BY ANDY WALGAMOTT, NORTHWEST SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE
Paging Ben Goldfarb.
The author of a recent book about road ecology has fodder for a new chapter on how our transportation network kills critters.
The Seattle Times today reports that at least two ESA-listed Chinook are among Lake Washington fish found dead underneath Sound Transit’s light rail tracks along I-90, building on reporting earlier this month that only listed “a small number salmon” as among the fish discovered near anode cables on the lakebed.
Most of the fish are described as smallmouth bass and yellow perch, nonnatives that fishery managers are actually trying to cut down the populations of in the lake, but the Times reports that sculpin and possibly sockeye and cutthroat trout have also been killed.
Chinook will be the most troubling species, given their March 1999 threatened listing and efforts to recover the stock in the watershed.
“It’s a never-ending battle,” Jaison Elkins, who heads up the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe Fisheries Commission, told reporters. “It’s pinnipeds. It’s pollution. It’s water temperature. It’s barriers. Now it’s these electric cables.”
Dead fish were first found in piles by divers in 2025 and then again this year. The clusters are next to anode cables associated with the rail line and hanging down and lying on the bottom of the lake. Sound Transit’s tracks are attached to the westbound I-90 bridge between Mercer Island and the Mount Baker Tunnel on the Seattle side of the lake.
Since the divers reported it in late July, initially to conservation organizations and then governmental agencies, WDFW issued Sound Transit a permit to take corrective action on the cables, according to the Times reporting.
“Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is engaged on this including monitoring reports for impacts on fish species of conservation concern and coordinating with state and regional agencies on their efforts. We are committed to working with our partner agencies to find a solution that reduces the ongoing impact on fish,” reads a WDFW statement, which also points to Sound Transit as the project lead.
Federal overseers have also been informed and are among those awaiting more information about the fish.
In addition to a fine chapter on how busy highways create a veritable “moving fence” that blocks big game movements, Goldfarb’s 2023 book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future Of Our Planet, dedicates nearly 20 pages to the problem of culverts blocking Washington salmon streams.
Grand scheme, fixing this fishkill bottleneck on Lake Washington will probably be much simpler than, say, getting transportation agencies and the public to buy into the value of wildlife over- and underpasses or a certain state to quit the court challenges and kick it into high gear on improving fish passage underneath its roads, but it’s another example of the unforeseen headaches getting folks and goods from here to there causes the natural world.
