Editorial: Doing away with dams

San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, August 16, 2009

President Obama is playing for time before wading into one of the oldest - and most far-reaching - disputes in the West's water wars: the fate of four dams on the Snake River in Washington. But eventually he and his policy team should muster the courage to go with a sweeping but science-backed option: Take down the string of outmoded structures that impede salmon.

It's a plausible stance that is already guiding demolition plans for four similar dams on the upper Klamath River on the California and Oregon border. A decision to breach a dam on the Snake could widen a trend already under way to re-evaluate water, power and environmental problems brought on by the aging structures.

Built more than a half century ago, the Washington state dams were designed to shunt water to wheat farmers, crank out electricity and provide a shipping waterway along the lower Snake River, flowing from Idaho into the Columbia River.

But there was a hidden cost, one that's drawn debate for over a decade: a sharp decline in salmon that's left a dozen strains endangered or near extinction.

(More here.)