The Seattle Times
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Salmon to get ladder to upper Puyallup

by The Associated Press

October 2, 2000

TACOMA - Salmon haven't spawned in the upper reaches of the Puyallup River in nearly a century. But that should change this fall, when a new $1 million fish ladder gives them a way to bypass Electron Dam in the foothills of Mount Rainier.

The 290-foot-long concrete ladder will open 30 miles of upriver fish habitat.

The ladder dwarfs the 96-year-old dam, 41 miles upriver from Commencement Bay. Considered an engineering marvel when it was built in 1904, the dam still diverts water with a shallow dike of wooden planks. The 22-megawatt generator produces enough electricity to power about 10,000 homes.

The fish-passage project is a joint effort of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians and Puget Sound Energy, which runs the hydropower project. The tribe oversees salmon restoration; the utility pays for it.

The work started three years ago, when the tribe dug three small, stream-fed rearing ponds upriver. Each spring, the tribe plants about 300,000 chinook and coho smolts in the ponds, trucking most of them from the state's Voights Creek Hatchery near Orting. The little fish spend several months acclimating in the rearing ponds and then hatchery workers release them into the river.

The goal is to restore a run that returns to the Puyallup's upper reaches when it's time to spawn.

The downstream run of the coho is assisted by another mechanism resulting from the agreement between the tribe and the utility.

To keep power turbines from chopping up the fish, workers installed a trap at the end of the 10-mile-long wooden flume that carries water to the power generator. Workers periodically remove trapped fish, truck them beyond the generator and return them to the river.

None of this comes cheap.

The fish ladder, the ponds and the trap-and-haul operation cost about $2 million. The utility also pays the tribe $175,000 annually to nurture the new fish runs.

But the biggest cost is loss of power-generating capacity. During low-flow months, between June and November, the utility has agreed not to draw much water into its flume. That means it loses between $250,000 and $1 million a year, depending on water flow and power rates.