WEST EYES DAM'S DEMISE

The era when dams stood forever officially ended Thursday.

Shortly after 6 a.m. Pacific time, a backhoe punched a hole in Maine's Edwards Dam. Church bells pealed and hundreds applauded as the lower Kennebec River ran free for the first time in 162 years.

Biologists say the move opens the way for Atlantic salmon and several other fish species to reach their natural spawning grounds. "This is the beginning of a new chapter in river fisheries management," said Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who watched from a bluff. "This has fixated the attention of river communities across the nation." In all likelihood, the Northwest will see similar scenes as efforts intensify to save endangered Pacific salmon. Work to remove two small dams near Portland is scheduled to begin next year. Two dams on Washington's Olympic Peninsula await only federal money to pay for their destruction. The future of dams on Washington's White Salmon, Skokomish and Snake rivers hang in limbo. Like the Edwards, the four Northwest dams most likely to fall are privately owned and antiquated. One of the two on Washington's Elwha River was never licensed, and neither could pass current regulatory muster. Portland General Electric voluntarily decided to remove its dams on the Sandy and Little Sandy rivers. But the federally owned dams on the Snake are workhorses younger than the average state resident. The Edwards is not the first of the nation's 75,000 dams to fall for the sake of fish. The states of California and Oregon removed irrigation dams last year. Washington Water Power Co. took out an Idaho dam that blocked steelhead from the South Fork of the Clearwater River in 1963. There have been others. But the Edwards is the first hydroelectric dam ordered removed against its owner's wishes. That 1997 demand by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission bolstered environmental groups in the Northwest. FERC is widely viewed as an advocate for dams, despite 1986 amendments to the Federal Power Act requiring consideration of environmental issues when dams are relicensed. "It was definitely a shot in the arm to the folks out here working on the Snake River dams," said Chris Zimmer, spokesman for the Seattle group Save Our Wild Salmon. "It showed that (the proposal to remove dams) is not a bizarre or un-doable concept." Northwest dam advocates warn not to read too much into Thursday's event in Augusta, Maine. "Unlike Edwards, the lower Snake dams still provide immense benefits to the people of the Pacific Northwest," read a statement from the Columbia River Alliance, a group that represents agricultural and industrial river users. Judged by Western standards, the Edwards is minuscule. It stands just 19 feet tall and generated 3.5 megawatts of electricity. There were no protests against its demise. Once FERC made its ruling, its owner, Edwards Manufacturing Co., stopped fighting and began negotiating for public money to help pay for the $7 million removal. Before the ruling, the city of Augusta considered buying and upgrading the Edwards. The city decided it would be a money loser, said Peter Thompson, former mayor and current president of the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce. So removing the dam "wasn't like you were taking away a huge economic factor in favor of fish," Thompson said. Nothing, but everything, in common In contrast to the Edwards, each of the four Snake River dams stands 100 feet tall and generates 100 times more power. Their removal - at an estimated cost of $1 billion - would end barging on the Snake and threaten jobs in river towns from Pasco to Lewiston. The proposal to breach those dams has sparked nearly unanimous opposition from farm, business and labor groups. It prompted country- Western musician Wylie Gustafson to pen "Save Our Dams," a song he warbled at a recent benefit concert. One rally in Pasco drew 3,000 folks on a rainy night in February. So many politicians attended the event that the state House of Representatives closed for the day. One legislator promised to chain herself to any dams the feds try to remove. Clearly, the emotions and issues separating the Kennebec from the Snake are as vast as the 2,800 miles between Augusta and Spokane. But there is one important similarity, said Rob Masonis of the conservation group American Rivers. "On the East Coast, there are anadromous fish runs that have been struggling for years. That is exactly what we're talking about in the Northwest," Masonis said. Yet, as the Columbia River Alliance noted in Wednesday's statement, the Edwards is only 40 miles from the Atlantic. Now that it has been breached, there are no barriers between ocean-going fish and their inland spawning beds. Separating the Snake River from the Pacific is 300 miles of the Columbia River, blocked by four dams nobody expects to come down. The Elwha story The Elwha River is perhaps the best Northwest comparison to the Kennebec. Standing 100 feet tall, Elwha Dam was built in 1912, but had to be rebuilt after washing out two years later. It was never licensed. Farther upstream, Glines Canyon dam stands 200 feet tall and was built in 1927. Neither dam has a fish passage system, so salmon and steelhead have access to only the first five miles of the river, which flows out of Olympic National Park and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Port Angeles. Then-owner Crown Zellerbach applied to FERC for a license to operate the Elwha in 1968. It applied for relicensing of the Glines Canyon in 1973. Nothing much happened until the 1980s, when tribes and environmental groups sued to assure that FERC would seriously consider dam removal, said Brian Winter of the National Park Service. Winter said FERC officials were conducting environmental studies and expecting years of litigation over the dams when staff for then- Sens. Brock Adams, D-Wash., and Bill Bradley, D-N.J., offered to negotiate with the dams' owners instead. That led to the Elwha River Ecosystems and Fisheries Restoration Act of 1992. It called for the National Park Service to buy the dams for $29.5 million and spend tens of millions more on their removal. With passage of the "El Act," Congress for the first time supported dam removal, an idea previously considered seriously only by groups like Earth First! Just five years later, FERC would order removal of the Edwards, and the government would make no offer to first buy the dam. Gorton's crusade Seven years after passage of the El Act, and a year after Congress appropriated money to buy the dams, the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams still stand. For that, credit one man who says he's acting on behalf of the region. Although Sen. Slade Gorton supported the El Act, the Washington Republican since has said he's skeptical that enough fish will return to the Elwha to justify the cost of dam removal. More importantly, Gorton wants assurances that no federal dams on the Snake or Columbia rivers will be removed without congressional approval. As chairman of the Interior Appropriations subcommittee, Gorton last year held up all funding for the Elwha because the Clinton administration wouldn't bend to that demand. This year, he proposes spending $7 million to make changes that the Port Angeles water system will need before the dams come out. Gorton's spokeswoman said he has no intention of providing money for removal until he's convinced the Snake River dams are safe. Gorton, who is making dams a major issue in his 2000 re-election campaign, doesn't expect to get such assurance until a Republican holds the White House. "No (Eastern Washington) dams are going to come down on my watch," he told reporters earlier last month.

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