Drop in barge use may factor into dam debate

Four dams on the Lower Snake River essentially managed to turn Lewiston, Idaho, into a port city about 400 miles inland. But some farmers shipping their wheat to market are turning from the river to rail as a more-efficient, lower-cost option. As a result, a decline in shipments by barge on the Lower Snake River, under way for decades, has accelerated. The overall decline in shipping on the river adds a new element to the regional debate on taking out four dams on the Lower Snake. Built beginning in the 1950s to provide hydropower, irrigation and navigation all the way from Lewiston to the mouth of the Columbia River, the dams have been in the cross hairs of a regional dam-removal debate for decades. Together, they provide 4.3 percent of the region’s total energy production, and irrigation to a few very large growers on the Lower Snake, in addition to navigation to Lewiston, the most inland port on the West Coast. The debate over the future of the dams will reopen soon, when federal agencies offer yet another proposed operating plan for the federal Columbia River power system, in hopes of finally receiving agreement from a federal judge that the dams don’t jeopardize the survival of threatened and endangered salmon. The dams have been operated on provisional approval since the 1990s as plan after plan has been shot down by judges dissatisfied that federal managers are adequately protecting salmon from extinction. The most recent, Judge James Redden, now retired, said of the Lower Snake River dams last spring: “I think we need to take those dams down.” He refused to comment further...more