River Damed
Media Release
Jul. 5, 2006

Twelve hundred miles (1,900 kilometers) from its source in the Canadian Rockies, the Columbia River flows past the once thriving fishing port of Astoria, Oregon, and empties into the Pacific Ocean. It was at Astoria in the late 1800s that the first great blow to salmon was dealt, when commercial fishermen hauled out as much as 43 million pounds (20 million kilograms) of salmon and steelhead a year. The commercial catch declined to the still sizable level of 25 million pounds (11 million kilograms) a year in the 1930s, before the dambuilding boom. Today the catch is around one to two million pounds (500,000 to 900,000 kilograms) a year. Fishing-industry representatives claim that at least 10,000 jobs on the Columbia have been lost because of the decline of salmon. Steve Fick of Astoria has witnessed the decline. A stout bespectacled man with brown hair, he has been a commercial fisherman for most of his 43 years. He owns one of the four fish-processing plants on the lower Columbia River that still handle salmon, down from two dozen canneries early in the 20th century.

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Website: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0104/feature1/index.html

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