483 



Mr. LaRocco. Mr. Godard, you wanted to respond to that? 



Mr„ GrODARD. Yes, thank you. 



To summarize the common wisdom that Ed was talking about, 

 the assumption is that of the fish, the smolt, passing the dam, 85 

 percent would survive and you multiply that through the number 

 of dams and you say the dams killed 90 percent of them. That 85 

 percent, no one has ever done a study; that is just someone's good 

 idea. The first study is the one that Sonny Smart in Chelan did. 

 He put fish in above the dam, run them through the turbine, you 

 have a device on it that inflates, and then you can capture all the 

 fish that you put through there and see how many are alive and 

 how many are dead. And the results of their work showed that 

 they recovered alive 94 percent of the fish, some fi-action of those 

 got away fi*om both the dam and the recovery method, and so the 

 number that was killed by the dam was something less than 6 per- 

 cent, by that study. 



Mr. LaRocco. Are those run-of-the-river dams or are those im- 

 poundment dams? 



Mr. Godard. Those are the same as the Corps of Engineer dams 

 and the Snake River dams and the Mid-Columbia dams, all the 

 same type. 



Mr. LaRocco, They have reservoirs? 



Mr. Godard. They all have reservoirs, but they are all nm-of- 

 the-river. The only ones that are different are Hells Canyon and 

 Grand Coulee with large storage, but they also block fish and no 

 fish go through the reservoirs. 



The problem with the 90 percent is it has the imderlying as- 

 simiption in it that through nature all those fish would have sur- 

 vived and become adults anyway. And that just is not the fact, only 

 a small portion of those, some 1 or 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 percent of those 

 would have become adults anyway. So our biological work shows 

 that the mortality is substantially less than the 15 percent that 

 has been assumed and the 90 percent is just a misrepresentation 

 of what is happening to the fish. 



Mr. LaRocco. Mr, Baker. 



Mr. Baker. Well BPA itself estimates that fully 80 percent of the 

 human-inflicted mortalities on these fish in the Snake River basin 

 are caused by the dams. I have made that point at a recent debate 

 that Mr. Lovelin and I had before the Washington State Council of 

 Farmer Co-ops. Mr. Lovelin was asked during question and answer 

 whether he agreed with that figure, and he did. So I assume that 

 his opinion has not changed. 



In any case, I would Tike to point out another experiment that 

 was done by the Mid-Columbia PUDs where 80,000 summer Chi- 

 nook juveniles were released from the Wells Dam during 1992. By 

 the time those 80,000 chinook smolts had gotten downstream just 

 past Rocky Reach Dam to Rock Island Dam, only two remained. So 

 I would conclude fi-om these two experiments — the one Mr. Godard 

 just related and the one that I just did — that in fact the reservoirs 

 are taking a very heavy toll indeed on migrating juvenile salmon. 



Finally, Mr. LoveUn's cost/benefit analysis is based upon a life- 

 cycle model that fi-ankly has been pummeled in peer review, largely 

 rejected, mainly because it assumes little or no delayed mortality 

 when we release these smolts fi"om the barges at, the estuary. If I 



