Faults, Fault and Falsehood Part 1
Portland General Electric’s Red Herring About Cold Water
Selective Water Withdrawal Tower at Pelton Dam - Lake Billy Chinook
The Metolius River is a world treasure. A wonder to behold, it can be appreciated even more should you choose to nerd out on the geology of the place. (And if you continue reading this blog post, you will be briefly nerding out on its geology.) The formation that created the Metolius is all about horsts and grabens. Horst and Graben is not a high-end kitchen knick-knack store on Wall Street in downtown Bend. A horst is a fault block that rises, and a graben is a fault block that sinks. Green Ridge, rising a couple thousand feet above the east bank of the lower Metolius, is a horst. Topography like this, that runs in a series of basins and ranges, is the result of the stretching of the earth’s crust, due to the rise and fall of land along fault lines. The pull apart of the landscape around the Metolius resulted in the reorienting of the river. It once ran in an east-west vector. It also opened a valley that cut into a vast aquifer beneath the older Cascade mountain range. You can see precisely where this gash in the earth’s crust daylights this subterranean treasure trove of artesian spring water: where the Metolius emerges out of the north side of Black Butte, a miraculous, instant river, 48 degrees Fahrenheit, so clear that a glass of it looks like it should have an olive on a toothpick floating in it.
An entire complex of springs, in fact, from Opal Springs on the lower Crooked River, to lower Whychus Creek, eventually comprises 80 percent of the water in the lower Deschutes River. If you’ve ever seen the Deschutes near Tumalo State Park, you can see what the other 20 percent looks like after irrigation and municipal water withdrawals upstream of here make the river look as anemic as it really is in this section.
Anyhow, the Metolius: it is its cold water that flows at an approximate rate of 1,200 cubic feet per second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, into Reservoir Billy Chinook, where it sinks to the bottom of the forebay at Round Butte Dam. (Cold water is denser and heavier than warmer water.) And before PGE’s selective withdrawal tower went operational, it was this cold water that was drawn directly off the bottom of Reservoir Billy Chinook that made the tailwater fishery on the Deschutes one of the greatest in the world.
As pure, cold and beautiful as it is to behold, the Metolius is an ice-cream headache for Portland General Electric. As a condition for the federal license to operate Round Butte Dam, PGE was, and is, obliged to provide fish passage for salmon and steelhead. A trap and haul operation was devised, including an incrediblly silly ski-lift style contraption to move adult fish above the dam. Outmigrating juveniles would be gathered up at a collection facility on the shores of the dam’s forebay. But the three different rivers feeding the reservoir—the Metolius, cold, clean and clear, and the Deschutes, depleted on its run through Bend and Redmond and adjacent farm land, and the Crooked, then as now plagued with cowshit and irrigation withdrawals, where they met in the reservoir, made for confusing currents for outmigrating juveniles. The colder, denser water of the Metolius, when it met the warmer water of its sister streams, mixed the currents in ways baffling to juvenile fish. The collection facility in the forebay became an ichthyological hotel with no guests. The program was declared a failure, and as was often the case back then, PGE was let off the hook by building hatcheries elsewhere.
PGE has yet to figure out that the best hatchery is a healthy river system. For half a century, (1968-2009) it shirked its duty to provide fish passage. Its solution in the early 2000’s, when it had to re-apply for another license to operate its Deschutes dams, was to sell the public on a $110 million dollar selective withdrawal tower. The tower moves water, not fish, the latter a popular misconception that PGE promotes on its own website. The tower moves no fish, and worse, does not move water as designed.
This is partly because PGE is guilty of a bait-and-switch: prominent features of the plan never got built. One example: powerful intake turbines that would have supposedly created a current to attract outmigrating juveniles to the forebay collection facility.
But the worst part of the selective withdrawal tower isn’t that it has failed at fish passage: few trap and haul fish passage programs can claim anything resembling sustained success. It’s that the tower puts warm polluted water from the surface of the reservoir into the lower Deschutes River. Only this time it isn’t just the extirpation of self-sustaining runs of salmon above the reservoirs. It’s the slow unraveling of what was once one of the country’s best cold water refuges for salmon, steelhead and trout.
For PGE, the tower is becoming another half-century long broken promise. Will the company try to do the right thing this time around, or cover their tracks with lies?
If you enjoy what you’ve read, and you want to support my mission to remove dams throughout the US, please purchase my latest book, Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot Chaotic World.
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