Workers on Wednesday began breaching the last dams on a key stretch of the Klamath River, clearing the way for salmon to swim freely through a vast watershed near the California-Oregon border for the first time in more than a century. largest dam removal project in American history is nearing completion.
Crews used excavators to remove rock dams that were holding water upstream from two damsIron Gate and Copco No. 1, both of which had already been nearly completely removed. With each shovelful, more and more river water was able to flow through the historic channel. The work, expected to be completed tonight, will provide salmon with a pathway to important habitat just in time for the fall Chinook, or king, salmon spawning season.
“Our sacred duty to our children, our ancestors and ourselves is to care for the river, and today’s events represent a fulfillment of that obligation,” Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, which has fought for decades to remove the dams and restore the river, said in a statement.
The demolition comes about a month before the removal of four towering dams on the Klamath is scheduled to be completed as part of a national movement to allow rivers to return to their natural course and restore ecosystems for fish and other wildlife.
More than 2,000 dams had been removed in the U.S. as of February, most of them in the past 25 years, according to the advocacy group American Rivers. They included dams on the Elwha River in Washington state, 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 begin 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 grounds and improving water quality will help support the return of our salmon, a healthy, sustainable food source for several tribes.”
Salmon is of cultural and spiritual importance to the tribe and other tribes 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 of their lives in the Pacific Ocean but return to their natal rivers to spawn.
Fish populations then plummeted. In 2002, a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and warm temperatures killed more than 34,000 fish, mostly Chinook salmon. That set off decades of advocacy by tribes and environmental groups, culminating in a 2022 decision by federal regulators a plan approved to remove the dams.
Since then, the smallest of the four dams, known as Copco No. 2, has been removed. Crews have also drained the reservoirs of the other three dams and began removing those structures in March.
Along the Klamath, removing the dams won’t have a major impact on energy supplies. At full capacity, they produced less than 2 percent of PacifiCorp’s energy — enough to power about 70,000 homes. Hydropower from dams is considered a clean, renewable energy source, but much larger dams in the western U.S. have become a target for environmental groups and tribes for the damage they cause to fish and river ecosystems.
The project is expected to cost about $500 million, paid for by taxpayers and PacifiCorps taxpayers.
But it’s unclear how quickly the salmon will return to their historic ranges and the river will heal. There have already been reports of salmon at the mouth of the river, beginning their river journey. Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe, said he hopes they can get past the Iron Gate Dam soon.
“I think we’re going to have some early success,” he said. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to see some fish above the dam. If not this year, then definitely next year.”
Further upstream are two other dams in Klamath, but they are smaller and allow salmon to pass through fishways: a series of pools that fish can jump through to get past a dam.
Mark Bransom, executive director of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit 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 it means for fish to come back,” he said. “It’s going to take time. You can’t undo 100 years of damage and impacts to a river system overnight.”