Reaches of southwest Washington's White Salmon River devoid of salmon for 90 years should again be teeming with spawners this autumn.

A collaborative effort led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to transport 500 fall chinook tule salmon past Condit Dam and release them in the river above to spawn, according to USFWS spokeswoman Amy Gaskill. The spawners are fish that returned to the federal agency's Spring Creek National Fish Hatchery as well as wild spawners returning to the river being trapped by a research team, she said.

The hatchery's tule program was started with wild broodstock from the White Salmon River 100 years ago, Gaskill said.

The transport effort began Sept. 8 and continues on Mondays and Thursdays each week through Oct. 2, according to the agency.

The overall "pilot project" is being carried out in preparation for the planned removal of the dam next fall. The proposed "salvage" plan was developed by the parties of the Condit Work Group: the USFWS, NOAA, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Yakama Indian Nation and PacifiCorp.

Condit has long blocked salmon's upstream passage. It was completed in 1913, equipped with a fish ladder. But the ladder washed out in 1918 flooding and was never replaced.

The dam's owner, PacifiCorp, plans to remove the dam next fall to once again allow salmon and steelhead to populate the river's upper reaches. Final approval for the removal must be granted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which licenses the operation of privately owned hydro projects.

The hope was to begin removal of the dam in October of this year but PacifiCorp decided in May that it would not yet have all of the necessary permits, according to the power company's Tom Gauntt. The new target is 2009.

PacifiCorp in 1991 filed an application with FERC to renew the project's license, which was to expire at the end of 1993. The project has been operating under annual licenses since that time.

But after reviewing FERC's 1996 environmental impact statement for the project the company decided that its terms and conditions would make operating the dam uneconomic. They included mandatory prescriptions issued by the NOAA Fisheries Service for installation of state-of-the-art fish passage facilities and higher in-stream flows and other requirements that would result in a cost of from $30 million to $50 million, according to the company.

Three years later PacifiCorp entered into a settlement agreement with intervenors in the licensing process that called for dam removal. The agreement caps the monetary exposure that PacifiCorp could incur for dam removal at $17.15 million in 1999 dollars.

Since that time the company and others involved have been planning and working through the numerous bureaucratic hoops that must be cleared before a dam can be removed.

A revised Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement from the state is expected to be completed by year's end, according to a "Six Month Update" filed this week by PacifiCorp with FERC this week. It is necessary before the Washington Department of Ecology could issue a state water quality certificate for the removal project. A public comment period on the certificate application ended this week.

PacifiCorp has applied to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a permit under the Clean Water Act authorizing dredge and fill associated with decommissioning the dam and for a River and Harbors Act permit authorizing in-water work associated with dam removal. The update said the company expected to have all the necessary permits in hand within nine months.

An Endangered Species Act biological opinion has been in place since 2006 that says the removal would not jeopardize the survival of listed Columbia River basin stocks. The White Salmon River in south-central Washington's Skamania and Klickitat counties empties into the Columbia near the town of White Salmon upstream of Bonneville Dam.

In its BiOp NOAA Fisheries says the long-term benefits for protected Columbia River basin salmon and steelhead outweigh what will be short-term negative effects resulting from the proposed removal of Condit.

Among those short-term negative impacts will be a flood of sediment released along with a pulse of water from backed up Northwestern Lake when the dam is breached.

The proposed dam removal is expected to have long-term benefits for the four species to be most impacted -- Mid-Columbia steelhead, Lower Columbia chinook and coho and Columbia River chum salmon. The removal would allow access to about 14 miles of chinook and 33 miles of steelhead habitat that has been blocked since the dam was built. The listed chinook and steelhead stocks are the two species that would benefit most with the reopening of upstream habitat.

The Condit powerhouse is located on the Big White Salmon River at river mile 2.2 and the dam is located at mile 3.3. They are connected by a 1.1-mile bypass reach.

The pilot project that began this year is intended in part to help guide mitigation for negative impacts to wild fish that now spawn in the lower river. That layer of sediment is likely to smother egg nests and otherwise disturb the fish.

The pilot project is designed to evaluate capture methods, transport pre-spawning tule fall chinook salmon and to gain an understanding of their spawning habits in the White Salmon River above Northwestern Lake prior to the removal of Condit Dam.

NOAA notified FERC this week of two minor "amendments" to its 2006 BiOp -- the change in the anticipated removal date and the plan to implement the salvage plan.

"Both of these changes require minor adjustments to the incidental take statement in the 2006 Opinion," NOAA said in its Sept. 10 letter to FERC. Any fish mortality resulting from the salvage project is not likely to exceed the existing ESA take limits.

"As development of the salvage plan progressed, one of the alternatives considered was capturing and transporting tule fall Chinook above the Project to areas where good spawning gravels exist (between the upper extent of Northwestern Lake and Husum Falls) and allow the fish to spawn on their own," according to NOAA's letter.

"The Condit Work Group further determined that it would be reasonable to conduct a pilot operation to refine salvage methods and to see if the fish would successfully spawn. It is fully expected that fish will spawn successfully. This operation will occur during the months of September and October 2008," according to NOAA.

"Radio tags will be attached to a number of transported fish to monitor their behavior and to assess spawning success," according to NOAA's letter.

The fish salvage operation described in NOAA's 2006 BiOp considered installing a removable weir in the river to direct returning adult tule fall chinook into existing White Salmon ponds (concrete raceways) and holding them until ready for spawning.

Their offspring would then be reared in captivity and later released to help naturally repopulate the river. That planning for that operation is now largely completed, NOAA says.