White River dam blocks thousands of pink salmon

BUCKLEY, Pierce County — The fish were so thick in the rivers you could walk across on their backs. The old-timers' oft-repeated tale sounds like a phenomenon never to be witnessed again.

Yet a visit this week to the White River near Buckley brings the image to mind. Thousands of pink salmon have backed up behind Puget Sound Energy's old wooden diversion dam, eager to head upstream and reproduce.

The presence of a huge number of pinks has renewed a protracted dispute among the agencies and interests that control the river's flow and the fish that inhabit it.

"They've got a fixed amount of energy, and they're just wasting it beating themselves against the dam," said fish biologist Russ Ladley, the Puyallup Tribe's resource protection manager.

He and other tribal biologists predict a massive die-off if something isn't done to allow the pinks to migrate.

Gary Sprague, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, isn't so sure. The river is running relatively high for August, which means the water is oxygenated and cool, good for fish. And pinks usually don't do much spawning until later in September, he said.

"They can hold in the river for a while," he said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is obligated to move the fish past its flood-control facility farther upstream, is ready to authorize an intervention.

And a spokesman for Puget Sound Energy, which owns the dam, says the utility's willing to step in and attempt a fix if it gets the Corps' OK and it's safe to send workers into the river to do it.

Between 30,000 and 60,000 pinks are expected to head up the White River this season, said fish biologist Blake Smith, who also works for the Puyallups.

Pinks, also called humpbacks or humpies, are only 2 years old when they return to the rivers to spawn and die. They are the smallest and most numerous salmon species, the kind granddad might have grown up eating out of a can.

Those who have studied the pinks say they commonly colonize new habitats.

And although pinks are relative newcomers to the White River, a run two years ago was similar in size, Smith said.

In the river near Buckley, the fins of the pinks appear dark against the gray of the river, which picks up its color from the runoff of glaciers on Mount Rainier. As the fish seek passage through the roiling current, they are confronted by the dam.

Erected starting in 1911, the dam is a vestige of the utility's White River hydropower generator, which shut down in 2004.

The Corps now has a cooperative agreement with the utility to maintain the structure. But flooding in November 2006 damaged it, so the dam no longer blocks the rushing river.

Even so, fish can't get past without human intervention. Ordinarily, enough water would flow past the dam to attract fish to an adjacent ladder, where Corps workers trap the fish and truck them upstream.

But August is typically the river's driest month, and most of the water left in the river hurdles over the broken dam rather than rushing through the fish ladder.