U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Completed in 1961, Hills Creek Dam sits 4 miles southwest of Oakridge at the confluence of Hills Creek and the Middle Fork of the Willamette River.
By DOUG BATES/Editor/The Herald — It took more than a year of legal wrangling, but the environmental watchdog Willamette Riverkeeper will finally receive federal records documenting potential safety threats posed by two large, aging dams on the Upper Willamette River.
The records will be released under an agreement negotiated by the U.S. Justice Department and signed into law by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken.
Under the agreement, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must provide — in 30-day installments — the public records requested by Willamette Riverkeeper in March 2020 regarding the structural integrity of those two aging projects — Hills Creek Dam near Oakridge and Lookout Point Dam near Lowell — as well as 11 other dams in the Willamette Basin. The Corps went for months without responding to the group’s Freedom of Information Act request, prompting the nonprofit group to file a lawsuit against the agency on Dec. 16.
The agreement, touted by Willamette Riverkeeper this week as a hopeful sign of more transparency by the Corps, settles that lawsuit, at least for now.
Beginning immediately, the Corps “will produce a minimum of 7,000 pages of records responsive to the FOIA request, on a rolling basis, at 30-day intervals,” the agreement states. “The parties shall meet and confer at six-month intervals,” beginning on Sept. 21, the agreement continues.
It goes on to lay out steps and procedures for the plaintiff, Willamette Riverkeeper, to challenge redactions, withheld records and any other potential actions by the Corps to limit the release of information.
The dispute grew out of a plan the Corps released in January 2020 calling for restrictions on water levels behind the dams. The plan says higher water levels could create too much risk of dam failure in an earthquake and refers to related reports on the structural integrity of those dams.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lookout Point Dam is nearly 70 years old.
Hills Creek Dam is 60 years old and rated in the Corps study as “moderate risk” of failure in a major seismic event. Lookout Point Dam is nearly 70 years old and rated as “high risk.”
Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper, expressed mixed feelings Wednesday, April 14, about the Corps’ acceptance of the agreement. He said it was encouraging that his group has already received its first installment of the records it requested, but he said it was discouraging that the public had to wait so long, and fight so hard in court, to get to see records showing how and why the Corps came to its conclusions about the dams.
“It shouldn’t have to be this hard,” Williams said.
Concerned that the dams near Oakridge and Lowell might fail if a major earthquake occurred while their reservoirs were full, the Corps has decided to keep water levels behind the dams several feet below capacity.
And just last month, the Corps announced a similar decision for Detroit Dam on the Santiam River. Detroit Lake behind the dam will be kept at least five feet below “full pool” this summer it’s to reduce stress on dam spillway gates and reduce the chances of a breach by 10 percent during an extremely large Cascadia or local earthquake.
“As you can see, transparency remains a problem here,” Williams said, noting that the Corps has not released records showing how it reached its conclusions about safety threats posed by Detroit Dam.
If the old dams need repairs, Williams said, that work could open the door to adding fish passage for salmon and steelhead or even dam removal. His group has also sued the Corps over its failure to protect threatened and endangered species of salmon and steelhead in its management of Willamette River dams.
The dams were built for flood control, irrigation and hydropower, and none of them have fish ladders to help salmon and steelhead swim around them. Instead, wildlife managers funnel the fish into trucks and drive them around the dams.
Herald Editor Doug Bates is a retired newspaper editor who lives in Oakridge.
