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Snafu at lake kills, strands small fish Corps lowers water releases much faster than pact with ODFW allows By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune Thousands of infant wild salmon and steelhead either have died or remain stranded in Rogue River side channels because federal water managers over-aggressively cut back flows from Lost Creek Lake last Friday, violating fish-protection policies, authorities said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dropped water releases at Lost Creek dam almost two times faster than allowed under an agreement with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The fast drop stranded infant coho, chinook and summer steelhead along gravel bars and in side channels where they had taken refuge from last week's high and swift flows. Now, thousands of the small fish - including threatened wild coho protected under the federal Endangered Species Act - are stranded and blocked from swimming back to the main-stem river, biologists said. Corps spokeswoman Dawn Edwards blamed the mistake on a failure to give the project's new regulator, Mike Posovich, the ODFW recommendations in the agency's official water-flow manuals when he took over from Russ Davidson about three months ago. "It's a very unfortunate incident and it's very regrettable," Edwards said Wednesday. "It's impossible to undo, and we'll take steps to make sure it won't happen again." Now ODFW biologists are mulling how best to rescue the stranded fish and get them back into the main-stem river before more die. Possibilities include amassing a large group of volunteers to wade side channels and gravel bars throughout the upper and middle Rogue and use nets to salvage the infant fish and ferry them back to the river, ODFW biologists said. Others include requesting that the Corps keep flows high through mid-June to give the surviving fish a chance to grow bigger and find their way back to the river, or hoping strong rains this weekend will raise flows enough to ease the salmon back to the river. "It will be tough to salvage these animals when, in some places, you're 40 to 50 kilometers from the river," ODFW researcher Tom Satterthwaite said. "My guess is that we'll probably ask the Corps to keep the flows up." As the Rogue waters rise, young salmon and steelhead head to the banks and take refuge from swift waters by holding in trees, grasses and pools formed at the base of some gravel bars. Normally, rivers subside naturally and the fish follow the receding water back to the main channel. Hydrologists try to imitate this recession with a systematic drop in water releases from Lost Creek Lake. Research done by Satterthwaite and others in the 1980s led to an ODFW recommendation that dam releases in the spring not drop faster than 150 cubic feet per second and not more than 750 cfs per day. During an eight-hour period Friday afternoon and evening, the Corps dropped water releases from 3,000 cfs to 1,600 cfs - almost twice the maximum recommended amount, Edwards said. "We have to take responsibility for this," Edwards said. An ODFW survey conducted Monday on a portion of the upper Rogue upstream of the Highway 234 bridge found four infant chinook and one infant coho and summer steelhead dead, Satterthwaite said. About 4,000 other small salmon and steelhead were found in land-locked pools. Satterthwaite said that survey covered less than 1 percent of the affected area and that it was impossible to estimate the loss. "But, in my mind, it's significant," he said. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.