The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

There are dams that should come down and those that shouldn’t.

Hopefully, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducts its review of the 14 federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, that will become abundantly clear.

Here is the difference.

Demolishing the two dams on the Elwha River west of Port Angeles was a good thing. The dams were built in the early 1900’s to bring electricity to the Olympic Peninsula at a time when salmon and steelhead were plentiful in other Pacific Northwest rivers. Neither dam had fish ladders.

On the Elwha, the issue was clear: removing the dams allowed salmon a...