BLACKFOOT, Idaho, April 7 (UPI) -- The worst drought in 34 years has gripped the Pacific Northwest, threatening endangered salmon while impacting farmers and sending electricity rates upward. The melting snowpack that provides the water is estimated to be at about 60 percent of normal.

Water the salmon need to make the migrations up from the ocean and down from the spawning grounds is not being released this year. Instead, water authorities are holding it back behind dams along the Snake River in Idaho and the Columbia River in Washington.

"The drought has so depleted water supplies that the reliability of the region's electricity system is in peril," explained Steve Wright, acting administrator of Bonneville Power Administration. Portland, Ore.-based BPA is a federally owned wholesaler of electric power produced largely by 29 dams in the Columbia-Snake river basin.

Farmers in Idaho are also in the equation. Shareholder-owned Idaho Power is paying farmers 15 cents a kilowatt hour not to use their irrigation pumps. This amounts to about $450 an acre for farmers. About 130,000 acres will be taken out of production, shaving 25 percent off anticipated local energy demands of water-generated power.

Juvenile salmon, called smolts, need a current of water to carry them down to the sea. In the reservoirs behind the dams there is no current and the fish are not carried downstream.

Traditionally, the agencies involved in the Snake and Columbia Rivers water management have spilled water from the dams to create the current the young salmon need to get to the ocean. After the salmon mature into adults in the ocean, they swim up the rivers in which they hatched, to spawn and die.

One salmon conservation method that will be used this year is scooping up the juvenile salmon from the reservoirs, loading them on trucks and barges, and transporting them to the ocean. This measure has been performed for many years.

But Save Our Wild Salmon, a coalition of more than 50 wildlife, environmental and conservation groups, is calling for more dam spills.

Bill Arthur, Northwest regional director of the Sierra Club told United Press International, "This is likely to be a massacre this spring instead of a migration. Estimates I've seen are that we could lose up to 95 percent of the salmon run."

Arthur supports a plan that would breach four dams on the Snake River.

During the Clinton administration, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service called for breaching four dams on the Snake as the only way to save the salmon.

The Federal Bureau of Reclamation, the second largest wholesaler of water in the United States, manages some of the dams in system.

"We're not going to be able to meet the needs of every worthwhile cause out there but we'll do what we can," Diana Cross, spokesperson for the bureau, told UPI. "We're really doing this week-by-week, making decisions, and the priorities may vary from one week to the next."

She explained, "Different species emerge from the eggs at different times. One week you're worried about chum salmon and then a few weeks later you're worried about spring chinook. ... Water is a limited resource. There's not enough for everything."

According to Cross, when the BPA declares a power emergency the requirement to spill water for fish is voided.

But Scott Bosse, of Idaho Rivers United, a conservation group, told UPI, "In the Endangered Species Act a whole host of measures are called for to make the river safer for migrating salmon. The most important of those measures are being abandoned in order to produce more electric power this year.

"What we're saying is that under the endangered species act the federal agencies have an obligation to deliver that water for salmon. We're looking at the Endangered Species Act trumping state water sovereignty. Those are the two laws that are at loggerheads here," Bosse said.

Unless the spill program is carried out in full, he added, salmon that migrate after August 1 will probably die in spite of any trucking or barging program. There won't be enough water flow to carry the young fish to the truck and barge pick up-points.

After such measures to conserve energy and divert water for power generation it seems unlikely that Idaho Power will voluntarily spill water to provide a water current for migrating fish unless ordered to do so by a Federal authority.

As for farmers, said John Thompson, communications director for Potato Growers of Idaho, "The farm commodities just don't pencil-out. Any kind of return is better. Selling water to the power company is the highest priced commodity the potato growers have today."

(Reported by Joe Grossman in Santa Cruz, Calif.)

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.