Four dams on the lower Snake River in Washington state harm water quality and threaten endangered salmon, and breaching the dams may be the best way to comply with the Clean Water Act, the U.S. EPA told the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week. In a letter to the Corps, the EPA called the Corps’s three proposed alternatives to dam breaching “unacceptable” and said that some of the science behind them — most prominently a claim that the dams might actually help salmon by cooling the river — was “false and misleading.” The differences of opinion among all the agencies involved with salmon protection — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service are also in the mix — mean that the final recommendation to Congress about whether to breach the dams will likely be made by the White House.
