Feds Demand Fish Ladder for Mud Mountain Dam

Going up? For now, endangered salmon populations on the White River can't go anywhere, but officials from the NOAA are telling the Army Corps of Engineers that river dam operations in the Washington state region must be improved to accommodate for the struggling fish.

And that includes adding something called a "fish ladder" to help threatened Chinook salmon summit the Mud Mountain Dam near Enumclaw.

According to The Associated Press (AP), federal fisheries biologists from the NOAA are requiring the corps to have this new fish passage-way up and running by 2020 to comply with the Endangered Species Act. Now, the corps is reportedly seeking funding to get construction started.

"Do I think this will get done? Yes, if we can persuade Congress to authorize the program," Will Stelle, NOAA Fisheries regional administrator, told the AP.

Mud Mountain Dam was reportedly built in 1948 - lacking any fish accommodations that newer dams can boast, such as fish transporting "cannons" or ladders. Instead, to preserve salmon populations along White River, local conservationists literally scoop the fish out of the water, throwing them into watered containers which are then trucked uphill to their ancestral spawning grounds.

And as you can imagine, this kind of work takes a lot of manpower, resources, and often misses a great number of fish, keeping populations dangerously low.

Fish ladders would do away with this inefficient process, providing the salmon a means to sprint up what resembles a watery uphill staircase, complete with various stages for rest. State and federal wildlife officials are overseeing similar projects in California, where the Chinook, or "king Salmon," and Central Valley steelhead fish have been on a steady decline.

The Mud Mountain Dam project is part of an effort by the NOAA to improve salmon mortality. The administration reports that along the White River, only about 80 percent of adult salmon survive their upstream migration - with the help of trucking - and less than 20 percent of juveniles survive their downstream journey. The aim is to increase these rates to 98 and 95 percent, respectively.