Plan floated for Lake Cle Elum Dam fish passage

YAKIMA — A proposal that would provide fish passage at Lake Cle Elum Dam for the first time in more than a century has been released for public comment.

The proposal is contained in a draft environmental-impact document that includes allowing juvenile fish to exit the huge lake and a system to capture adults as they return to spawn.

Returning fish would be trucked around the dam and released into the lake.

Associated with passage is a plan to reintroduce coho, sockeye and spring chinook salmon as well as summer steelhead trout to the lake and its tributaries.

Access for fish to what was a natural lake has been blocked since the early 1900s, when the first crude dams were erected. Those dams were later replaced by larger, earthen structures.

Comments received will be considered before a final document is issued late this year, the Bureau of Reclamation said.

Funding for passage must be sought from Congress.

Lake Cle Elum is the largest of the five major water-storage lakes that serve the Yakima Irrigation Project, which includes Kittitas, Yakima and Benton counties.

The lake has a capacity of 436,000 acre-feet of water.

Joel Hubble, of Yakima, the bureau's study manager for the passage report, said the document selects as the preferred alternative a gated outlet structure near the right side of the dam's huge spillway.

The facility is designed to operate over a 50-foot change in the elevation of the lake pool to accommodate juveniles exiting the lake to migrate to the ocean from mid-March to early August.

That alternative is projected to cost $65 million in 2004 dollars, the report said. Annual operation and maintenance is estimated at $300,000.

The reintroduction plan also could include construction of a fish hatchery at the lake sometime in the future.

The fish-passage plan is the result of an agreement among the bureau, state and federal fish agencies and the Yakama Nation after the federal agency declined to include passage facilities in the reconstruction of another storage dam, Lake Keechelus.