JANUARY 13, 2024
By Erik Neumann - Jefferson Public Radio, Juliet Grable
The bypass tunnel at the
bottom of Iron Gate Dam in Northern California has been carefully reinforced so
it can handle the load of water and sediment pouring through it.
Juliet Grable for NPR
The largest dam removal in U.S. history entered a
critical phase this week, with the lowering of dammed reservoirs on the Klamath
River.
On
Thursday, the gate on a 16-foot-wide bypass tunnel at the base of Iron Gate
dam, the lowest of those slated to be removed, was opened from a crack to 36
inches.
Amy
Cordalis stood in the dawn chill to witness the first big surge as the gate was
widened. She's an attorney and Yurok Tribe member who has played a critical
role in advocating for dam removal. As water poured through the tunnel, she
could hear boulders rolling and tumbling. The water turned to dark chocolate
milk as decades of pent-up sediment surged through.
"This
is historic and life-changing," Cordalis said. "And it means that the
Yurok people have a future. It means the river has a future; the salmon have a
future."
Amy Cordalis (left) and
Barry McCovey, members of the Yurok Tribe, have played key roles in advocating
for the removal of the Klamath River dams.
Juliet Grable for NPR
Mike
Belchik, a senior policy adviser for the Yurok Tribe, was also there to witness
the controlled breach.
"It's
kind of surreal," said Belchik, who has worked on Klamath River water
issues for the tribe for nearly 30 years. "I don't know why we had such
confidence that it was going to happen. But we did. We always knew it would
happen."
One
hundred seventy-three feet high, with a 740-foot crest, Iron Gate is an earth
embankment dam with a skinny, many-fingered reservoir behind it. The lowering —
or drawdown — of Iron Gate and two other reservoirs on the Klamath River will
make way for the removal of three remaining hydroelectric dams that are part of
the Lower Klamath Project in Northern California and southern Oregon.
For
decades, these barriers have blocked salmon, steelhead and Pacific lamprey from
accessing habitat above them and contributed to poor water quality below. The
Klamath River was once the third-largest salmon producer on the West Coast, but
in the time since the dams were constructed, the Klamath's coho and Chinook
runs have dwindled to a fraction of their historic abundance.
When
tribal activists first started calling for the removal of four Klamath River
dams in the late 1990s, people thought they were "crazy," said Leaf
Hillman, an elder of the Karuk Tribe who helped launch the campaign.
"We've never really considered any other alternative to removing dams. And
so it was a fight that we were committed to, and that we knew that we had to
win. And it's been an intergenerational struggle."
A
massive die-off of Chinook salmon in 2002 catalyzed increased activism around
getting the dams removed. An estimated 34,000 to 78,000 fish died. The loss of
these fish didn't just mean the loss of a fun summer fishing activity, said
Brook Thompson, a Yurok Tribe member who was 7 years old at the time and is now
in her late 20s. "Those salmon to me are the connections I have with my
relatives," she explained. "In a day, that was all gone."
Copco 1, located on the
Klamath River in Northern California, is one of three remaining dams in the
Lower Klamath Project that will be deconstructed later this year.
Juliet Grable for NPR
The
fight to save the Klamath River's salmon shaped the lives and careers of people
like Thompson, who grew up holding up posters at protests. Today, she is
pursuing a Ph.D. that focuses, in part, on how to incorporate Native knowledge
into policy. For her, it all comes back to the river and the fish that are so
central to Native diets, ceremonies and identity.
"Yurok
spirituality and Yurok ways of life cannot exist without having the salmon
here," she said.
While
activists celebrate the rebirth of a river, the massive project brings
uncertainty to others, particularly residents who live near the dams. In the
small town of Copco Lake, Calif., losing their namesake lake means losing the
centerpiece of their community. It also brings heightened concerns about how
the reshaped landscape will affect their property values and their ability to
safeguard their homes from wildfires in a high-risk region.
Up
until now, vehicles could easily access the lakeshore to pump water to fight
fires, and aircraft could dip their buckets into the lake, according to Francis
Gill, a Copco Lake resident and fire chief for the community's volunteer fire
department. Gill fears that the community will be much more exposed to fire
without the lake as a buffer.
"Now,
instead of having that lake as a huge barrier, we get the potential for fire to
jump the river, get from one side to the other easily," Gill said.
"Especially just with the way the wildfires have been getting the last 10
years. They just blow up so fast and get so big, so quickly."
Other
large dam removals on the Penobscot River in Maine and on the Elwha River in
Washington state have shown that rivers — and the fish that depend on them —
can recover quickly. The successful campaign and restoration of the Klamath
watershed will no doubt inform other dam removal efforts.
"Every
time we do this, and we do this at a big scale, we learn new things about the
legal pathways," said Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of
California, San Francisco. "It just helps people see that this is
possible, and that it can be highly successful."
Advocates
and analysts are eyeing four dams on the Lower Snake River in Washington as the
next big dam removal in the queue. Owen says that who owns the dams and what
the dams are used for greatly impacts the politics around their removal.
"Along
the Snake River, you have irrigators who rely on some of those reservoirs; you
also have barge traffic, that's conveying wheat," Owen said. These factors
make the Snake River dams a "harder case." Still, the removal of the
Klamath River dams "makes action on the Snake River more likely than it
was a few years ago," he said.
For
the next week, water will flow through the bypass tunnel at an average rate of
2,200 cubic feet per second, draining down Iron Gate reservoir between two and
four feet per day. Later this month, J.C. Boyle, the uppermost of the three
dams, will be breached, followed by Copco 1. By June, the Klamath River should
be flowing more or less within its historic channel, and the work of
dismantling the structures can begin.
Advocates
are quick to point out that dam removal alone will not save the Klamath River's
salmon runs. However, removing the barriers will open up 76 miles of coho
habitat and over 400 miles of Chinook habitat, says Shari Witmore, a fish
biologist at NOAA Fisheries.
If
modeling is correct, as many as 80% more Chinook salmon could return to the
basin within about 30 years after the dams are removed. Ocean harvest could
increase by as much as 46%. But this will depend in part on restoring important
tributaries, including the cold spring-fed rivers in the upper Klamath Basin,
which have been compromised with diking and draining of wetlands.
"Once
we restore that, we put this basin back together," Witmore says.
"That creates a lot of resilience over time with climate change, and it
buffers against multi-year droughts."
Cordalis,
the Yurok Tribe member, agrees that more work lies ahead. But she's also
looking forward to fulfilling a simple personal goal.
"Fishing,"
she said. "I want to go fishing."
(Source: https://www.npr.org/)