Editorial: Learn from Idaho’s Sunbeam Dam

Image from Original Article on Idaho Capital Sun

From Idaho Capital Sun - “As Smolt to Adult Returns Continue to Dwindle, Salmon Can Teach Us Lessons at Idaho’s Sunbeam Dam” tells us how quickly the salmon were recovered once the Sunbeam Dam was breached.

Given it was in the same basin, the same species, there is no reason for us to doubt the outcome of breaching the four Lower Snake River Dams.

“A 25-year federal/state/tribal salmon science collaboration, the comparative survival studies, say yes. Their 2019 report estimates that re-opening the lower Snake, coupled with effective salmon spill at the four Columbia dams that will remain, will increase Chinook SARs in the Salmon River to a mean of 5.1%.[6] A 5% SAR will take a bit longer than 6% to re-build salmon, but if sustained, it will do the job fine. The conclusion of the comparative survival studies is based on deep probes into vast stores of data. A large majority of individual salmon scientists have reached the same conclusion from both data and their experience.”