An additional $500 million could be on its way to help unlock almost half, or about 100 river and stream miles, of the Green River’s historical salmon spawning and rearing habitat behind Howard Hanson Dam.
President Joe Biden on Monday earmarked $500 million to create a path past the dam for juvenile fish heading downstream toward Seattle.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, has been among a bipartisan chorus of Washington lawmakers pressing the Army Corps of Engineers, which built and operates the earthen embankment dam, to make fish passage a priority. Murray helped secure $220 million for the Howard Hanson Dam Fish Passage Facility Project through funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2022, and an additional $50 million to help the Army Corps continue design and award the construction contract.
Murray’s office said the president’s budget request is not necessarily what will be enacted by Congress, but Army Corps projects are typically funded as requested. This new money would allow the Army Corps to fully fund the fish passage construction contract at the dam, according to Army Corps spokesperson Dallas Edwards.
The Green River flows from the Cascade Mountains north of Mount Rainier. It meanders through Flaming Geyser State Park, Auburn, Kent and then on to Tukwila, where it becomes the Duwamish, Seattle’s only river. The upper Green River has been inaccessible to Chinook and coho salmon and steelhead since the Tacoma Headworks Diversion Dam went into operation in the 1910s.
The diversion dam, about 3 miles downstream of Howard Hanson, has been upgraded to allow adult salmon to be trucked above the dams to the upper watershed once the Howard Hanson fish passage project is complete.
The Howard Hanson Dam, completed in 1962, is intended to reduce flood risk in the Green River Valley, where in the past floods were a more regular occurrence. In the 70 years before construction, the valley flooded more than 30 times, heavily damaging lands and buildings, said Edwards, the Army Corps spokesperson.
During its life, the dam has prevented an estimated $23 billion in flood damage, Edwards said. Research on the impacts of climate change on King County rivers from the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group has suggested future floods might be manageable within the dam’s capacity through the end of this century.
The total project cost on Howard Hanson, including money already spent on the additional water storage project and initial design, is $921 million, according to Edwards. Murray has continued to advocate the importance of securing full funding for the project so it doesn’t hit any more roadblocks.
“The funding requested in President Biden’s budget … is a true milestone and a real cause for celebration,” Murray said in a statement. “Salmon and fish are so foundational to Washington state’s economy, culture and our Tribal partners — and in writing our funding bills for next year, you can bet I will do my part at every step of the way to deliver this historic funding to restore wild salmon to our rivers and streams.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, charged with the recovery of salmon and the orcas that feed on them, ordered in 2019 that fish passage be operational at the dam no later than 2030. Present operation of the dam without fish passage jeopardizes the survival of threatened Puget Sound Chinook and also endangered southern resident orcas, the agency found.
In 2020, all of the state’s congressional members signed a letter insisting the Army Corps make salmon passage at the dam a top priority.
There, in the upper reaches of the Green River, Chinook and coho salmon, and steelhead trout, will lay their eggs. Later, baby fish will emerge and eventually use the new passage to make their way toward downstream side channel and estuarine habitat, where they will fatten up before heading to saltwater.
The Army Corps plans to construct something called a “fixed multiport collector” in the dam to help move migrating juvenile salmon downstream. The result will likely be five vertically stacked holes, allowing fish to pass at varying reservoir water levels, Edwards said.
Juvenile salmon migrate near the surface of the water column, which fluctuates in height by as much as 100 feet during spring migration. Collecting fragile baby fish from such a moving target is a big design challenge.
Once the fish make it into the holes in the dam, gravity will usher them through pipes and finally into a tunnel that will slowly release them back into the river. Construction is expected to begin in 2027 and take about three years.
When complete, the project will be the second fish-passage facility to be constructed in recent years in the area, according to the Army Corps. The new Mud Mountain Dam upstream fish passage facility on the White River near Buckley experienced a record-breaking year in 2023.
“In collaboration with our tribal partners, the Corps of Engineers successfully passed 1.4 million fish in 2023 at the new facility,” Seattle District Commander Col. Kathryn Sanborn said in a statement. “We look forward to building on this success in partnership with the tribes, other federal and state agencies, and our non-federal sponsor Tacoma Public Utilities to ensure completion of this downstream fish passage facility, helping support salmon and Orca recovery.”
The fish passage project is just one piece of the Howard Hanson Dam water storage project. The Army Corps began construction on the project to create an additional 20,000 acre feet of water storage in 2003. But work on fish passage, originally scheduled for completion in 2006, stopped in 2012 when the design penciled out to more than double the maximum cost limit.
“The Green being so close to our hearts in terms of who we are as traditional Indigenous people here, it’s really a huge piece of our home and a huge piece of who we are,” said Vice Chair Donny Stevenson of the Muckleshoot Tribe, which has treaty-protected fishing rights on the river. “What this does is restores a huge part of that system and access to a huge part of that system for a species that needs it.”
Through moving adult salmon to prime spawning grounds in the Green River, ramping up hatchery production, closing Chinook harvest for up to a decade at a time, and infusing more than $20 million annually into habitat restoration efforts, the Muckleshoot and Suquamish tribes have carefully sustained this species on the brink.
“I’m just incredibly thankful and grateful that we have collaborators and advocates who are willing to put forward an investment like this, it’s not small,” Stevenson continued. “But the reality is that it’s just the start, and there’s still a heck of a lot of work to do. That’s the reality of the world that we’ve created.”
Material from The Seattle Times archives was included in this reporting.
The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.