Workers use heavy machinery to demolish and remove the remaining structures in late July. Once used to collect drinking water for the town of Snohomish, removal of the dam will allow fish populations to move up river with greater ease.
courtesy Steve Schuller
SNOHOMISH — The Pilchuck River Dam is finally down, a step to letting salmon run more freely. Demolition began in late July, city administrator Steve Schuller said.
The spillway dam is demolished. The next steps have been to move the river back to its natural course, remove a structure at the premises and remove the fish ladder, Schuller said.
The diversion dam near Granite Falls no longer feeds drinking water to the city: A few years ago, the city concluded it was cheaper to take water exclusively from Everett — it was sourcing half its water from Everett at the time — versus upgrading its water treatment plant to continue to use river water. Everett gets its water from Spada Lake. The water treatment plant was decommissioned.
The agreement to pull the dam is between the city and the Tulalip Tribes.
A little over $2 million in grant funding paid for the removal. Three key grants came from the state’s Recreation and Conversation Office, the federal National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
The Pilchuck dam was put in place in 1912 in reaction to Snohomish’s Great Fire of 1911. The current intake system and dam were finished in 1932.
Busting dams is becoming more common: The catalog of removals includes two on the Elwha River, and late last month a dam on the Nooksack River in Bellingham, built in 1961 to grab drinking water. More than 30 have been removed in Washington state in the past 25 years, The Seattle Times reported.
Snake River Dams stay
On Friday, July 31, three government agencies jointly determined the lower Snake River Dams in eastern Washington must remain in place, releasing a Final Environmental Impact Statement that largely mirrored their draft impact statement from February.
The agencies’ plan includes to “balance fish benefits and energy goals by spilling more water in the spring for juvenile fish passage,” a joint statement from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, and Bonneville Power Administration says.
Environmental groups that want the hydroelectric dams removed to help salmon migration, naturally, lambasted the decision.
Last year, Snohomish resident Lanni Johnson participated in a hunger strike in Olympia at the Capitol seeking Gov. Jay Inslee to order the dams removed because salmon feed orca whales.
The hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers generate a sizable amount of the Northwest’s electricity. Fourteen of these dams are run by the federal government agencies.
The Pilchuck River Dam is not a hydroelectric dam.
“The (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), which operate the dams, determined in 2002 that removing the lower Snake dams would increase the chances of salmon recovering by 50 percent,” an article published by a sustainability advocacy group, The Sightline Institute, points out. Four types of endangered salmon run through the dams in question.
