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Corps Begins Summer Plan for Fish Passage by Dean Brickey East Oregonian, June 22, 2011

PORTLAND -- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has implemented its Summer Fish Operations Plan, which will continue through Aug. 31. The plan will help Snake and Columbia River juvenile salmon and steelhead migrate safely to the ocean. The plan closely resembles last year's and includes spill and fish transportation operations at Corps-operated dams on the lower Snake and Columbia rivers.

The operations were developed by federal and regional fish managers to provide timely and safe passage of juvenile fish through the hydropower system. Fish pass the dams through the turbines, over the spillways via spill or spillway weirs, or through screened bypass systems where they can be collected for transport or routed directly back to the river.

The juvenile transportation program collects fish at three Snake River dams and McNary Dam on the Columbia River and either barges or trucks them to below Bonneville Dam for release back to the river. The transportation program began in May and will continue into fall.

Evaluations of different spill operations to determine which best meet juvenile passage performance standards in the 2008 Biological Opinion will be suspended this summer because of unusually high flows in the river system.

The June final water supply forecast for the Columbia River Basin is 135 percent of normal as measured at The Dalles Dam and 156 percent of normal for the Snake River Basin as measured at Lower Granite Dam.