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Fisheries Agency will Explain Estuary Plan by Erik Robinson, staff writer The Columbian, January 26, 2008

Before any anadromous fish in the Columbia River basin makes it to the Pacific Ocean, it has to cool its fins in the river's mouth - its estuary. And that's a much more perilous place than it used to be.

The river has been dredged, diked and dammed. From a fish's perspective, that means the water is warmer and more polluted, the nutrient-rich floodplains are largely off-limits, and the river is crowded with voracious new predators.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, pulling together a slew of other recovery plans, proposes a series of actions to make the estuary more hospitable for salmon and steelhead making the transition from freshwater to salt water. The agency will host two public workshops this month, in Vancouver and Astoria, Ore.

Estimated total cost of the improvements over 25 years: $500 million, or roughly the same as Seattle's Safeco Field.

"Some of these actions are already being implemented," said Patty Dornbusch, the NMFS salmon recovery coordinator for the lower Columbia in Portland. "The $500 million is not necessarily new funding needs."

The agency lays out a series of 23 broadly defined actions in its "Estuary Recovery Module," so named because it's envisioned as a piece of a larger recovery plan spanning the full life cycle of the 13 Columbia basin salmon populations listed under the Endangered Species Act. Other modules will cover tributaries where fish spawn and the ocean where they spend most of their lives.

In the estuary, the agency lumps its proposed management actions as responses to six categories of threats:

• For flow-related threats : Establish minimum stream flows for tributaries and adjust the timing and magnitude of water flowing out of upriver dams.
• For threats related to sediment: Remove pilings and pile dikes to allow coarse sediment to migrate downriver.
• For structural threats: Operate the upriver dams to reduce the amount of warming that happens to water in slackwater reservoirs; breach dikes and levees to improve access to off-channel habitat.
• For threats related to the food web: Reduce predation by Caspian terns, sea lions, pikeminnow and other predators.
• For threats related to water quality: Identify and reduce sources of pollutants and improve stormwater handling in cities and towns.
• For other threats: Protect and restore streamside areas and reduce the effects of ship wakes that wash juvenile fish ashore.

Related Sites:
For more details on the model, see nwr.noaa.gov/Salmon-Recovery-Planning/ESA-Recovery-Plans