the result of a change in their diet from mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies to pollution tolerant snails and worms. The timing and frequency of insect hatches changed dramatically. Overall bug abundance plummeted. Populations of insect-eating birds also crashed.
Another parasite, C.shasta, which is lethal to spring Chinook when its density is measured at ten spores per liter, was measured in the lower Deschutes at up to 100 spores per liter after the start of tower operations. Prior to the commencement of Tower operations, C. shasta, while present, was rarely the mortality factor it is now. Post Tower operation, wild spring Chinook are now on a fast descent toward extinction in the Deschutes.
Anemic returns of salmon above the Pelton Round Butte dams, double digit returns in most years, are far short of reintroduction benchmarks. PGE has proposed that compromises in water quality in the lower river might result in successful reintroduction above the dams–but this just has not been the case.
PGE also claims: “The Selective Water Withdrawal facility was put in place to solve two serious problems in the Deschutes basin: historic fish runs that have been cut off for decades, and seasonal river temperatures that had been artificially disrupted. This was harmful to the river’s natural ecosystem as well as the Tribe’s heritage and culture.”
There’s a lot to unpack with this one. If there’s any compelling evidence that fish were harmed by one hundred percent bottom draw from the forebay of Lake Billy Chinook–which was the way water release from Round Butte Dam was managed from 1968 to late 2009–PGE, nor anyone else, has presented it.
Elsewhere, PGE has claimed colder water in the fall, under current management protocols, benefits fall chinook. But PGE’s own pre-license study, published in 1999, does not show this. This paper, the Huntington Report, published in 1999, found that while temperature differences may influence juvenile fall chinook emergence timing, these differences are not statistically significant.
Others, biologists from ODFW, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, and PGE have speculated that warmer water could benefit juvenile fall Chinook. In hatcheries, warmer water accelerates early life cycle processes. This could apply to Deschutes fall Chinook. But that possibility–and that’s all it is–has never been studied. Even if it proved to be true, the management of warmer temperatures would have to take place in a well-researched, timed, and specifically targeted flow management program. PGE doesn’t do this. It simply dumps warm polluted water off the surface of Lake Billy Chinook from November through May. In late spring, these temperatures at times have been so high as to be lethal to salmonids, and that certainly negates any possible benefit.
PGE’s “historic” temperature targets are based on pre-dam construction data gathered in the 1950’s. Prior to any water quality laws on the books, and little in the way of regulation of pollution, rivers around the U.S. were in poor condition. The Deschutes was no exception. Grazing took place down to the waterline. Agricultural and industrial withdrawals were largely unregulated. Worse, the “historic” temperature model deployed by PGE uses present-day maximum daily temperatures for air and water to calculate the “without project temperature,” the temperature the river would supposedly be if the dams were not in place. A more realistic approach would plug in mean, or better yet, from an aquatic health standpoint, minimum air and water temperatures to arrive at an ideal temperature for fish in the lower Deschutes.
Last, claiming that the colder, cleaner water in the lower Deschutes was harmful to “Tribes’ culture and heritage” leaves out a broader look at PGE’s role in harming the treaty rights of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs. It was the construction of the Pelton Round Butte Complex that wiped out salmon in most of the Deschutes basin. Treaties signed a century before guaranteed Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs the right to fish in “all the usual and accustomed places.” Litigation in the 20th century clarified these rights to include not just the fishing, but catching and eating fish. Eliminating salmon from the vast majority of the Deschutes basin, then claiming cold water harmed tribal interests in the portion of the river that remains seems hypocritical at best.
It’s worth reiterating that C. shasta is on the threshold of wiping out wild spring Chinook from the Deschutes River. This fish resides at the center of the traditional economy, culture and heritage of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs. This parasite very likely wouldn’t exist at its current lethal levels in the Deschutes were it not for the Selective Water Withdrawal Tower, and subsequent declines in water quality in the lower Deschutes.
“Plain Facts” does contain one sentence that we can agree with: “Changing SWW Tower operations has no effect on our energy output or revenue.” Good to hear. That means there’s no good reason for PGE to resist the work of fixing the ecological trouble it created.
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