Spill, which is now happening at each federal dam along the Columbia-Snake river system that has fish passage, allows out-migrating salmon to dodge the dams’ deadly turbines, increasing their survival rate and eventual returns.
But this year, in addition to battling hundreds of miles of near-still water, predators and a warming ocean, the roughly 6.6 million roughly pinky-finger-sized young fish also face a Trump administration that has attacked the notion of using the West’s rivers for anything but pure and immediate commercial gain.
Why spill?
“Before the dams were in place, there was a huge flood every spring and early summer of cold water that pushed tens of millions of salmon and steelhead juveniles out to the ocean,” said Joseph Bogaard, executive director of Save Our Wild Salmon.
Dams mostly drowned the once-wild Columbia’s seasonal fluctuations, transforming the river into a slack-water machine that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in hydropower each year and allows ships carrying billions of dollars in goods to travel from the Pacific as far inland as Idaho.
Legally mandated seasonal water releases are a choreographed effort to mimic the natural flows while primarily protecting the river’s dominant interests: flood risk mitigation, hydropower production and commercial shipping.
To environmental advocates, spill is both a compromise and a powerful, research-backed stop-gap tool to hold off looming regional salmon extinction until long-term solutions like Lower Snake River dam removal prevail.
Even with spill, however, journeys from the far reaches of the Snake River out to the Pacific that used to take young salmon about two weeks now take two months, said Jeremy FiveCrows, who runs communications for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.
Water managers at Bonneville say spill is important. But they argue it carries risks, and that bypass options the dam offers out-migrating fish are often actually safer.
To power managers, spill is, more than anything else, a “cost” because that water could have been put to work generating power. Over the past 25 years, spilled Columbia River water could have generated an average of $139 million each year, said Doug Johnson, spokesman for Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the power produced by federal Columbia-Snake river dams.
Johnson also said BPA expects replacing that theoretical power will cost about $240 million annually in coming years.
Environmentalists, Native nations and recreational fishing groups point out that the river has value outside of the power it produces and isn’t just a hydropower plant that has fish, for now.
A downstream battle
Despite those disagreements, federal river managers, regional Native nations and environmental groups, as well as Washington and Oregon, reached a Biden administration-brokered salmon restoration agreement in 2023 that, in part, set a new spill regime across the basin.
Under that agreement, Bonneville currently spills 150,000 cubic feet of water per second from April 10 to June 15, said Jeanette Flemmer, BPA’s chief of fisheries.
That amount decreases as the value of power goes up later in the year, arriving at 95,000 cfs from June 16 to the end of July, and 50,000 cfs for August.
While the agreement involved significant compromise, all parties describe it as the best hope for recovering salmon populations and honoring treaty-protected fishing rights while meeting regional energy needs and driving economic growth throughout even the most rural parts of the Columbia Basin.
But, with the Trump administration slashing regional federal workforces and environmental protections, the future of spill is unclear.
“A lot of the policies that were in place when the new administration took over are under review,” Bogaard said. “There is a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Officials with the Corps declined to answer questions about how the current political landscape could impact spill.
Spill along the Federal Columbia River Power System is required through a number of agreements with Native nations, as well as to meet federal agencies’ obligations under the Endangered Species Act, the system’s environmental impact statement and its most recent biological opinion.
Tom Conning, spokesman for the Corps’ Northwestern division, said the agency “will make changes to spill levels as conditions require in the river.”
But already, during his second term, President Donald Trump has taken aim at environmental protections for endangered fish in favor of attempting to use water for irrigation — a move that Politico’s E&E News reported will hurt salmon populations and fishing communities.
Even if the current spill regime remains in place, reduced staff rolls at the federal agencies that manage the Columbia could negatively impact dam functions, said Tom Lorz, a hydraulic engineer and fish passage specialist who has been with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission since the mid-1990s.
And without spill, the basin stands to lose the “best way to keep fish from going extinct,” he said.
“It’s a lot of uncertainty,” Lorz said of the current political environment, “which is never a good thing when you’re trying to manage fisheries or endangered species or trying to make sure you’ve got a plan going forward.”
The Columbian originally published this story on April 10, 2025..
