The Fuss Over Fish

This story was first broadcast on Nov. 19, 2000. It was updated on Wednesday, June 18, 2008.

The federal government has declared a "fishery disaster" area along the U.S. West Coast this summer after the salmon population there went into what's being called an "unprecedented collapse." As a result, the commercial salmon industry, which normally captures 800,000 fish a year, has been shut down and salmon prices are going through the roof.

The cause of the die-off is up for debate: the Bush administration blames warmer temperatures in the ocean where salmon spend most of their lives, but many scientists say man is to blame. Dams and irrigation canals kill millions of salmon as they migrate up and down rivers where they are born and where they return to spawn.

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl first reported on the disappearing salmon back in 2000, focusing on two rivers in Oregon and Washington - the Columbia and its tributary, the Snake - where salmon were once so plentiful, it was said you could walk across the water on their backs.

The question then - and still today - is whether four dams should be torn down to prevent the salmon's extinction. Under the Endangered Species Act, the government is required not to let that happen. And the lengths the government is going not to let that happen, and the billions they're spending not to let that happen, are staggering.

"This whole system [was] built just so that the little baby fish don't have to go through the dam?" Stahl asks, observing an elaborate labyrinth of pipelines set up at a dam.

"Right, in order to keep them away from the turbines," says biologist Doug Arndt of the Army Corps of Engineers, which built the dams.

Arndt says the turbines kill about half the fish that go through them. And so 20 million young salmon a year are diverted as they go downstream into specially built raceways and sluices, shot through tunnels, into the pipelines and are then loaded onto barges. The fish are given a lift on a barge, courtesy of the U.S. government.

"We're gonna take all these fish down the river," Arndt explains. "It's gonna be about 300 mile trip. …Take about a day and a half."

Ironically, the well intentioned barging may interfere with the salmon's homing instinct, which is essential to their survival since after their trip down river, they go back up the river as adults to spawn, homing in on the very spot where they were born.

Asked if they're getting hurt, Arndt says, "No."

"This is actually a very, very good system," he tells Stahl.

The salmon are also loaded onto trucks. "They tried airplanes, they tried trucks…different ways of getting the salmon safely to below the hydro electric system," Arndt explains.

To help the fish that aren't barged or trucked get past the dams, the Corps built an artificial shoreline that cost $80 million, and a surface fish collector that cost $200 million. But after two decades of spending, the results are dismal: Coho salmon are already extinct, and runs of Chinook and Sockeye salmon are on the endangered list. To stop the decline, environmentalists are insisting that some of the dams be torn down.

So now Northwesterners are facing a choice between their beloved salmon and their beloved dams.

"These dams are still providing very, very cost effective power, about a half a cent a kilowatt hour. I mean that's much, much lower than anyplace in the country. You probably pay 10 cents or 15 cents a kilowatt hour for your power at your home," says Bruce Lovelin, the former president of an industry group that lobbied to keep the dams.

In the 1930s, starting with Bonneville, the federal government built six dams along the Columbia River. Then in the 1960s and 70s, four more dams went up on a tributary, called the Snake River, once the mother lode of salmon. It's these last four dams that have been targeted for removal.

"These four dams came on late in the grand orgy of dam building in the Columbia River. The salmon, frankly, were doing fairly well. Not good, but doing fairly well with all these other dams in place. When you started adding the four dams, it was the cumulative effect that finally broke the camel's back," says Ed Chaney, a former state wildlife official, who heads Chinook Northwest, an environmental group.

Chaney says it was the " tipping point."

The salmon population has plummeted from 16 million at its peak to just over one million today. The dams are one reason, but there are others: too much fishing over the years; damage to the rivers and streams by logging and farming, and urban pollution. Salmon migrate right through the middle of downtown Portland, Ore.

"All of those things have contributed to the diminishment of those once enormous populations. Only one thing threatens the salmon with extinction, however. And that's the dams," Chaney argues.

To save the salmon and keep the dams, the government spends a bundle on a system involving eight different federal agencies. That doesn't begin to account for all the local government workers, private consultants and university fish scientists who inspect, poke, and measure. It has come to be known as the "salmon recovery industry."

Asked what the system does with all that money, Lovelin says, "Well, it pays for biologists, Jeeps, computers, bureaucracy, administrative overhead."

To do what?

"And a little bit of salmon recovery," Lovelin says.

Another expense: hatcheries. So far it has cost over $900 million to produce salmon in vats and buckets to replace wild fish killed by the dams. But you have to wonder, since large numbers of hatchery fish are also killed by the dams.

On top of that, they've been studying the problem for 25 years in a plethora of research projects. In one such project, adult fish are tagged, and fed a tracking device.

In another study, in a cramped trailer near one of the dams, 20 women and one young man plant computer chips in tens of thousands of baby salmon.

Scientists get more information from robo fish, a rubber beauty filled with sophisticated electronics. As it goes through the dams, its sensors record the impact of the turbines. Price tag: $5,000 a piece. But they're reusable.

But if you think it is all high tech, meet Lucille Worsham who, for more than 15 years, sat all day inside Bonneville dam, staring at an underwater window as one of 65 professional fish counters.

"You know, I understand that they've tried to come up with some high tech way to do it. And they've never come up with anything better than you," Stahl remarks.

"That's true," Worsham replies. "And we're glad, we fish counters."

"Money. All of this has just cost a fortune, this effort to save the salmon," Stahl remarks.

"Billions have been wasted," Ed Chaney says. "Not spent to save the salmon. Billions have been wasted and that's the real tragedy here."

"You know, we've talked about the barging. They've got pipes. They've got diversionary routes. They've got ladders, all of this manmade, all of it costing money. But the point is to try and save the fish," Stahl says.

"No. The point is to try to avoid fixing the dams," Chaney charges.

"Save the Dam project," Stahl says.

"That's exactly right," Chaney replies. "These are 'save the dam' facilities."

Environmentalists like Chaney are up against a powerful 'save the dams' coalition. Virtually every politician in this neck of the woods is against removing the dams - both Democrats and Republicans. So are the farmers, who are afraid of losing the irrigation provided by the dams that turned what used to be a desert here into an agricultural bread basket. The timber industry is afraid of losing inexpensive barging for their products.

Without the dams there wouldn't be any navigation on the river at all. Aluminum companies and other heavy power users are afraid of losing their bargain priced electricity. They like shifting the focus away from the dams. What do they blame for the salmon's decline? Fishing, particularly by Native American tribes which, under the terms of a treaty, are allowed to catch endangered salmon. And, hard as it is to believe, your dollars pay for that too.

"They've recently paid, I think it's over $500,000, to purchase new gill nets for commercial harvest by the Indian tribes," Lovelin says.

"Harvest of the salmon?" Stahl asks. "The endangered salmon?

"Yeah, that's right," Lovelin says.

"Wait. The government is buying the nets?" Stahl asks.

"The government is buying the nets," Lovelin says. "You can quite literally go on the banks of the Columbia River and buy an endangered salmon for $2 a pound."

Lovelin is right about everything but the price. 60 Minutes found some Yakima tribe members selling Chinook salmon out of the back of a truck, but at $4 a pound.

"You can put the Indians out of business and the fish are still gonna go extinct," Chaney says. "Why don't we stop giving the aluminum industry all this cheap electricity? Why don't we stop subsidizing the waterway transportation people? Why doesn't somebody else have to give up something? Everybody wants to beat up on the Indians who are catching a tiny, few fish. What's wrong with this picture?"

Whether the dams stay in or eventually come out, either way, there's no end in sight to the spending - $500 million a year and rising. And as we've seen, a lot of it goes to correct the unintended consequences of man's good intentions.

How did Caspian terns, a bird and a salmon predator, get in the act? They eat so many, it's putting a dent in the government's rescue efforts. What's the Army Corps of Engineers doing about it?

"Moving, relocating the terns to a different place, where they won't take as many fish," Arndt says.

But the same Corps of Engineers that's now trying to move them, brought them here in the first place. The terns weren't here until the Corps dredged the river and created an island right in the middle of the salmon's migration route. That done, they decided it would be nice to turn it into a bird refuge. By 1998, 20,000 terns had settled in.

As the Corps started to move the terns, the bird lovers swooped in. The Audubon Society went to court and got the project stopped, but not before $600,000 had been spent.

"Now is it true that the Corps is actually combing through tern droppings, or guano, to recover the computer chips, to see if they've been eating the salmon?" Stahl asks.

"I wouldn't say it quite like that. What I would say is, the researchers are going through with rakes in the sand," Arndt says.

This could give new meaning to the term "government waste." And meanwhile the spending on the piping, the barging and the counting goes on.

Produced by Karen Sughrue