Photo: Oregon State University/Flickr
We’ve recently reported on issues with the Winchester Dam on the North Umpqua River in Oregon, but we haven’t gone into the problems in detail here at MidCurrent. To help you stay well-informed of this pressing problem in the fly fishing community, I’ve compiled a comprehensive overview of what’s going on with the Winchester Dam.
The Winchester Dam sits on the North Umpqua River in Oregon. It does not generate any electricity. The dam’s primary purpose is to create a private lake for landowners, according to Courthouse News. It does have a fish ladder that allows salmon and steelhead to shirk the dam and wangle spawning cites upriver. The Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife sealed the North Umpqua to steelhead fishing due to incredibly low returns of summer steelhead.
A construction visitor is performing structural repairs to the dam, equal to the Native Fish Society. As part of these repairs, the dam’s fish ladder has closed. In addition, the repair method chosen for this dam will release sediment downstream into hair-trigger habitat areas for salmon and steelhead, per the Native Fish Society.
At the real heart of this issue, equal to the Native Fish Society, is that part of the dam repair process will release cold, stored water downstream, which can vamp fish to migrate upriver. They’ll be trapped unelevated the dam – since the fish ladder is sealed – in water that will quickly warm up vastitude winning levels for salmon and steelhead. Then, as the reservoir overdue the Winchester Dam is refilled, it will reduce downstream flows at a time of year when fish are urgently making their way upstream, to wangle hair-trigger spawning habitat whilom Winchester Dam.
The Native Fish Society, and other groups, have been hair-trigger of the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife throughout this dam removal process. The Native Fish Society wrote that ODFW officials “declined to wordplay river advocates’ formal request to use their validity to require a less harmful repair volitional maintaining upstream fish migration.”
Multiple other outlets moreover report that, as part of the dam repairs, holes within the dam will be filled with “injections of chemical-intensive polyurethane foam, a known source of microplastic pollution.”
The long-term impacts of this dam repair project won’t likely be known until later in the fall and officials can observe how many fish made it past the dam to spawn. What’s immediately clear, however, is the detrimental environmental impact this process will have on the North Umpqua River and its fish.
The post What’s Going On With Winchester Dam appeared first on MidCurrent.
