Wildlife Refuge to Be Expanded for Protection of Pacific Salmon

WASHINGTON —  President Clinton announced a major expansion Friday of a national wildlife refuge along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest in order to provide protection for Pacific salmon.

The White House said management responsibility of 57,000 acres that was part of the top-secret project to build the atomic bomb will be transferred from the Energy Department to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect wild salmon and preserve the river’s ecology.

The move, sought by environmentalists for more than a decade, ensures that the land near the Columbia River in Washington state will not be turned into farmland.

Clinton said that adding the land to the Saddle Mountain National Wildlife Refuge will protect prime salmon habitat and support the Pacific Salmon Treaty with Canada.

“My budget proposes increases for salmon restoration, but Congress has provided only a fraction of the resources necessary to do the job,” he said in a statement taped for radio.

The acreage was part of the Hanford nuclear reservation that began in 1943 for the Manhattan Project to build the bomb during World War II.

Hanford made plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal until the 1980s and is now being cleaned up as the most contaminated nuclear site in the nation.

But the land to be transferred was part of a security buffer, so much of it has been untouched for decades and is considered to be in good condition.

Environmentalists view the area as one of the last large chunks of high-quality, shrub-steppe habitat in the nation. The land is home to more than 200 species of birds and more than 40 rare plants and animals.