Thursday July 25, 2024
The Seattle Times —
As the Washington State Department of Transportation spends billions of dollars removing concrete and metal pipes that block spawning salmon, another state agency is finally finishing a strategy to fix all the state’s fish migration barriers.
Department of Fish and Wildlife officials last week revealed key parts of a plan to prioritize which of tens of thousands of these man-made blockages would, if replaced, bring back the most salmon.
Without the strategy — which has taken more than four years to produce — the Inslee administration has been sinking billions into stream restorations that, in many cases, are ineffective or useless today.
Construction crews have ripped out the pipes, known as culverts, which run under state highways and replaced them with natural streambeds, but a Seattle Times investigation in March found the state was investing tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars, in so-called “orphan” culverts.