Tons of Trouble

It was one of those classic Obtuse Seattle Liberal moments: Back in the summer of 2000, the City Council jumped into the controversy over salmon-killing dams on the Snake River in Eastern Washington by approving, 8-0, a resolution favoring dismantling the dams. It was dressed in woolly "we're all one big ecosystem" language and well intended, but it was also a disaster.

What the council failed to reckon with was that the fight over these same dams had come to symbolize, for Eastern Washingtonians, urban liberals' malign neglect of their rural way of life. And since the Snake River empties into the Columbia, and the Columbia's waters run nowhere near Puget Sound, it seemed a pretty cut-and-dried case of Seattle sticking its nose into other communities' affairs.

So, rather predictably, a wave of condemnation followed: The council was scolded publicly and told to "mind its own business" on the pages of both the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times, and radio talkers, especially the right-wing variety, had a field day. Some 11 communities and two counties passed resolutions condemning Seattle's. A Pasco City Council member even proposed breaching Seattle's Ballard Locks in response.

The uproar persuaded some council members to try to mend political fences by touring the dams and telling the press that "we made a mistake" (in the words of Richard Conlin). But the outrage really never went away. To this day, radio talkers and columnists trot out the resolution as emblematic of Seattle's brie-and-wine style of provinciality and smug disdain for its eastern neighbors.

Counting fish at Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River.

Jeff T. Green / Getty Images

Six years and an orca endangered-species listing later, it's starting to look like the council may have been on the right track after all Evidence is starting to mount that those Columbia River salmon—especially the spring chinook runs that have been most harmed by the Snake River dams—could play a critical role in the survival of the killer-whale population that resides primarily in Puget Sound. And that means that recovery programs for the orcas will, at the very least, increase scrutiny of the role of the dams in the whales' survival, and could decide their fate.

The southern resident orcas—about 90 whales comprising the J, K, and L pods— officially became listed as an endangered species last week by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which announced the decision in November after years of pressure from environmental and orca- advocacy groups. The announcement was generally greeted with fulsome praise in the local press and among civic leaders. After all, not only are the whales now a million-dollar ecotourist attraction, they're a regional icon, part of the Northwest identity.

It hasn't hurt that, from outward appearances at least, the orca listing doesn't change things a lot as far as recovery programs go. This is largely because the cornerstone of any orca-recovery program is going to focus on restoring salmon runs—and the work for doing that is, in many regards, already well under way.

However, the potential reach of the listing is much broader—which may explain why it is already in the sights of industry.

The Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River near Pasco.

Jeff T. Green / Getty Images

Killer whales are prodigious eaters—their daily food requirements are between 4 percent and 5 percent of their body weight, and adult males can weigh up to 12,800 pounds. For the southern resident population in Puget Sound, which consumes fish almost exclusively, that means a single adult orca will eat between 28 and 34 salmon a day.

Probably the best demonstration of their voraciousness occurred at Dyes Inlet near Port Orchard in 1997, when a contingent of 19 L Pod orcas hung out at the mouth of the inlet for two months and consumed nearly the entirety of a substantial run of chum salmon.

That event—notable not least because L Pod rarely strays that far south in the Sound—appeared to signal that the southern residents were having real trouble finding enough food to eat. Over the next five years, the population of southern residents began to decline precipitously, from nearly 100 in the early 1990s to 79 by 2001.

Scientists grew concerned that if the declines continued, the whales would no longer have a viable gene pool and would soon tumble into an inevitable downward population spiral. The southern residents are genetically isolated; even though other killer whales (called "transients") visit their waters to feed on large sea mammals like seals and sea lions, there is no social interaction or apparent communication between them. Their respective languages are completely different, and genetic samples indicate there has been no intermingling for thousands of years. So the presence of a substantial coastal population of orcas means little to the killer whales who reside in Puget Sound for much of the year.

Recognizing that this was indeed a distinct population proved key in NMFS's decision to list the orcas as endangered, since their previous approach had been to consider them simply a subset of the larger coastal population. The sharpness of the 1990s declines also made plain how vulnerable to extinction the orcas are.