For years, fish managers had wondered why the good habitat in upper Mill Creek produced so few salmonids. There was speculation that poor passage in the Mill Creek flood control channel was to blame, but there was little real data to go on.
The team of Pat Powers, Jay Kidder, and Kozmo Bates surveyed the channel, created hydraulic models, created energetics models, and were able to describe the passage problems in the channel.
What they described is a complex, flow-dependent passage problem.