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THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, AuguST 21, 2021
Company says technology can aid salmon passage
By COURTNEY FLATT
Northwest News Network
One Northwest company
thinks it may have a better
way to help adult salmon
make it up and over the
Snake River dams.
Yes, you read that right —
over the roughly 100-foot-
tall dams.
Whooshh
Innovations
has deployed its fish pas-
sage technology at dams and
other obstructions on rivers
around the world from the
United States to Canada to
Norway.
Company officials have
met with federal agencies
and have presented a draft
proposal to lawmakers.
Moreover, company offi-
cials said, this innovation
could generate $60 million
over 10 years by diverting
water from fish ladders to
hydropower turbines.
This could be the larg-
est project for the company,
said Vince Bryan, CEO of
Whooshh Innovations. It
could potentially replace
the six fish ladders on the
lower Snake River to help
adult salmon reach spawn-
ing grounds, Bryan said.
“The issue that we’ve
been working on for the
past 10 years was exactly
this issue: How to get the
fish through the river system
more quickly,” Bryan said.
However, Noe Gonzalez,
a spokesperson for the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers,
said overall, the adult fish
ladders on the lower Snake
work well. The fish ladders
were built with the dams and
have had few modifications
since they were constructed.
Most recently, a cooling sys-
tem was installed at the Lit-
tle Goose and Lower Gran-
ite dams, the last two dams
on the lower Snake.
The first device by
Whooshh
Innovations
grabbed headlines during
early days of testing with
an explosive nickname: the
salmon cannon. The flexible
plastic tube doesn’t exactly
Whooshh Innovations
A fish passage technology developed by Whooshh Innovations transported 8,200 salmon around a massive landslide on the Fraser River in a remote part of
British Columbia.
Public Broadcasting.
‘No stress’
Courtney Flatt/Northwest News Network
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife crews load a
30-pound fall Chinook salmon into a demonstration of the
original salmon cannon.
shoot salmon in the air. It’s
more like the ultimate slip
and slide, former Whooshh
Innovations president Tom
Shearer said in an earlier
interview with Northwest
The white flexible tube
is misted with water. The
pressure inside makes the
salmon feel like they’re still
in the river, Bryan said. At
earlier demonstration proj-
ects, shadows of the fish
can be seen moving their
tails because they feel like
they’re swimming through
the tubes.
“The fish are literally
gliding in the tube,” Bryan
said. “We mist inside the
tube, so they are exchanging
oxygen. There’s no stress
levels — they’re not in a
panic.”
He said the pressure dif-
ferential inside the tubes
makes the fish feel like
they’re in 30 inches of water.
“When they exit, then
they just continue on. They
just swim,” Bryan said.
A study with the Colum-
bia River Inter-Tribal Fish
Commission has shown
some fish made it to the next
dam faster than fish that
went up the traditional lad-
ders. That’s because they
have used less energy in the
tubes than in the fish lad-
ders, Bryan said.
This Snake River pro-
posal, Bryan said, improves
upon the salmon cannon,
which was initially designed
to sort Northwest apples
without bruising them.
A big difference in the
newer technology is how the
fish enter the system. People
have to place fish into the
salmon cannon. This newer
device, which the company
has dubbed the Passage Por-
tal, is fully automated. The
portal system will use water
flow to attract fish, taking in
cooler water from deeper in
the water column.
The system is mounted
onto a floating structure.
That structure allows it to
move where the fish are
swimming, Bryan said.
See Salmon, Page B3
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