51�Թ�

The plan calls for initially supplementing populations of fall-run chinook and coho salmon by raising them at the newly built Fall Creek Fish Hatchery, located on one of the tributary creeks fish can now access upstream from where Iron Gate Dam once stood.

The young fish were raised at the Fall Creek Fish Hatchery and included about 90,000 coho salmon, a threatened species, as well as more than 400,000 fall-run Chinook salmon.

Some of the fish that were released are expected to return in a few years as adults to Fall Creek Fish Hatchery, a $35 million facility that was built as part of the dam removal agreements between California, Oregon and the utility PacifiCorp, which operated the dams.

About 25,525 smolts that were thrown onto the creek banks “were not able to flop down into the water,” Andrew Gibbs, the department’s fish hatchery coordinator for eastern Oregon, said in an interview on Wednesday.

When workers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife took 830,000 juvenile Chinook salmon from the newly built Fall Creek Fish Hatchery and released them into a tributary on Feb. 26, they found that the fish were dying as they passed through a tunnel beneath Iron Gate Dam.