Take a few minutes to help save our dams – by April 13th | Guest Opinion

We write to you as members of the Tri-City community to talk about the importance of the four lower Snake River dams, and the urgent need for our friends and neighbors to support their continued existence.

These dams are critical because of the affordable electricity they produce, the irrigation they provide, and for the shipping they enable. Unfortunately, they have been under attack for decades by those who mistakenly believe that breaching them will restore salmon populations along the Columbia and Snake River system.

The federal agencies responsible for managing this system recently issued a Draft Environmental Impact Statement which recommends not breaching the dams. The study finds that breaching the dams would not provide the desired improvements to salmon populations, but it would have severe negative impacts across the Pacific Northwest region, including here in the Tri-Cities.

Importantly, the agencies are accepting public comments on the draft until Monday, April 13th, and we hope that you will take a few moments to submit your own comments about why the Snake River dams are important and shouldn’t be breached. Here are some reasons why they are important to us:

Agriculture is the lifeblood of the Tri-City region and, according to the study, breaching the dams would remove 47,926 acres of land from irrigated agriculture. Some dam breaching advocates dismiss these impacts by saying that only big corporate farms benefit from irrigation, but that’s simply not true. Regardless of ownership, thousands of people here in our community work on these farms, provide services to the ag industry, or process the food these farms produce.

In addition, smaller operations like Blue Mountain/Applegate Farms benefit substantially from the affordable electricity the dams provide to operate our irrigation systems. With increasingly slim profit margins, small family owned farms are vulnerable when operating costs rise, and replacing the dams with wind and solar is estimated to increase power costs in the Tri-Cities by 50%.

And at Tidewater’s Pasco terminal, which has been operating since 1952, 28 Tri-Citians have family wage jobs that simply wouldn’t exist without the Lower Snake River dams. Breaching the dams would not only be devastating to these employees and their families, it would also risk the livelihoods of the local vendors and suppliers that count on Tidewater’s business.

We know there is a lot of concern and uncertainty as our community adjusts to the impacts of the coronavirus. Understandably, people have a lot of other things on their minds these days, but keeping our dams is incredibly important to the Tri-Cities, and the time to act is now.

We ask that you take a few minutes to submit your comments no later than Monday, April 13th. You can submit them online by going to comments.crso.info, or by mail to:

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Attn: CRSO EIS

P.O. Box 2870

Portland, OR 97208-2870

(Must be postmarked by April 13, 2020)

This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 1:46 PM with the headline "Take a few minutes to help save our dams – by April 13th | Guest Opinion."