BOONE, NC — On the rushing Watauga River, excavators are carving through the remains of the Shulls Mill Dam, pulling apart the concrete piece by piece, gradually opening a waterway that has been controlled for nearly two centuries.
Removing this private hydroelectric dam in western North Carolina will be a boon to rafters, kayakers and tubers, allowing the river to flow freely for nearly 80 miles (129 kilometers). But perhaps the biggest beneficiary is a strange, ancient creature known as the eastern hellbender salamander.
Sometimes called the snot otter or Allegheny alligator, it is the largest salamander in North America, growing to two feet (61 centimeters) long. But the salamander’s habitat in places like the southern Appalachians has shrunk, and its numbers have declined by 70 percent in the past 50 years.
“What’s so important about the hellbender is that they require a special habitat: clear, clean, cold, oxygenated water,” said Andy Hill, a Watagua Riverkeeper with MountainTrue, which worked with American Rivers to remove the dam in July. “The hellbender is a keystone species for a mountain stream ecosystem, and removing this dam will create a new habitat.”
The demolition of the Shulls Mill Dam is part of a national trend to return rivers to their natural state by removing outdated, sometimes abandoned structures that once powered mills, irrigated farmland or stored water, with the aim of boosting biodiversity, improving water quality and strengthening flood protection. amidst worsening stormsThe campaign to demolish dams has been going on for decades, but has been intensified by a one-off financial injection from the A bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
More than $2 billion will go to federal agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency, to maintain, repair and remove dams, culverts and other barriers. Of that, $920 million has already been spent on 544 projects.
The Wildlife Service will get $200 million over five years to remove dams. In April, the agency announced plans to award $70 million in grants to support 43 projects to remove dams and other river barriers in 29 states.
“It’s a huge, huge boost,” said Amy Horstman, coordinator of the service’s National Fish Passage Program, noting that grants that were once limited to a few hundred thousand dollars now number in the millions of dollars.
“This really changes the scope and scale, even the way we think about aquatic connectivity,” she said. “People came in with bigger, more complicated projects and asked us to take a bigger piece of that pie.”
States also invest money in removing dams.
North Carolina — that The Associated Press discovered in 2019 had the second largest collection of dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition — earmarked $7.2 million for the removal of the Shulls Mill Dam and at least five others in the western part of the state.
The Michigan Legislature has allocated more than $43 million for dam maintenance and removal after a dam break thousands displaced in 2020. A dozen dams, including one on the Maple River that breached in 2023, have been removed with that funding.
“Certainly we try to reduce that risk to human life and property damage,” said Mason Manuszak, an environmental engineer with the state’s dam safety unit. “One of the things we really try to teach people is the ecological benefits of removing dams.”
Serena McClain, senior director of the national dam removal program at the conservation organization American Rivers, said the increase in funding, particularly from the infrastructure bill, is an “opportunity to get critically important projects funded.”
But McClain stressed that this is just the beginning: Many of the country’s 500,000 to 1 million dams are more than 60 years old, and the cost of removing them can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions.
“It’s a tremendous down payment on what’s needed to restore and reconnect vital river habitats across the country,” McClain said.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of dam removal are aquatic animals, particularly migratory fish. Studies have shown that removals can lower water temperatures and increase dissolved oxygen levels in rivers, and increase populations of trout and salmon, as well as freshwater mussels and American eels.
“The scientific findings show that when there are obstacles, the whole system suffers,” said Fish and Wildlife’s Horstman.
Some large dam systems are being removed, including four dams on California’s Klamath River — the largest removal project in history. But most of the dams being demolished are relatively small.
In Maine, the Remnant Mill Dam on the Sabattus River is scheduled to be removed this summer. In addition to flood protection, the project will provide passage for river herring and endangered Atlantic salmon. In New Hampshire, the Washburn Mill Dam on the Mohawk River was removed to restore connection to nearly 40 miles (64 kilometers) of brook trout habitat.
In Flint, Michigan, the Hamilton Dam, built more than a century ago to power mills, is being demolished. The dam, on the Flint River, has long been at risk of collapsing and flooding the city center. Removing the dam will reconnect 25 miles (40 kilometers) of upstream habitat, which will sturgeon population in the lakeaccording to U.S. conservationists. It will also strengthen flood protection, improve water quality and boost riverfront redevelopment efforts.
Dam removal is normally done with excavation equipment, but McKinley Lake Dam, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Missoula, Montana, was blown up — with explosives carried by mules. It is one of 10 ancient dams on eight glacial lakes that are being removed to lower water levels and allow the return of wetlands critical to native amphibians such as the long-toed salamander and the Columbia spotted frog. Native trout species in the streams below the lakes would also benefit.
“It’s a rewilding, a renaturalization exercise,” said Rob Roberts, a senior project manager with Trout Unlimited, which worked with government agencies on the nearly $4 million project to remove all the dams over the next decade.
But not everyone is in favor of removing dams, especially larger structures.
Republican lawmakers in the West, including U.S. Reps. Doug LaMalfa of California, Cliff Bentz of Oregon, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Russ Fulcher of Idaho, argue that the projects are draining reservoirs, leaving acres of silt behind, destroying water sources for farmers and eliminating hydroelectric jobs.
They argue that proponents of dam removal fail to understand that there are many other factors besides spawning ground problems that cause fish population declines, including overfishing, disease and pollution.
“It’s a political power grab,” said LaMalfa, who tried to block the removal of the dam on the Klamath River. “They’re determined to rip them out. These are trophies for these guys.”
In North Carolina, the removal of dams along the Wautauga River has been widely applauded, with advocates already seeing cleaner water and fish unable to swim in parts of the river for decades.
Life for hellbenders living below the dam should also improve. Eight were captured by divers and relocated to a safer location downstream, where another dam was removed in 2021.
Michael Gangloff of Appalachian State University, who coordinates biological monitoring at the Shulls Mill site, said the free-flowing river should improve water quality and make it more attractive to salamanders. Sediment will be washed downstream, he said, exposing larger rocks and boulders where salamanders live, lay eggs and raise young.
“We should see better living conditions around the dam and in 10 to 15 to 20 years it will be hard to see that there was a dam there,” Gangloff said.
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Casey reported from Boston. Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed from Madison, Wisconsin.
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