Reading an artical in the News Tribune this morning about the low water in Lake Tapps got me thinking. It was mentioned in the artical that Puget Power stopped using the diverted water from the White River to generate power. The water was then diverted into Lake Tapps by Mud Mountain Dam. If the dam has no purpose now, why not remove it? I know the dam is not very big and there is no lake behind it so the only thing it is doing now is blocking the way for wild spring and fall chinook, coho, pinks, sockeye, and steelhead. Plus the fact that last year the Army Corp of Engeniers screwed up by stopping the flow of water for a day killing thousands of endangerd Puget Sound wild chinook and wild steelhead among other fish. So what is the purpose of this dam? Is water still being divered so that greedy land owners can have an unatural lakefront property? I just don't get it.

I think we're going to see litigation for years concerning Lake Tapps. Those homeowners spent a lot of money to have waterfront property and they're not about to let their house values go to poop. Whose gonna want to buy a million dollar home that sits next to a mud puddle?

FJ15
Mud Mountain dam is a flood control dam ran by the Army Corp. of engineers the water diverted into lake tapps is diverted down stream at a diversion dam, that is where the fish are trapped and trucked around Mud Mountain dam and released back into the White river.

I was just talking about this with a co worker who is from that area. I think Go Harley hit it on the head. It seems that is one of the main reasons; waterfront property homes.

I guess you probably wouldnt think the same way if you owned a house on the lake. I dont own on the lake but I have many friends that do and none of them I consider to be greedy.

As far as the lake goes, I dont know why they just dont keep it filled and occasionaly drain it in the fall/winter months and around fish runs as needed for maintainance.

Here are a few links that you might want to look at to have a better understanding how the water enters and exits Lake Tapps.

http://www.nws.usace.army.mil/PublicMenu/Menu.cfm?sitename=MM&pagename=Tour

http://www.pse.com/energy/history.htm

Mud Mountain Dam has nothing to do with Lake Tapps and the greedy water front property owners!!!
Mud Mountain Dam was built to help control flooding in the Puyallup valley. It's there to protect any of you working or living in the Puyallup and Auburn valleys. So I guess you could say it's there due to all the greedy property owners that live in low lying areas in the south sound area.

There is a seperate diversion dam near Buckley that diverts water into the flume that goes to Lake Tapps. From Lake Tapps it runs down the hill and back to the White River.
I grew up right below Mud Mountain Dam and just a couple miles up river of the diversion dam.

At the diversion dam is a fish trap where the state traps the native fish and trucks them around the dam/

What really messed the White River up was that it used to flow into the Green. Farmers south of Seattle got tired of getting flooded by it and diverted it into the Puyallup. That pretty much put a stop to the fish runs in that river. There was still some fish in the river but I think it was just fish that wandered up it from the Puyallup.

Thats not exactly how it happened.

Before 1906, the White River flowed to the north where it was joined by the Green and Black rivers to form the Duwamish River, which continued to Elliott Bay. In November 1906, a flood-caused logjam obstructed the northern channel, diverting the entire flow of the White River down a small tributary of the Puyallup River called the Stuck River. The White River has continued to follow this course since the flood of 1906. In January 1915, the Auburn Dam was completed at the location of the logjam, making the change in course permanent.

FJ15,

Mud Mountain Dam (MMD) is an Army Corps of Engineers flood control dam that reduces flood damage to Auburn, Puyallup, Sumner, and Tacoma. It is not related to Lake Tapps. Lake Tapps is, or was, a storage reservoir for Puget Sound Energy’s White River hydropower project. However, as hydro projects go, it was not an economical project, and complying with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license requirements and ESA chinook protection requirements made the project even less economic, so PSE shut it down.

Lake Tapps remains as a significant social, economic, and political issue however. There are a lot of expensive (high property tax revenue) waterfront and water view homes in the area, including my cousin’s and aunt and uncle’s. In addition, Lake Tapps is Pierce County’s most heavily used County park. Legally, PSE could drain Lake Tapps as a part of retiring the hydro project. PSE owns the lake and lake bottom, and conceivably could develop additional real estate there. Every deed on Lake Tapps includes the provision that PSE might some day retire the hydro project and drain the lake, and that purchasing property there does not include any entitlement to perpetual lakefront property. Ah, but the politics conflict with that legality, and so PSE and many other parties are working cooperatively to try to save the lake even as the hydro project is retired.

This is going to get really interesting. Who’s responsibility is it to keep adding water to Lake Tapps? (The lake leaks into a small creek and some springs and would eventually drain.) The Corps owns and operates MMD. The Corps’ fish ladder and trap is located at PSE’s diversion dam, which is 5 miles downstream of MMD. The Corps is looking to build a new barrier dam (not diversion dam, as water diversion is not an authorized purpose of MMD) at the diversion dam site to better facilitate their fish passage responsibility. It will be interesting to see if Pierce County politics are powerful enough to get water diversion to Lake Tapps added to the Corps’ MMD operations responsibility. And if so, who is going to buy PSE’s lake bed and water diversion canal from them? Presumably, all of PSE’s property associated with the hydro project will be for sale. Will the Lake Tapps property owners and Pierce County step in and pay for the benefits they receive, or will there be a federal taxpayer bailout? Are you starting to “get it?”

As it turns out, the White River probably has enough water to share to keep Lake Tapps from draining. That will require only a very small percent of the available flow compared to the hydro project, which took most of the river’s water supply, to the detriment of the fish runs. I think the Lake Tapps problem is solvable, the issue is who will pay for it.

MMD isn’t going away, because the White River flood threat is real, and it isn’t going away. And upstream and downstream fish passage at MMD seems to be effective, and should improve when the Corps constructs a new barrier dam and makes fish ladder improvements. The White River supports spring, summer, and fall chinook, coho, pink, and chum salmon, steelhead trout, bull trout, but I haven’t heard of any significant sockeye run in the White that is blocked by MMD. Oh, and last April’s fish kill occurred when the Corps controlled flow to the White River at PSE’s request so PSE could re-install flashboards on their diversion dam.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

Thanks for the replies. I didn't know all that was mentioned about the dams, including the second dam. I just thought that it was a useless dam in the river. Still not totally convinced that it helps flood control as the Puyallup System (all the rivers) hardly ever rises above it's crest. Rivers that start with 'S' seem to flood more around here and have no dams on them.

Salmo: The White does get some sockeye, much like the Sky which gets under 100 a year. Here is the site that has the fish coun't at the dam, it has sockeye on it. They must be the strain of Puget Sound Sockeye that spawn in very small nuber in a few rivers. (not all rivers like strays would) Not very much is known about them like where their young rear. They are mentiond on the WDFW web site under sockeye.

http://www.nws.usace.army.mil/PublicMenu/Doc_list.cfm?sitename=MM&pagename=FISHCOUNTS

The diversion dam doesn't really do anything for flood control. As most of the time during the flood season the flume is full and Lake Tapps can't really hold any more water.

Now as far as Mud Mountain Dam, it holds a TON of water back whenever the Puyallup starts getting high. Head up there sometime when the Puyallup has been running high for a good week during the monsoon season and the water lever is usually quite high.
Go there during the summer and there's no water, the river just flows srtaight through the dam.

Interesting. I just got done checking out the "Puget Sound River Sockeye" page. ( http://wdfw.wa.gov/fish/sockeye/riverpuget.htm )I always thought that a lake was needed to rear the juveniles. I wonder if you could use Lake Tapps for juvenile sockeye rearing. The fish could spawn, rear in the lake and then go to sea after a few years. Would they need to re-enter the lake on the way back to the spawning grounds or could they bypass that and just continue up the White?