A federal judge ruled that the U.S. government’s attempts to recover Northwest salmon populations, hurt by dams, have failed. “In his ruling, US District Judge Michael Simon in Portland, Ore., lambasted the federal government’s current plan to ameliorate the effects of the dams, saying it violates both the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act,” says The Christian Science Monitor.
Simon said that even as the agencies involved, including NOAA Fisheries, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, set out to restore salmon habitat, they had refused to sacrifice electricity generation—to the peril of the fish, whose numbers continue to fall. The paper said the battle over the dams had “spanned at least 15 years, and it marks the fifth time that the court has rejected the government’s efforts as insufficient.”
The judge suggested that officials consider “breaching, bypassing, or removing one or more of the four Lower Snake River Dams,” since the dams raise water temperatures, a phenomenon that killed hundreds of thousands of salmon last summer, according to the Monitor. The government has until March 2018 to present a revised plan.