DAM REMOVAL: THE PROMISE VS THE POLITICS

 

A little over a month ago, a cofferdam on California’s Klamath River was taken down.  Its removal marked the last step in a long process that gave Pacific salmon and steelhead (sea-run rainbow) trout access to hundreds of miles of historic habitat, spawning grounds, and nursery areas, access that had been denied to them for more than a century.

It didn’t take long before a biologist for the Stae of Oregon spotted what was the first chinook salmon to enter the river and ascend beyond the former site of the cofferdam, where the far larger Iron Gate Dam had also once stood, as it swam toward the place where it would hopefully mate, spawn the next generation of salmon and, its life’s purpose completed, die.  In death, it will pay its debt forward, enriching the waters where its offspring would live for a brief time before they head towards the sea.

It was the first salmon to ascend the Klamath since 1912, when the river was first dammed.

Restoring salmon and steelhead runs in the Klamath necessitated the largest dam removal project in the history of the United States.  It cost $500 million, funded largely by PacifiCorp, a California utility, and various local water boards, and involved the removal of four separate dams.  Native American communities provided the impetus for the action, which was supported by PacifiCorp, the states of California and Oregon, and various angling and conservation organizations.

According to an article in the National Fisherman, members of the Yurok and Karok tribes began calling for the dams’ removal over two decades ago, after low, stagnant water and high water temperatures, resulting from the dams interrupting the Klamath’s natural flow, led to a gill rot disease that spread through the river’s spawning salmon, killing 70,000 adult fish, in 2002.

Scientists believe that it will be years before salmon and steelhead fully repopulate the Klamath watershed.  Removing the dams is a first step, but a watershed is more than just a river; it encompasses the entire basin, from the uplands that catch winter snows and funnel snowmelt and rain into the waterway to the vegetated banks that hold back the silt and keep it from suffocating the pebbled spawning beds or impairing the aquatic invertebrates on which the juvenile salmon will feed.

The Klamath River basin suffered significant damage during the century and more when the dams were in place; it will now be necessary to restore the native plants needed to fully restore the watershed.  That will take an immense amount of work to complete, but that work has already begun.

Still, the return of the first salmon was a major milestone.  Roberta Frost, secretary of the Klamath Tribes, observed that

“The return of our relatives the c’iyaal’s is overwhelming for our tribe.  This is what our members worked for and believed in for so many decades.  I want to honor that work and thank them for their persistence in the face of what felt like an unmovable obstacle.  The salmon are just like our tribal people, and they know where home is and returned as soon as they were able.”

There is reason to hope that the Klamath River’s salmon will eventually thrive.  The story of the Elwha River, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, is similar to that of the Klamath, although of a somewhat smaller scale.  After decades of advocacy spearheaded by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and its supporters, Congress passed a bill that authorized the removal of two hydroelectric dams on the river.  The work, completed in 2014, opened up 70 miles of high-quality habitat that had been denied to the salmon for over a century.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, which has been actively studying the impacts of the Elwha dams’ removal, reported that

“With the barriers removed, aquatic organisms regained access to the entire river.  Anadromous fish such as salmon returned to areas that have been void of such species for a century.

“The free passage has also prompted a rapid increase in salmon life history diversity.  One example is the ‘re-awakening’ of summer steelhead, which is likely originating from up-river resident O. mykiss [rainbow trout] populations.  Species such as Pacific lamprey are also increasing following dam removal…”

So dam removal has been demonstrably beneficial for rivers and their runs of anadromous fish.

While big rivers and Pacific salmon have been getting most of the publicity, the impacts have also been beneficial on smaller East Coast streams.  One of the best examples may be the removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River in 1999, which marked the first time that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission refused to renew the license of a hydroelectric dam that its owners wished to continue operating.

The removal of the Edwards Dam opened up an additional 17 miles of the Kennebec River to striped bass, alewives, and American eels, and led to the removal of the Fort Halifax Dam at the mouth of the Sebasticook River, which is the largest tributary of the Kennebec, opening that waterway to anadromous species for the first time in over a century.

In New York, in Maryland, in Massachusetts, and elsewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, the removal of smaller dams has allowed alewives, blueback herring, eels, and other anadromous species access to freshwater habitats and spawning grounds that they have long been denied, sometimes for more than two centuries.

Now, conservationists, anglers, and other advocates for diadromous fish are calling for what would be the biggest dam removal project yet, the removal of the lower four dams on the Snake River.  The National Wildlife Federation argues that

“Removing the four lower Snake River dams would reconnect endangered salmon and steelhead to 5,000 miles of pristine, high-elevation habitat—increasing the Columbia River Basin’s resiliency in the face of a warming climate, and providing salmon and steelhead with a real chance to recover to healthy and abundant populations.”

Trout Unlimited asserts that

“The fact is that salmon and steelhead returns [to their spawning grounds] in the Snake River Basin over the past 5 years have been among the lowest ever recorded.  In 2022, some salmon and steelhead returning to the Snake River have shown some signs of improvement—but only when lumping wild and hatchery fish counts together, and only when compared to terrible recent seasons…

“It is abundantly clear that the lower four Snake River dams are the primary cause of declines to wild salmon in the Snake River basin.  The Snake River basin is the largest, most climate resilient area of salmon habitat left in the lower 48 and contains over 40 percent of all coldwater habitat for Pacific salmon in the entire contiguous United States.  Salmon are resilient creatures, surviving ice ages and a geologically active landscape.  If we give them access to the most significant habitat left in the lower 48, then salmon can once again thrive.”

The Biden Administration seems to have agreed.  In September 2023, it issued a Presidential “Memorandum on Restoring Healthy and Abundant Salmon, Steelhead, and Other Native Fish Populations in the Columbia River Basin,” which acknowledged that

“Actions since 1855, including the Federal Government’s construction and operation of dams in the Basin, have severely depleted fish populations,”

and declared a policy

“…to carry out the requirement of the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act, (Public Law 96-501) to operate, manage, and regulate the [Columbia River System] to adequately protect, mitigate, and enhance fish and wildlife affected by the Federal dams in the Basin in a manner that provides equitable treatment for fish and wildlife with the other purposes for which the Federal dams are managed and operated.”

The Biden Administration seemed to adhere to that policy, as on December 14, 2023, it announced an agreement that,

“when combined with other funding that the Administration is anticipated to deliver to the region, will bring more than $1 billion in new Federal investments to wild fish restoration over the next decade and enable an unprecedented 10-year break from decades-long litigation against the Federal government’s operation of its dams in the Pacific Northwest.”

The agreement was filed in the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon, and will be implemented through a memorandum of understanding between the Federal government, the states of Washington and Oregon, four Native American tribes, and various environmental organizations.  It appeared to set the stage for the possible removal of the Snake River dams.

However, this November’s election has changed the political landscape, ushering in a new administration that is far more friendly to dams and water projects, and far less friendly to salmon and free-flowing rivers, than the administration currently in power.  The election also appears to have handed both houses of Congress to a party that is generally more hostile to dam removal.

That may have doomed the dam removal effort on the Snake River, because such removal requires the approval of Congress.  Even before the recent election, the hydropower industry and its legislative allies spoke out against removing the dams, with Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) claiming that

“This final package, which would make our region’s dams effectively defunct, confirms what we’ve all known for years.  The Biden Administration is catering to the wishes of extreme environmental activists that do not understand both the importance of the dams to our region, and the consequences of their proposed actions.”

Newhouse and other legislators introduced a package of nine bills that would prohibit removal of the Snake River dams.  At the same time, a representative of the affected tribes spoke out in favor of the dams’ removal and in support of the agreement.  Shannon F. Wheeler, Chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, observed that

“The Federal dams on the lower Snake and mainstream Columbia rivers have had—and continue to have—devastating impacts on the salmon and our people, burdening our Treaty partnership.  So today, as Six Sovereigns joining together with the United States to advance salmon restoration throughout the Basin—including preparation for the breach of the four lower Snake River dams—we are also witnessing the restoration of Tribal Treaties to their rightful place under the rule of law.”

Thus, the table is set for continued conflict.

The bills introduced in the House, which would prevent the removal of the Snake River dams, were never passed and signed into law.  The Federal government seems to have entered into a legally binding agreement to protect the salmon, and if it steps away from that agreement, perhaps by refusing to remove the dams, it may well be subject to further litigation and perhaps an adverse court ruling.

At the same time, with Republicans now controlling the Senate, there is a very good chance that legislation to prevent the removal of the Snake River dams would pass both houses of Congress should it be reintroduced, and there is little doubt that it would be signed into law.  After all, in the previous Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency took the remarkable position that

“One option for addressing the conflict created by the inability to achieve applicable water quality criteria at all times and in all places is for the States to make changes to their applicable designated uses.  The federal regulation…provides requirements for establishing, modifying and removing designated uses.  A state may designate a use or remove a use that is not an existing use, if the state conducts a ‘use attainability analysis’ that demonstrates that attaining the use is not feasible…”

What Trump’s EPA was effectively suggesting was that if dams rendered rivers such as the Snake unable to support salmon spawns, the answer was not to remove the dams, but simply to remove “salmon spawning” from the list of designated uses of the river. 

While that might lead to the salmon’s disappearance from the river, it would make it far easier to leave the dams in place.

We could expect the same sort of logic from the incoming administration, given a president who once spoke of rivers’ waters being

“diverted into the Pacific Ocean,  [emphasis added]”

as if rivers didn’t naturally flow to the sea, and who last appointed a Secretary of the Interior who favored diverting waters away from their natural course, even though their flows were critical to the survival of Pacific salmon runs and endangered fish species, for the benefit of the agricultural industry.

The president who might decide whether to remove the Snake River dams recently—while not president—expressed so little understanding of how rivers flow that he said,

“You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet.  You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you.  You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water would come down here and right into Los Angeles.”

It’s not completely clear what Trump was talking about, as there is no river system that can be simply diverted either to Los Angeles or into the Pacific Ocean—the badly overtaxed Colorado River probably comes closest to his description, although its usually dry delta opens not on the Pacific, but on the Gulf of California—but it is pretty clear that someone with his unique understanding of rivers is probably not going to do much to protect anadromous fish from the impacts of dams.

And that’s unfortunate, because the effort to remove dams for the benefit of anadromous fish has gained real momentum in recent years.  Many fish stocks, on both coasts, have benefitted from dam removals, and it will be sad to see removal efforts are abandoned.

However, given the current political environment, it is likely that the last, best chance to save declining runs of Pacific salmon, as well as other diadromous species, may well expire in just two more months.