Letter: Dam spillways are for emergency flood control, not wasting water

I see that the No. 1 story in the Tri-City Herald for 2015 was the massive fish kill below the Wanapum and Priest Rapids dams on the Columbia River.

Here is what happened: Grant PUD spilled billions of gallons of warm, oxygen-deficient, surface water over its spillways, infusing super-saturated atmospheric gases into the water that killed millions of little fish. The sturgeon then moved in below the spillways to gorge themselves on the dead fish. These prehistoric monsters also became overexposed to the deadly water conditions and perished.

This would not have happened if the water had been passed through the new fish-friendly turbines. The little fish would have passed through unscathed.

Those spillways are for emergency flood control, not for wasting water and power to try to justify running the expensive nuclear power plant, wind turbines and fossil fuel power plants.

If the dam operators didn’t try to flush fish to the ocean over the spillways, we would have all of the cheap power, fish and irrigation water that we need.

This story was originally published January 27, 2016 at 5:25 PM with the headline "Letter: Dam spillways are for emergency flood control, not wasting water."