March 95 Letters to the editor are encouraged. I believe the author needed to finish telling the story. We do know that up to 95 percent of the smolts leaving the Columbia die, so, in the overall picture and in the decision of the drawdowns, it is irrelevant to me what the survival at the Lower Granite Dam is.
Action is needed now.
Where there are only one or three or six sockeye salmon returning to Idaho's Redfish lake, any percent mortality at any dam is too much. We also know that smolt migration from Idaho to the sea, when the watershed was a river, was about two weeks, and now, through a series of reservoirs, it is about two months. You would have a hard time convincing a commercial or sports fisherman. In this political, industrial and scientific stalemate, the only losers are the salmon and future generations. I matriculated as a grad student in the zoology department back in 1963.