"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
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MONDAY 11/20 IMPORTANT!!! - Town Hall regarding the rivers and dams being held in Sweet Home
What do chlorinated drinking water, muddy rivers, and dead fish have in common? Environmentalists.
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Monday, November 20 @ 5:30pm
Sweet Home City Hall
3225 Main St
Sweet Home, OR 97386
We need you to please come this Monday and support your Linn and Lane County neighbors being impacted by the drawdawn of multiple lakes and rivers along 13 dams in these counties. Bring signs and a friend! A more detailed explanation from a Linn County community member is included below. A couple major points of concern are the thousands of Kokanee that were killed and seen floating in insane numbers along the river, discolored drinking water that is brown, water being so heavily chlorinated to make it "safe" that people are concerned with drinking it or using it for much of anything, and I'm sure there's more. The chlorination is making their bathrooms and laundry rooms smell of bleach, and the water discoloration is leaving people uncomfortable using it to bath or cook. Parents are not using it to make their babies' bottles or to give them baths in it. People have reported their pets not feeling well. The list goes on. Please see the photos below as a small example of the impact this is having.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? WHAT'S GOING ON?
Groups of environmentalists came together and were able to get a federal judge to allow the drawdown of 13 reservoirs in the Willamette Basin. Of those there are 8 equipped with power generating turbins that supply over 300,000 homes with reliable and green energy.
The groups claim that the Wilamette Basin's native salmon will be able to more easily traverse back to where they were once native in order to spawn. However, there is a catch. Many of the rivers, on which they are using this drawdown method, never actually had a native spawn run of salmon. In fact, to the best of most peoples' knowledge, they saw very few salmon up in the arms of these river....above the Green Peter for instance. There was a winter steelhead run, and still is, below Foster Reservoir, but those fish aren't the topid of the catastrophic drawndown experiment. These drawdowns are supposedly for the salmon spawn, yet the drawdown itself and the massive influx of silt downstream, has smothered and buried the spawning areas because salmon lay eggs on small river rock. Add to it that the reservoir itself no longer has any gravel or river rock, any eggs laid during this last spawn will have been killed off.
Many months ago, there was a meeting in Sweet Home where many upset fishermen, boaters, water enthusiasts, and concerned citizens showed up and voiced their dissent. Concern brought up included the drawdown's effects on the fish, local water, drinking water, blue/gree algea, and others.
These catostrophic effects, compliments of the "environmentalists", from Green Peter Reservoir being drawn down so quickly resulted in ALL of the Kokanee in the river being killed. Quickly following the killing of the Kokanee, the water flowing through what used to be a reservoir and is now just a silt and mud filled stream. It is decimating the once clean waters of the Foster Resevoir that then spills into the Santiam....where Sweet Home pulls the water for their city water to filter/treat/ect. Lebanon, Crawfordsville, Holly, and other local communities also use the Santiam and Calapooia as water sources. Wells in Lowell have also been drying up. Typically a very clean and reliable source for filtering water, they are now unable to filter out all the bacteria and tannins, and have resorted to the needing to use significant quantities of Sodium Hypochlorite (bleach) to make it "safe".
MINIMUM OF THREE YEARS
These drawdowns are supposed to last for a minimum of 3 years and originally there was no talk of actual removal of the turbin generators only a drawdown not to use them during the spawning time frames to allow the fish to readily travel. Suddenly we are having meetings about the full decomission of the hydroelectric turbins which many had voiced concerns about at the original meetings with the Army Corp of Engineers. It appears they are using these false narrative of salmon issues to reach the real goal of decommissioned power sources and removal of these reservoirs that bring much needed business to our rural communities and small businesses. These issues could quite literally kill off our rural way of life.
