Letter to the Editor: A low-energy method of getting fish above the dam

Oroville Dam blocks Chinook salmon and steelhead from roughly 67 miles of historic spawning habitat above the reservoir. DWR's current response, trucking eggs to tributaries above Lake Almanor, treats symptoms but leaves the dam itself uncrossable for migrating fish. Here is an automated low energy approach worth testing. Salmon home to their birth stream by recognizing its water chemistry, a documented mechanism. Using 770 feet of elevation between the lake surface and the dam's base, gravity could carry a fraction of that water from each upper tributary through simple siphon pipes to distinct pools below the dam. Fish sorting themselves […]