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1.3 million hatchery fish die photos by Jim Craven Cole Rivers Fish Hatchery employees Rose Baker, right, and Pat Harbison use strainers to separate tiny live spring chinook from the dead Friday. A water pump and alarm system failure caused the death of 1.3 million infant fish Thursday. Accident may devastate prize chinook fishery By Mark Freeman of the Mail Tribune TRAIL -- Rose Baker dips her metal strainer into the aquatic rubble left from Cole Rivers Hatchery's worst disaster, sifting through death looking for life. One by one, inch-long Rogue River spring chinook salmon swim from the strainer into an open raceway of healthy water. The remnant dead are whisked by the thousands into a plastic bucket. Bill Otto, manager at Cole Rivers, says a tragedy like this "hits you right in the gut. It's the next worst thing to having a death in the family." "We're looking for survivors, trying to salvage every one we can," says Baker, a contract employee at the state-run hatchery along the upper Rogue River. "These are the fishermen's fish," she says. "It's sad to see anything die, especially as many as this." Baker and a dozen other hatchery workers spent Friday cleaning up the carnage from a water pump and alarm system failure Thursday morning that killed an estimated 1.3 million infant spring chinook salmon. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates the death rate at three of every four spring chinook bred this fall and set for release into the Rogue River and two nearby reservoirs this summer. The brunt of the loss will not be felt until 2003, when the catching in the Rogue of returning adult spring chinook -- the river's most lucrative sport-fish -- will likely drop by 50 percent, ODFW biologist Mike Evenson says. The fish died after a failed pump stopped running cool, oxygen-charged water through the 378 trays of these tiny fish, barely a month old, that fill the facility's hatch house. After the fish gobbled up what oxygen remained, they began to suffocate and die en masse. Alarms that ring at the hatchery compound as well as workers' homes failed to warn slumbering employees. "We thought we had plenty of precautions," hatchery Manager Bill Otto says. "Obviously not." A janitor discovered the failure about 4 a.m. and notified hatchery workers, who quickly restored the flow of fresh water to the tiny fish, Otto says. While the water pump was likely off only about a half-hour, the breakdown triggered the largest loss of infant fish in the hatchery's 28-year history. "It hits you right in the gut," a teary Otto says. "It's the next worst thing to having a death in the family." Outside the hatchery compound off Highway 62 near Trail, sport-fishing enthusiasts reeled at the prospect of a future Rogue salmon-fishing season left on life support after Thursday's accident. The Rogue's prized run of wild spring chinook is already depressed enough that it, along with other chinook coastwide, were almost listed as a threatened species. Hatchery-raised fish buoy returns and are raised specifically for catching in the sport and commercial fisheries. The bulk of the fish lost Thursday would return to the Rogue in 2003 as 12- to 20-pound adults. Without them, the sport-fishing community fears cutbacks or closures to sport and commercial harvest to protect the remaining wild spring chinook. "This could really scare people," says George Edwards, manager of the Rogue Outdoor Store at the Rogue's mouth in Gold Beach. "You'll see people jumping up and down saying we should close fishing because we won't have that hatchery stock. That's the big negative side." ODFW biologists are exploring ways to minimize the loss, Otto says. The hatchery annually releases 1.62 million spring chinook smolts into the Rogue in late summer and early fall. Another 150,000 are stocked each summer into Applegate Lake, while another 50,000 are released into Lost Creek Lake and the remaining 15,000 go to classroom incubators where they are raised, then released, by area schoolchildren. Otto says plans likely will include dropping the Lost Creek and Applegate stocking for this year, giving different fish to the classroom incubators and releasing the remaining 400,000 or so spring chinook for the Rogue. The ODFW also could take advantage of the tendency for the salmon to mature and return to the Rogue after two to five years in the ocean. Increasing chinook releases in subsequent years, Otto says, could help fill in the void left by Thursday's loss. The accident occurred after a string of unusual events Wednesday at the hatchery. Power was off at the hatchery, which was running on generators most of Wednesday while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did some repairs upstream, Otto says. After power was restored, a surge damaged a transformer that feeds the three-tiered alarm system at the hatch house, where the infant chinook were growing and awaiting transfer to outside ponds as early as next week. The alarm first sounds in the hatchery offices. If that does not get addressed, it sounds through speakers on hatchery grounds. The final alarm is loud bell-ringing in the four state-owned residences and three trailers that house hatchery workers and their families nearby. When the transformer was fixed Wednesday, workers checked the most sensitive alarm -- the first one, Otto says. In the past, every restarting of the first alarm system also activated the remaining two, he says. But the pump failed early the following morning, and the two back-up alarms did not sound. "I still get emotional thinking about it," Otto says. "Seeing all those dead fish that are your responsibility. You feel like you let the public down. But it was an accident." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA