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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2019  

  News G1

HOSTILE WATERS
A SEATTLE TIMES SPECIAL REPORT   PART FIVE

CHASING
A MEMORY
In California, orcas and salmon have become
so scarce, people have forgotten what once was.
Will the Northwest be next?

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

The second largest warehouse district on the West Coast hems in the Green River where it flows through south King County. More than 80% of the lower Green River is walled off
behind levees that, while protecting against flooding, can damage salmon habitat. Above, a southern resident killer whale breaches last year off Puget Sound’s Vashon Island.

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PHOTOS BY STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife fish culturalist grasps a thrashing Sacramento River winter run chinook. Ripe with eggs, she is a rare find and her eggs may be used for a captive population as a hedge against extinction. Southern resident killer whales still come all the way to California targeting these fish. But they are mostly chasing a memory of abundance.

“PEOPLE DON’T
EVEN KNOW
WHAT WE USED
TO HAVE.”
JONATHAN AMBROSE, A BIOLOGIST WITH THE NATIONAL
OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION

Shasta Dam, finished in 1945, was
built without fish
passage. California
winter chinook have
since declined in the
habitat left for them
in the Sacramento
River, where water
withdrawals,
drought and hot
water – all worsened by climate
change – have
pushed them to the
brink of extinction.

By LYNDA V. MAPES
Seattle Times environment reporter

REDDING, Calif. — If there is a
hell for salmon, it probably looks
like this.
There were many more golf
balls in the water than salmon
this summer, whacked there by
enthusiasts at Aqua Golf, a driving range on the bank of the
Sacramento River.
Below the surface, the gravel
salmon need to make their nests
had been mined decades ago to
build Shasta Dam, 602 feet tall
and with no fish passage. The
dam cut off access to all of the
cold mountain waters where
these fish used to spawn.
The hillsides above the river
were blackened by wildfire.
Houses, instead of forests, stood
along the banks. Cars roared by
on Interstate 5 as temperatures
soared to 105 degrees.
Yet the matriarchs of the orcas
that frequent Puget Sound still
remember the big winter chinook
that used to thrive here. The fat,
juicy fish are precious winter food
for orcas at the southernmost end
of their vast foraging range.
The orcas, called southern
residents for a reason, cruise all
the way to California to feed on
Central Valley salmon runs. L pod
was off Monterey early this year.
The oldest whale among all the
southern residents, L25, born
about 1928, led the way. She
brought her whole family because her mother did before her,
and her grandmother before that.
In the southern resident pods, the
matriarchs lead the search for
food — particularly in times of
scarcity.
But was L pod chasing fish in
California — or only L25’s memory of them? The fish have become
so scarce, it is hard to know if the
Continued on next page >

Winter chinook circle in tanks, part of the captive brood at the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery at the base of
Shasta Dam. The dam cut off all their natural spawning habitat.
Left: Today most
salmon runs in the
Sacramento River
are so diminished,
many people have
forgotten that California is a salmon
state and essential
orca habitat.
Right: Almonds are
a thirsty crop. It
takes more than a
gallon of water to
grow one nut. Irrigation for industrial-scale agriculture
takes water from the
Sacramento salmon
need.

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PHOTOS BY STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Everything that hurts salmon happened first and worse in California. The fate of salmon there is a cautionary tale for the Northwest, the last stand for salmon and orcas in the Lower 48. This view is of San Francisco Bay and Foster City.

< Continued from previous page

Many of the chinook runs that orcas most rely on are threatened
with extinction, just like the orcas themselves.

CHINOOK RIVER RUNS

Ketchikan

ENDANGERED

THREATENED

GOOD

BRITISH COLUMBIA
So

ut

he

rn

r es

ide

Fraser
River
nt

ki l

le

Vancouver

rw

ha

Seattle

e
ng

PACIFIC
OCEAN

WASHINGTON
Snake River

Portland

Columbia River*

SACRAMENTO RIVER
WINTER CHINOOK RUNS
60,000
50,000

CANADA
U.S.

le
ra

whales got any nourishment.
Jonathan Ambrose is working
to reintroduce Sacramento winter chinook back to their high
mountain waters, above the dam,
in a last-ditch effort to beat extinction.
These fish can’t survive much
longer where they are, said Ambrose, reintroduction coordinator for the Central Valley office of
the National Marine Fisheries
Service. The salmon are kept on
life support with cold-water
releases from the dam. But because of increasing water use for
agriculture and growing human
population — and heat and
drought only expected to intensify with a warming planet — some
years there isn’t enough cold
water for fish.
Salmon still cruise under the
Golden Gate Bridge in their journey to and from the sea. But San
Francisco today is known for its
tech boom and world-class urban
amenities — not salmon.
Salmon?
Many people here have forgotten all about salmon, Ambrose
said. They don’t know the Sacramento is a salmon river. That
California is a salmon state. That
orcas still come here, searching
for salmon.
“People don’t even know what
we used to have,” Ambrose said.
The decline of this river, once
second in salmon production in
the U.S. only to the Columbia
River, is a cautionary tale, a time
machine, depicting a possible
future. What has happened to the
Sacramento and its winter chinook could happen here, in the
Northwest.
Lack of adequate available
food is one of the main reasons
the southern residents are spiraling toward extinction. Three
were presumed dead this summer. Last year, mother orca Tahlequah raised worldwide dismay
when she carried her dead calf
for 17 days and more than 1,000
miles. There are only 73 southern
residents left.
The whales made only a short
visit to California waters this year
because there isn’t much food
there for them. And increasingly,
the whales aren’t here in the
Salish Sea much, either.
Mostly, they have remained on
the coast searching for chinook.
As the orcas leave, more and
more people arrive: Nearly 200
people a day are moving to the
Puget Sound region, where the
population, some 4 million people, is expected to grow to nearly

Status of priority chinook runs
for southern resident orcas

ALASKA

OREGON
Coastal
Oregon runs

53,089

Medford

40,000
30,000

Cape Mendocino

20,000
10,000
0
1970

977

Sacramento
River**

CALIFORNIA
San Francisco

’80

’90

2000

’10

2017

*Columbia chinook runs vary by season and region. Upper river spring runs are
endangered, with summer and fall runs good. Middle river summer and fall runs
0
100
are good. All lower river runs are threatened.
**Sacramento chinook runs vary by season. Winter runs are endangered, spring run
MILES
are threatened and the fall/late fall runs are in good standing.
EMILY M. ENG / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Sources: NOAA, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Esri, Natural Earth

Winter run chinook migrate from the ocean into the bay and under the Richmond-San
Rafael Bridge on the way to the Sacremento River. At left is an oil-tank farm.

6 million by 2050.
In suburban Snohomish County, housing is burgeoning as
Stillaguamish River chinook are
declining. In Central Puget
Sound, most of the Lower Green
River is walled off behind levees.
The Lower Duwamish, into
which the Green flows, has been
converted to an industrial waterway. Yet the Stillaguamish and
the Green-Duwamish rivers are
still crucial producers of the chinook the endangered orcas need.
On the Columbia and Snake
rivers, another historic salmon
stronghold, the Northwest region
since 1981 has spent nearly $17
billion on fish and wildlife recovery, but has not budged a single
salmon run from the endangered-species list. Puget Sound
chinook also remain at high risk
of extinction, despite 20 years of
recovery efforts.
The region is on a path to repeat the history of decline seen
everywhere that salmon have
ever thrived. First in the rivers of
Europe. Then the East Coast of
North America. Then California.
In the Northwest there is no
need to choose between salmon
and prosperity, orcas and jobs.
“We have a chance to do what
other parts of the country have
not done to save what remains,
restore what is lost, and essentially, to have it all,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine.
“This is a battle for the soul of this
region.”
The last stand in the Lower 48
for salmon and the orcas that
depend on them is here. It is now.
In the Northwest.
Billions spent, salmon
still endangered
This cluster of slides, flumes
and buildings looked like a water
park in the middle of Washington
wheat country.
Here at the Lower Granite
Dam, 20 seasonal workers are
crammed into trailers, plunging
needles into the bellies of tiny fish
to insert tracking tags. More
incoming fish zipped their way,
backward and uphill in translucent plastic piping to their work
station. The fish were temporarily zonked with a knockout potion, aptly called Aqui-S, to make
them easier to handle.
As the drug soaked in, the fish
quieted, and workers standing in
a line at a flume palmed each one
to insert the tag. It enables managers to track the survival — or
demise — of every salmon on its
journey downriver from Lower
Granite Dam, the inlandmost on
See > ORCAS, G4

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  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2019

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PHOTOS BY STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

At Lower Granite Dam, water thunders over the spillway to help sluice salmon to the sea, rather than sending it through turbines to generate electricity. Despite nearly $17 billion
spent in the world’s largest fish and wildlife recovery program, many Columbia and Snake river salmon runs that orcas need are still headed toward extinction.

< Orcas
FROM G3

the Lower Snake River, to Bonneville, more than 300 miles away,
the last dam on the main-stem
Columbia River before the Pacific.
But in this industrialized river
system, many salmon do not
swim at all. Instead, they are
taken out of the river, put on a
barge to cruise toward the ocean.
It’s a strategy intended to spread
the risk between salmon migrating in the river and those getting
a ride.
It’s a dazzling and even bamboozling scene, as workers sort,
tag and ship salmon that just
minutes before were swimming
downriver, minding their own
business, until encountering a
migration massively altered by
hydroelectric dams that help
power the region.
Hundreds of millions of dollars
have been spent on alterations to
the hydro system, trying to address the basic problem that a
soft, tiny fish no longer than a
finger is trying to get past a cement wall 100 feet high, and a

This spiral fish flume is used to move juvenile salmon past Lower Granite Dam. Some fish will be loaded into a barge for
tranport to the sea, while others will be piped back into the Lower Snake River, the Columbia’s largest tributary.

Continued on next page >

Dams in the
Columbia River Basin
Dam construction resulted in a loss of
more than half of the fish habitat in the
Columbia River Basin.
C olu m i a River
b

Columbia Basin Boundary
Area naturally accessible to salmon
Area rendered inaccessible to
salmon due to dams
Dam

ALBERTA

BRITISH COLUMBIA
Vancouver

CANADA
U.S.

Victoria
Strait of Juan
de Fuca

Wells
Chelan

WASHINGTON

OCEAN

Seattle

Chief
Joseph

Grand
Coulee

Rocky Reach
Rock Island

Olympia

PACIFIC

Yakima

Baby salmon run a gantlet of dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in
their journey to the sea.

Spokane
Little
Goose

Wanapum

MONTANA

Priest
Rapids

Lower
Granite

Lower
Monumental
Ice Harbor
mbia
u
l
Bonneville
o
C
ver McNary
John R i
The Dalles Day
Portland

Missoula
Helena
Dworshak

Hells Canyon
Oxbow
Brownlee

Bend
Boise

Sn

OREGON
0

a k e River

IDAHO

50
MILES

NEVADA
Sources: Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission,
Northwest Power and Conservation Council
EMILY M. ENG / THE SEATTLE TIMES

UTAH

Seasonal workers sort and tag juvenile salmon at Lower Granite Dam, injecting electronic tags in the fish to track their survival through eight dams.

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PHOTOS BY STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Industrial development crowds the Lower Duwamish Waterway. Nearly all of its natural estuary wetlands and side channels were filled in. Salmon that orcas rely on still travel
through these waters, where a major Superfund cleanup and other restoration projects are underway.

< Continued from previous page

battery of turbines grinding electricity from the current. And the
fish must run this gantlet over
and over again as they navigate
as many as nine dams.
The Columbia still has banner
years, in relative terms. But lately
the tempo between good years
and bad is quickening, and the
wipeouts are getting worse.
The harmful effects of the
highly altered rivers are worsened by climate change. Ocean
conditions are depleting marine
food webs, and rivers are warming in a one-two punch that has
diminished salmon returns to
some of the lowest numbers in
decades.
Passage through long, slackwater reservoirs is perilous because
salmon are cold-water animals.
The cumulative effects of climate
change are pushing water temperatures into the 70s in some
reservoirs for more than a month
at a time. The longer salmon are
in warmer water, the more susceptible they are to disease and
dying before they reach their
home gravel to spawn.
Orca L25 was about 10 years
old when the first dam, Bonneville, started churning out kilowatts in 1938. Today, for her
family, and for human families all
over the region, the stakes on the
Columbia and Snake are high.
The dams are zero-carbon
energy producers — critical as the
region seeks to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels to fight global warming. Yet some orca experts maintain whale recovery is
unlikely without removal of the
four Lower Snake dams.
Dam removal on the Lower
Snake has been at the heart of a
more than 20-year court battle
and political fight, with federal
judges six times finding that
federal agencies are not measuring up to salmon-recovery requirements in operation of the
federal hydro-power system.
Passage for juvenile salmon
has greatly improved, though a
poorly understood phenomenon
called “delayed mortality” that
kicks in after the last dam,
thought to be linked to stress
from the hydro-power system,
has made exact losses impossible
to count.
This much is certain: historically the Snake is believed to have
been the Columbia basin’s most
productive drainage for salmon
and steelhead. It’s supported
more than 40 percent of all Columbia spring/summer chinook.
But today these fish are at high
risk of extinction. Some runs are
already gone.
As people debate and argue
about what to do, hungry whales
are still looking — hard — for the
fish that always sustained them,
especially in the early spring.
These Columbia and Snake fish
are essential to the whales to

Muckleshoot tribal members got only 12 hours of treaty-protected fishing in Elliott
Bay and the Duwamish this summer because chinook runs were so poor.

A mountain of
scrap metal sits
at the edge of
the Lower Duwamish. The
river was long
ago converted
to heavy industrial uses.

carry them until the start of the
summer-run salmon in the Salish
Sea, their summer home. For as
long as L25 can remember.

leering from a billboard just
overhead.
To paddle the Lower Duwamish — into which the Green
flows — is to witness all that can
Seattle’s only river
be done to a river without killing
A front-end loader pawed at a
it.
pile of scrap metal several stories
The natural estuary and sidehigh and heaped all the way to
channel habitat is almost entirely
the river’s edge. Steel barges
eliminated — smothered in fill, or
staged to tow shipping containers walled off with levees, dredged
full of goods and materials to
and straightened. The Lower
distant ports lined the west bank. Duwamish is no longer a river at
One barge was stacked five conall, but what the U.S. Army Corps
tainers high, and topped by a tour of Engineers calls a waterway, an
bus with a leaping orca painted
industrial shipping channel, to
on its side.
Elliott Bay.
There is still real wildlife here.
To be sure, a lot of work has
Sandpipers fluttered over a mud been done and is underway by
flat; a kingfisher cut across the
governments, businesses, nonriver. A great blue heron stood
profits and volunteers to restore
ready to spear a meal, oblivious
the Green-Duwamish to health. A
to the Geico Insurance gecko
$342 million, 17-year Superfund

cleanup is proceeding in the
Lower Duwamish, with the goal
of removing and remediating
decades of toxic pollution. The
Port of Seattle has completed
more than 93 acres of habitat
restoration in the watershed and
Elliott Bay, and has a goal to do
more. Community shoreline
access and habitat improvements
have brought life back to the
Duwamish. All sorts of new directions and experiments are being
pursued to improve water quality, even artificial floating wetland
islands called “bio-barges.”
A Re-Green the Green program
has been underway since 2016,
with a goal of planting more than
2,300 acres of trees in the Green
River watershed and Central
Puget Sound area by 2025 to
improve conditions for salmon.
It’s a tall order in an area hardused to create the region’s
wealth, and which for decades
was paved and poisoned under
practices mostly disallowed today.
“For so many years the river
was just used as an open sewer,”
said David Schumate, a retired
engineer and river advocate who
lives by the river and was
dwarfed by the tailfins of parked
Boeing aircraft as he paddled his
canoe downstream.
The din of industrial machinery made it hard to talk amid a
cacophony of traffic, rumbling
airplanes and jet blasts from
Boeing Field. Backup alarms,
heavy equipment, banging,
smashing, clanging. The roar of
the kilns at multiple cement
plants.
A Lime rental bicycle heaved in
the river glowed green in the
muddy brown water. Suddenly a
fish jumped near Schumate’s
paddle — to his shock: “I’m surprised there are any fish left in
here at all.”
Rain started to pock the river,
stoking discharge of wet-weather
runoff, from all of the surrounding roofs, parking lots, roads,
industrial facilities and junkyards
that flows untreated into the
river. Called stormwater, this
runoff carries oil, grease, dirt, tire
dust, soot from engine exhaust,
and a witch’s brew of pollutants
from any and every hard surface.
The biggest source of pollution
to Puget Sound, stormwater
runoff is so toxic to coho salmon
many females full of eggs die
before they can spawn in urban
creeks.
The blubber of orcas carries the
poisons, which are in the fish they
eat. When they go hungry, they
burn their fat, releasing contaminants into their bloodstream,
where they can compromise their
health. Orca babies carry the
highest levels of contaminants
relative to their weight because of
the load of pollutants they take
on from their mothers’ fat-rich
milk.
Continued on next page >

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  News G7

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES, TAKEN UNDER NOAA PERMIT 21348

Southern residents are the most urban orcas in the world, competing with the needs and wants of more than 6 million people living around the Salish Sea. These orcas swam last November between the Port of Tacoma and the Superfund site at the former Asarco smelter at Ruston.

< Continued from previous page

Eric Warner, research team
leader for the fish division of the
Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, knows
from experience that the GreenDuwamish still is treated as a
dumping ground. Even an Acura
turned up during one cleanup
effort, Warner said. “You hear
about the need for large woody
debris in the water for salmon.
Well, we have shopping carts
instead.”
This is one of the most important rivers in the state, both for
the survival of Puget Sound chinook and for southern resident
orcas that eat them. Yet just like
the orca and the salmon, the
Green-Duwamish is fighting for
its life.
More than 80% of the Lower
Green River already has been
walled off from its floodplain,
with levees intended to protect
billions of dollars worth of property and what has become the
second-largest warehouse industry on the West Coast.
Managing even more growth
and population yet to come with
salmon and orcas in mind comes
down to day-to-day decisions in
places like this.
“This is basically a ditch,” said
Katie Beaver, Lower Green River
Basin Steward for King County,
watching the river beaten and
banished between walls of the
Desimone levee, intended to
protect portions of Kent, Renton
and Tukwila from flooding. Here
the board of the King County
Flood Control District, composed
of all nine Metropolitan King
County Council members, approved in 2013 construction of a
set-back levee with a rock-armored shore and steel wall.
Other county officials had
proposed an alternate plan, to set
the levee much farther back and
provide flood protection along
with environmental benefits,
including better fish habitat. The
flood district has built levees like
that, including in Auburn. But
this time, the flood district board
went for the faster, cheaper
choice, with less property acquisition from local businesses.
Mature trees were cut to build
it, and plantings intended to
provide shade died. Much of the
site, but for some willows, bakes
See > ORCAS, G8

1 NATURAL SHORELINE

LAND USES
Agriculture

5 SETBACK LEVEES

1

7 FORESTED RUNOFF

6 LEVEES

8 URBAN RUNOFF

Industrial
Commercial

Levee

Open areas

Elliott Bay

Levee

Sammamish

Osprey

Floodplain

Floodplain

Setback levees create room for a river
to move, managing floodwater while
retaining a natural shoreline. Larger
setbacks can allow public access, and
create space for a greenbelt to shade
water and keep it cool for salmon.
Example: Van Doren’s Landing Park
(Kent)

4

ARMORED SHORELINE

Levees with floodwalls require less
property to build but they offer fewer
restoration opportunities.
Example: Briscoe-Desimone Levee
(Kent area)

Burien
Tukwila

Vashon
Island

2

A hardened shoreline lacks shrubs and
trees, deflects waves, narrows the beach
and erodes it. Biodiversity, including
crucial habitat for forage fish, shorebirds
and baby salmon is lost.
Example: North of Des Moines
Beach Park

Des
Moines

Maple
Valley

Kent

Auburn
Chinook salmon

HEALTHY RIPARIAN

5

Pacific tree frog

River otter

Black Diamond

Federal Way

Tacoma Headworks
Diversion Dam

3

4 UNHEALTHY RIPARIAN

Great
blue heron

Cougar

Ravensdale

Southern resident
killer whale

Rain runs off hard surfaces, carrying
untreated pollutants and creating surges
of water into streams that damage
habitat. Green stormwater infrastructure,
including home rain gardens, can help
moderate stormwater.
Example: Downtown Seattle

Orcas rely on salmon from the Green River, one of the most important chinook producers in Puget Sound.
The river valley also is home to about 100,000 jobs, as well as one of the largest warehouse and
distribution districts in the nation and an annual payroll worth billions. Land use and restoration
decisions made here will determine whether salmon in Seattle’s only river will recover, or continue to
decline. Moreover, half the watershed is inaccessible to salmon because of the Howard Hanson Dam.

6

SeaTac

In a forested landscape, vegetation and
soil hold runoff, cleansing the water and
moderating flows.
Example: Bass and Beaver Lakes
(Enumclaw area)

The Green-Duwamish Watershed:
a vital home for people and fish

Renton

3

Levee

8

West
Seattle

Natural bluffs feed beaches. Forage fish lay
their eggs on beaches while young salmon
and birds use beaches and shallow waters
for feeding on insects and other prey.
Example: Fort Lawton Beach (Seattle)

2

Levee

Seattle

Residential

Howard A.
Hanson Reservoir

Howard A.
Hanson Dam

7

NO FISH PASSAGE

Green R
ive
r

Humphrey

Lester

Puyallup
A healthy stream is shaded by native
plants, cooling the water. The shoreline
meanders through its floodplain as water
levels change seasonally. Gravel provides
material for salmon to dig their nests.
Example: Doreen Johnson Conservation
Area (Auburn area)

An unhealthy stream has no shade, raising
water temperatures that can kill salmon. It is
channelized and cut off from its floodplain.
There is no insect rain or leaf litter to provide
a food source for a diversity of species. There
is no gravel for salmon to dig their nests.
Example: Desimone Oxbow (Tukwila)

Bonney Lake

Enumclaw

Salmon
blocked

Greenwater
Herring
Elk

0

5
MILES

Caddisfly
Rough-skinned
newt

Note: All illustrated scenes are general examples of landscape conditions. Animals not shown to scale.
Source: King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks

EMILY M. ENG / THE SEATTLE TIMES

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PHOTOS BY STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

The Howard A. Hanson Dam, built in 1962, blocks fish passage to half the Green River watershed and more than 100 miles of spawning habitat for chinook, coho and steelhead.

< Orcas

should provide fish passage. “The
only controversy is why it is taking so long,” said Fred Goetz,
Endangered Species Act coordinator for the corps’ Seattle district office.
The agency started building a
juvenile fish-passage facility here
but quickly busted the project
budget. With $108 million spent,
the corps stopped work in 2011.
By now work has been stalled for
so long, the process to design,
approve and fund the work needs
to be restarted.
NOAA has set a deadline to
begin fish passage at the dam —
in 2031.
“This may be the most important single project that can be
done for salmon recovery in
Puget Sound. We have a tremendous opportunity here,” Goetz
said. “The continuous decline of
the orca is not helped if we are
not able to accomplish these big
missions.”

FROM G6

in the sun in a river already hurting for shade.
“It shows we have these good
intentions and lofty aspirations
and reassuring words about
commitment to the environment,
but when push comes to shove,
the majority of the County Council, the Legislature, and the mayor and City Council in Kent, no
one was willing to do the right
thing,” Constantine said.
A new process is underway
now to create a long-term comprehensive flood-management
plan for the river. Tribes, state
agencies, county officials, the city
of Seattle and many nonprofit
conservation groups see a oncein-a-generation chance to set the
Green-Duwamish on a course
that protects property while also
supporting salmon and orca
recovery. “Why can’t we think
outside the box?” Beaver said.
“Politics gets us stuck. Let’s
think about this, not only in terms
of what is there today, but what
could be ... We need to raise the
awareness that this river is an
asset.”
Municipalities, real-estate
developers and farmers, meanwhile, are arguing for more levees — one option under consideration would build nearly 30
more miles of walls.
Even where there is consensus,
such as on providing passage for
fish into the upper watershed, the
Green-Duwamish is still awaiting
bold action to boost salmon and
orca survival.
In the upper Green, the Howard A. Hanson Dam rises. It was
completed in 1962 in part to
manage flooding, particularly in
the heavily developed lower
reach of the river in places including Auburn, Tukwila and Kent.
Built without fish passage, this
federal dam walls off more than

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers busted its budget for fish passage at the Howard
A. Hanson Dam and stopped work on the project in 2011 after spending $108 million. This hole in the ground and stairway are part of the project never finished.

Salmon struggle to survive in the Salish Sea
Salmon have been in a steady decline since 1980, victims of a range of threats in the waters
that include Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia.
CHINOOK OCEAN SURVIVAL*
6% Adult return rate
5.6 % - Salish Sea chinook

4

2.06%

2

1.96%

1.9% - Washington coast chinook

0

1977

’80

’85

’90

’95

’00

’05

’10

’13

*Survival rate is calculated by the number of juveniles entering the ocean in a specific year divided by the number of those salmon
(now adults) returning in subsequent years.
EMILY M. ENG / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Sources: Long Live the Kings, Salish Sea Marine Survival Project

Video: The
Stillaguamish Tribe
and the fight for its
salmon culture.
st.news/orca-salmon

100 miles upstream of river and
side channels, spawning habitat
just waiting for chinook, chum,
coho and steelhead.
Despite decades of talk and

Levees like this one on the Lower Green River in Tukwila have a hardened
rock wall along the river’s edge and no big trees to cast shade.

more than $100 million spent,
there still is no fish passage at the
Howard Hanson.
All parties agree this dam operated by the Corps of Engineers

Suburban sprawl,
and what remains
As the region grows, salmon
and the orcas are in a race against
time. To find the most endangered salmon in Puget Sound,
head to some of its fastest developing landscapes: the suburbs.
More growth means more
people and, depending on how
growth is managed, more pollution and runoff, as forests and
open spaces that absorb rainwater and pollution are paved or
converted to housing, shopping
centers, office parks — and all the
rest.
Lack of affordable housing in
cities is making the problem
worse.
Seattle’s boom has brought
more and more people chasing
six-figure tech jobs — and pushed
people of more modest means
fleeing high housing costs and
traffic and construction mayhem
to places like Suncrest Farms, 42
Continued on next page >

In a $2.5 million restoration project, King County acquired 102 acres along
the Green, took out two homes in the floodplain and revegetated 25 acres.

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PHOTOS BY STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Herring spawn colors the water in Hood Canal last spring. Natural beaches, healthy forests and clean, cold water support forage fish that feed salmon that feed orcas.

< Continued from previous page

miles from Seattle in Granite
Falls, Snohomish County.
Granite Falls, near the Stillaguamish River, notched the second fastest rate of growth among
cities in the four-county central
Puget Sound region in
2018-2019, state records show.
One reason is affordability. At
Suncrest Farms, $434,995 —
about half the median home price
in Seattle — buys a 2,668-squarefoot single-family home with a
yard and a three-car garage.
“Sold out of inventory, more
coming soon!” says the sign stuck
in the ground not far from where
swing sets stand at the ready in
backyards for the families flocking here, to enjoy a lifestyle with
more space, for less money.
“Whoever would have thought
that affordable housing and
transportation would be our
biggest conservation challenges?” said Jeff Davis, director of
conservation for the Washington
Department of Fish and Wildlife.
A recent congressional tour of the
south Sound, where pavement
also is pressing deeper into the
remaining bastions for salmon,
left him in despair.
While restoration work is underway all over the state, Davis
knows habitat loss is outpacing
the gains. He doesn’t want his
9-year-old daughter to have to go
to a museum to see a chinook.
For Shawn Yanity, Stillaguamish tribal chairman, that
day is already here.
Yanity eyes silvery chinook
circling in a tank, ghostly in the
light of the hatchery. This captive-brood facility is a living gene
bank for what has become one of
the most endangered chinook
runs in the state.
Some years, there have not
even been enough fish in the
Stillaguamish to put salmon on
the table for tribal ceremonies.
The tribe has had to buy fish —
and serve chicken and ham instead. What is being lost is a
cultural heritage, a practice and
way of life that isn’t replicated
with chicken dinners.
“It’s the teachings, the stories
the elders tell, the protocol and
preparation for fishing and hunting,” Yanity said.
The captive brood is both necessary, he said, and crushing: “I
don’t want to see my culture in a
tank.”
Western Washington tribes
with a treaty right to fish fought
all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court to compel repairs to fishblocking state highway culverts,
to help boost the runs.
But it will take more than a
paper victory promising hypothetical fish to put salmon back
on tribal tables and in orca
mouths, Yanity said. Many repairs done so far are stranded
investments unless repairs made
by the state are matched by local

Like tiny jewels,
herring eggs
stick to eel grass
and other
aquatic vegetation.

governments, fixing their culverts that block habitat, too,
upstream and down, Yanity said.
Despite it all, he has faith in the
fish and the orcas that depend on
them. Salmon and steelhead
even rebounded in the Toutle
River in Southwest Washington
after the eruption of Mount St.
Helens.
Environmental laws are making a difference, from the Clean
Water Act to the Marine Mammal

Protection Act. Puget Sound is
cleaner today than it was a generation ago. Gray whales, seals,
harbor porpoises and the transient orcas that eat them have
rebounded since hunting marine
mammals was prohibited. Even
humpbacks are making a comeback.
Where investments have been
made to restore the natural abundance of their habitat, fish have
boomed back.

After the largest dam removal
in the world, more chinook are
returning to the Elwha River than
in a generation. The Coastal
Watershed Institute of Port Angeles, a research nonprofit, also has
documented more surf smelt
along the nearshore of the Elwha.
That’s a response to dam removal
that restarted the river’s natural
flow of sediment, and the institute’s restoration work tearing
See > ORCAS, G10

The Stillaguamish Tribe bought this farmland along the Stillaguamish River to restore the floodplain and improve conditions for young fish. The tribe is buying land wherever it can for fish habitat.

 G10 News  

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2019

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PHOTOS BY STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES, TAKEN UNDER NOAA PERMIT 21348

The wonder of orcas never grows old. Bubbles briefly cover this southern resident’s pectoral fin as it surfaces in Commencement Bay near Tacoma last November.

< Orcas
FROM G9

out shoreline armoring to restore
the beach.
A healthy beach hops with bugs
on soft sand, essential spawning
ground for sand lance and surf
smelt. These forage fish, as well
as herring, feed the salmon that
feed the orcas.
In bays and coves along Puget
Sound, herring persist. Their
jewel-like eggs sparkle on eelgrass beds brought back by local
preservation nonprofits, government restoration projects and
even individual families choosing
to tear out bulkheads and riprap,
or keep their shoreline natural.
Just west of the mouth of the
Elwha, sunbeams filter through
turquoise water and alight on
herring in silvery torrents twining
through lush kelp forests. The
herring surge, flashing like a
constellation of stars. Fat young
of the year, these are the little fish
that will feed big chinook.
“It’s working,” says Anne Shaffer, executive director of the
Coastal Watershed Institute.
“Don’t give up. Keep going.”
No opportunity goes unnoticed
by plants and animals ready to
take advantage. Even at a tiny
pocket beach scooped out from
riprap and fill at the Olympic
Sculpture Park near the heart of
downtown Seattle, the water is
alive. Crabs hustle over a habitat
bench built to support the sea
wall but also to shelter and nur-

The U.S. Army
Corps plans to
replace this fish
trap with a better facility by
2020 to haul
White River
salmon to their
spawning
grounds.

ture the living shore. Juvenile
chinook make their way along
the sunlit shallows. Perch glitter,
squads of herring patrol the current and kelp is taking root.
Even the Lower Duwamish
Waterway, forgotten and left for
dead by so many, is still very
much alive.
One morning this summer,
Muckleshoot tribal members
hauled in chinook salmon in a
12-hour overnight fishery in

Elliott Bay and a stretch of the
Lower Duwamish to the Highway 99 bridge.
Amid the homeless camps,
the cement factories, the traffic
banging over the grated bridge
decks, here was a harvest as old
as Puget Sound, still going on,
for generations uncounted of
salmon, and people.
Ask Nick Elkins, 25, why he
wants to stay up all night fishing
for chinook on this river and he
has an instant answer. It’s not
the money — he caught only
five fish, selling three and keeping two for his family. “It’s the
beautiful fish.”
And beautiful they were:
chrome bright, their eyes wide
with the mystery of all they had
seen in four years at sea.
This is their home river, and
despite it all, the Green-Duwamish is still every year either the
first, second or third biggest
producer of chinook in all of
Puget Sound.
The fish runs here — although
a shadow of what once was,
from Puget Sound to the Columbia and Snake — are a miracle of survival that proves what
is still possible for salmon and
for orcas if given a chance.
The orcas still seek these fish
on the coast, in the Salish Sea
and even all the way into the
urban waters of Puget Sound,
hunting chum, coho and chinook. The special time for Seattle-area residents is when the
southern residents, in their final
seasonal rounds of the year,

come here at last. Downtown
killer whales. Who else has
that?
Sometimes the southern
residents are here for days on
end, thrilling ferry riders and
people flocking to beaches to
watch orcas blow and breach,
right off shore. One day last
November, J, K and L pods were
all here at once. Dozens of orcas
were cartwheeling and spy
hopping, right past the Superfund site of the Asarco Smelter
at Ruston, right past the densepack housing along the shores
of central Puget Sound.
They sculled upside-down,
slapped their pecs and flukes
seemingly just for fun, maybe
just to hear the resonant, smacking sound.
As the sunset painted the
water gold, people turned out
on beaches and shorelines from
Maury Island to West Seattle,
enchanted all over again at
what it means to live here. In a
place still alive, with salmon,
and with orcas on the hunt.
The Northwest is not California, where people have forgotten what they used to have. Not
yet.
At stake, as the region gets
richer, is whether it also will get
poorer. With only the grandmother orcas remembering
what used to be.
Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2515 or
lmapes@seattletimes.com; on Twitter:
@LyndaVMapes. Lynda specializes in
coverage of the environment, natural
history, and Native American tribes.

TAKEN UNDER NOAA PERMIT 21348

Autumn still means whales in Puget Sound country, when the southern residents come back home. The J, K and L pods thrilled people all over the Seattle area last November,
including these whale watchers on Maury Island.

ABOUT HOSTILE WATERS

CREDITS

The Seattle Times’ Hostile Waters series explores the plight of the southern resident killer whales, among the most
enduring yet most-endangered symbols of our region.
In Part One, we traveled north to
a land where another resident
population of orcas is thriving in
quieter, cleaner waters.
Part Two told how a generation
of killer whales was taken from
Puget Sound and shipped around
the world — and who put a stop
to it.

Part Three showed how scientists
— and a dog — are working to
understand how hunger hurts,
even kills, when salmon runs
crater.
Part Four revealed the
underwater world of orcas and
sound, and how our noise is
harming their ability to hunt.

Part Five, the final story in the series,
explores how humans have for centuries
sculpted, dammed and warmed the
natural world, from Europe to America.
Can people of the Pacific Northwest
change the course of history and create
a place for both orcas and humans to
thrive?
Explore the series at st.news/orca-series

Reporter: Lynda V. Mapes

Video editor: Lauren Frohne

Photographer: Steve Ringman

Graphic artist: Emily M. Eng

Project editor: Benjamin
Woodard

Art director and designer: Frank
Mina

Photo editor: Fred Nelson

Producer: Jeff Albertson

Videographer: Ramon Dompor

Project coordinator: Laura Gordon