PGE Employees Brave Storm to Help Hatchery Save Salmon

The salmon at the hatchery are due to be released into the Clackamas and Sandy rivers in March.

ODFW’s Clackamas fish hatchery. Courtesy: dfw.state.or.us

(CLACKAMAS, Ore.) - Several employees of Portland General Electric along with members of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife staff braved severe winter conditions last week to avert the loss of up to 900,000 spring chinook salmon destined for release into the Clackamas and Sandy rivers.

The salmon fingerlings being reared at ODFW’s Clackamas fish hatchery were imperiled by a sequence of events that began with a power failure following a major snowstorm at the hatchery on December 22nd.

The situation became progressively more precarious when a large diesel back-up generator started to malfunction two days later, on Christmas Eve, prompting employees from both organizations to give up time with their families to protect the fish.

Electricity is used to power intake pumps that pull water out of the Clackamas River in McIver Park and circulate it through a series of holding ponds at the hatchery and back into the river.

A constant supply of fresh river water is vital to the survival of young salmon, according Bryan Zimmerman, manager of the Clackamas hatchery. “The river water provides the oxygen necessary to keep the fish alive until they are at the proper size and condition to be released,” said Zimmerman, who spent some anxious hours with his staff keeping the generator going until power was restored.

A PGE line crew consisting of Mike Wolford, Kevin Akers, Grant Young, Nick Rost and Jim Sweet summoned by PGE customer service representative Cari Place was dispatched and arrived at the hatchery at approximately 3:00 PM on December 24th.

They worked through the night until a blown transformer could be replaced and power to the hatchery intake restored at approximately 1:30 AM on Christmas morning. Power to the rest of the facility was restored the following day.

The salmon at the hatchery are due to be released into the Clackamas and Sandy rivers in March.

Had the back-up generator failed completely before commercial power was restored, fishery managers were prepared to order the immediate release of 600,000 fingerlings into the nearby Clackamas River, almost three months earlier than planned.

The remaining 300,000 fingerlings, all destined for the Sandy River, would have to be kept alive at the hatchery one way or another.

“Fortunately, we didn’t have to go to that extreme, and what could have been a dire situation was avoided,” said Todd Alsbury, district fish biologist for ODFW’s North Willamette Watershed.

“This successful outcome was due in large part to the lengths that Clackamas hatchery staff and our friends at PGE went to in order to protect these fish when most people were at home spending the holiday with their families.”

Under normal circumstances, 1 to 3 percent of spring salmon released into the Clackamas and Sandy rivers return to their respective river basins.

Biologists believe that releasing the fish early, while they were still fingerlings, likely would have lowered survival rates and reduced the number of salmon coming back from the ocean in 3 to 4 years. Alsbury said that in other instances, salmon released too early have reduced return rates by as much as 75 percent.

The situation at the Clackamas hatchery was just one of thousands of storm-related incidents that PGE employees had to manage across the region. More than 200 crews and other employees worked through the holiday weekend, including Christmas day, according to Elaina Medina, PGE spokeswoman.

“Our crews worked tirelessly in very difficult conditions,” said Medina. “What made this storm so different and challenging was that it just kept coming, with new outages occurring as quickly as our crews could repair existing outages. This was the storm that just wouldn’t stop.”

During the 10 days that the arctic blast gripped the region, PGE handled more than 3,000 downed power lines and 400,000 customer outages, according to Medina.