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Workers breached the last levees on a key section of the Klamath River Wednesday, clearing the way for salmon to swim freely through a main basin near the California-Oregon border for the first time in more than a century as and the largest dam removal project in the history of the United States is near the end.
Crews used excavators to remove rock dams that diverted water upstream of two damsIron Gate and Copco No. 1, both of which were already almost completely eliminated. With each scoop, more and more river water was able to flow through the historic canal. The work, which should be completed by tonight, will give the salmon a passage through key habitat just in time for the fall Chinook, or king salmon, shore run season.
“Our sacred duty to our children, our ancestors, and to ourselves, is to take care of the river, and today’s events represent a fulfillment of that obligation,” Frankie Myers, vice president of the Yurok Tribe , which has spent decades fighting to remove the dams and restore the river, said in a statement.
The demolition comes about a month before the removal of four dams upstream on the Klamath was scheduled to be completed. as part of a national movement to restore rivers to their natural flow and to restore ecosystems for fish and other wildlife.
As of February, more than 2,000 dams have been removed in the United States, the majority in the past 25 years, according to the advocacy group American Rivers. Among them were dams on Washington state’s Elwha River, which flows from Olympic National Park into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia.
“I am excited to move into the restoration phase of the Klamath River,” Russell ‘Buster’ Attebery, chairman of the Karuk Tribe, said in a statement. “Restoring hundreds of miles of spawning areas and improving water quality will help support the return of our salmon, a healthy and sustainable food source for many Tribal Nations.”
Salmon are culturally and spiritually significant for the tribe, along with others in the region.
The Klamath was once known as the third largest salmon producing river on the West Coast. But after energy company PacifiCorp built the dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962, the structures stopped the river’s natural flow and disrupted the life cycle of the region’s salmon, which spend most part of their lives in the Pacific Ocean, but they return to their native rivers. to spawn.
Then the fish population decreased drastically. In 2002, a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and warm temperatures killed more than 34,000 fish, mostly Chinook salmon. That began decades of advocacy by tribes and environmental groups, culminating in 2022 when federal regulators approved a plan to remove the dams.
Since then, the smallest of the four dams, known as Copco No. 2, has been removed. Crews also drained the reservoirs of the other three dams and began removing those structures in March.
Along the Klamath, the dam removal will not be a major hit to the power supply. At full capacity, they produced less than 2% of PacifiCorp’s energy — enough to power about 70,000 homes. Hydroelectric power produced by dams is considered a clean, renewable energy source, but many larger dams in the western United States have become a target for environmental groups and tribes because of the damage they cause. to the fish and river ecosystem.
The project was expected to cost about $500 million — paid for by taxpayers and PacifiCorps taxpayers.
But it is unclear how quickly the salmon will return to their historic habitats and the river will heal. There have already been reports of salmon at the mouth of the river, starting their journey up the river. Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe, said he hoped they would pass the Iron Gate Dam soon.
“I think we’re going to have some initial success,” he said. “I’m pretty confident we’ll see some fish go over the dam. If not this year, then definitely next year.”
There are two other Klamath dams further upstream, but they are smaller and allow salmon to pass through fish ladders – a series of pools that fish can jump through to get past a dam.
Mark Bransom, chief executive of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit entity created to oversee the project, noted that it took about a decade for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to resume fishing after the Elwha dams were removed.
“I don’t know if anyone knows for sure what that means for the return of fish,” he said. “It’s going to take some time. You can’t undo 100 years’ worth of damage and impacts to a river system overnight.”
