The removal of two dams on Maine’s Penobscot River will open 1,000 miles of salmon habitat and rapids. Pictured: the Class IV Big Ambejackmockamus Falls.
CURRENT THE/WATER/ISSUE/2010
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IN AN ERA OF MASSIVE OIL SPILLS AND INCREASING ENERGY DEMANDS, WHY DOES RIVER CONSERVATION STILL MATTER? BECAUSE FREE-FLOWING WATER IS FUN. BECAUSE IT’S GOOD FOR THE NATIONAL CHUTZPAH. AND BECAUSE, AS THESE TEN COMEBACK STORIES ILLUSTRATE, SAVING RIVERS IS MORE PROFITABLE THAN EXPLOITING THEM.
Affairs
Jump in, the water’s fine: The cleanup of the Clark Fork River will create some 3,500 jobs.
FLUID THINKING
COLLECT THE RAIN
Montana’s strategy for jumpstarting the local economy? Tap the Superfund. BY ABE STREEP ONE HOT DAY last July, a group of us drove to
the town of Turah, Montana—two bars, one camp-supply store—and dropped two rafts into the loveliest Superfund site in America, the Clark Fork River. My companions were four scientists and a schoolteacher, and we were there to see the remnants of a dirtier era. We floated until we passed a kid flying a kite onshore. Soon after, I heard a low growling. The rumble amplified until we rounded a bend and came upon the source of the noise— trucks—at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers. Where the Milltown dam had sat for the past century, plugging up the Clark Fork and serving as a catchment for tailings from an upstream copper mine, the riverbed was now dry. Dump trucks and backhoes crawled between blackened tree stumps, removing arsenic-laden sludge. What the river ran through here, at the point where it met the Blackfoot—the waterway that famously haunted Norman Maclean— was a concrete gutter, a diversion skirting the old dam site. Our party was the second group to float to the dam site since the removal. (Montana governor Brian Schweitzer had floated 92 Outside
through to the cheers of a waiting crowd one week earlier.) Still, we had the privilege of seeing a river in a state of remedial distress. I turned to one of my rafting partners, Matt Daniels, a hydraulic engineer hired by the state of Montana to rebuild the Clark Fork’s natural channel through the old dam site, and asked what his plan was. He shrugged. “The goal is to rebuild a natural floodplain,” he said. “We have an idea of where the river used to flow,but it’s going to go where it wants to go.” THESE DAYS, Montana’s fastest-growing
industry is restoration, and ground zero for the boom is the Clark Fork. The cleanup of the 120-mile upper river will create some 3,500 jobs over the next decade. Much of the money
funding the new “restoration economy”— Schweitzer’s favorite buzz phrase—comes from the energy company ARCO, which has owned the mine responsible for the Clark Fork’s degradation since 1977. To call this comeback unexpected would be
FLUID THINKING
B L OCK I NVAS I V E S One of the problems with rivers is that they don’t respect borders. The Flathead starts in the Canadian Rockies and flows into Montana, forming the western boundary of Glacier National Park. Due to rich coal and oil deposits near its Canadian headwaters, the river has been the cause of an international tug of war for two decades. On one side: British Columbia’s government, oil giant BP, and the Cline mining company, all of which advocated digging near the Flathead’s source. On the other: the Flathead Coalition, a citizens’ conservation group. Fortunately, the enviros recently scored a TKO. In January, the United Nations World Heritage Committee reported that—surprise!—mining in the Canadian Flathead threatened Glacier. Soon after, on the eve of the Vancouver Olympics, British Columbia banned oil and gas mining in the Flathead Valley, sending BP —KYLE DICKMAN and Cline packing.
RYAN HEFFERNAN/AURORA. PREVIOUS SPREAD: JOSE AZEL/AURORA
CASH FLOW
Can gardens save rivers? Kansas City’s government thinks so. In 2005, urban officials became concerned about polluted storm water that ran into the Missouri River. So they invested $5 million in a project called 10,000 Rain Gardens, which teaches citizens how to water gardens from roof gutters. The goal: filter storm water through native plants. The plan is promising enough that Seattle, Portland, and Chicago have recently launched similar programs. —K.D.
THE/WATER/ISSUE/2010 like calling the 2004 Red Sox World Series victory a nice little turnaround. For most of the 20th century, the state’s economic policy went like this: Ranch, log, and mine—quickly. Those industries created jobs and forged a defiant spirit in many Montanans, but recently the zeitgeist has shifted. “Part of it was miners and loggers saying, We need extraction, but we also need to value the environment,” says Jim Kuipers, a former mining engineer who now advises government officials cleaning up the Clark Fork. “But one of the biggest things was that the Superfund designation brought jobs.” The Clark Fork flows 320 miles through the western part of the state and into Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho. The river’s tributaries include the Flathead, the Bitterroot, Rock Creek, and the Blackfoot— geologic stars of Montana’s $225 million-per-year angling industry— so the fact that the Clark Fork is the most polluted waterway in the state is ironic. The river is hemmed in by train tracks on one side and I-90 on the other, hard lines of transportation that have cut off the floodplain and shortened the river by 14 miles over the past century. The headwaters? Silver Bow Creek, a stream in Butte that’s been catching runoff contaminated by the tailings of a massive copper mine since the 1880s. In 1905, the copper baron William A. Clark began building the Milltown Dam at the town of Bonner, and over the next century the dam was transferred among energy companies. By 2000, it produced one-tenth of 1 percent of the state’s power while employing precisely two dam operators. Milltown did, however, function as an effective holding tank for Butte’s mine tailings. The upper river has been designated a Superfund site—a toxic-waste source the federal government helps clean—since the early eighties, when Bonner residents discovered arsenic in their drinking water. Since obtaining the Superfund designa-
RYAN HEFFERNAN
Brook trout in Montana’s Rock Creek
FLUID THINKING
HI T T H E H I GH -WATE R M AR K We’re about to find out whether wild fish and clean hydropower can coexist. Maine’s lower Penobscot River has been plugged with eight dams since 1910. Now, an unparalleled partnership—between environmental organizations; state, federal, and tribal governments; and hydropower interests—is taking down two of the lowermost dams and retrofitting a third with an innovative fish pass that resembles a natural river channel. The project will restore fish access to 1,000 miles of habitat by 2013. And the river will produce the same amount of power: PPL Corporation, owner of multiple dams on the Penobscot, will increase hydroelectric production at six small existing dams. Optimists expect threatened American shad to recover and the Atlantic salmon population to increase from less than 1,000 to 10,000 within a decade. But the most lasting impact of the project might be its value as a viable new model.“It shows that we can remove dams and increase power within the same river basin,” says Stephanie Lindloff, senior director of river restoration at American Rivers, an environmental nonprofit. —RYAN KROGH
tion, Montana has received some $300 million in federal money and won some $200 million in lawsuits from ARCO, which was bought out by the much-maligned oil giant BP in 2000. Now, after a couple of decades during which grassroots organizations pushed for dam removal, that money is putting people to work. Timber companies bid for contracts to rebuild riverbanks; engineers like Daniels redesign river channels; former miners dredge Silver Bow Creek. The work won’t dry up anytime soon. The removal of the dam was crucial, but the Clark Fork’s headwaters still need cleaning, and conservationists point out the necessity of rewatering the river’s smaller, lesser-known tributaries, which have long been siphoned off for agriculture. “There’s simply more business in restoration,” says Karen Knudsen, executive director of the local Clark Fork Coalition, a nonprofit that led the push for dam removal. “We want this to be a global example of how a damaged watershed can be fixed.” DURING THE SAME TRIP to Montana, I also
floated the Blackfoot. This was partly out of professional interest and partly because it was the peak of fishing season. Ponderosas
lined the banks, trout slapped the surface, a flotilla of rafts full of undergrads passed. Today, the Blackfoot is about as pristine a river as you’ll find in the lower 48, but not so long ago it was a mess, too. The Blackfoot fishery nearly crashed in the seventies and eighties, courtesy of a dam made of goldmine tailings that blew out near the river’s headwaters in 1975. Until recently, logging was ubiquitous here. (When Robert Redford shot the film version of Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, in 1991, he headed a couple of hundred miles east, to the Gallatin. Missoula rumor has it that Redford chose the Gallatin because the Blackfoot’s banks were too chopped up.) In the early nineties, concerned locals started cleaning the river and buying up nearby land to donate to the Forest Service. This year, the Nature Conservancy will complete the purchase of 170,000 acres in the river valley from a former timber giant. I floated an eight-mile section of the upper river with M. Sanjayan, lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, and Grant Kier, executive director of the Five Valleys Land Trust, a partner in the Conservancy deal. We were supposed to be working, but the cutthroat trout distracted us. Eventually, I asked a question, something related to the land grab. Happy to relay the company line, Sanjayan began to reply, but his rod bent to the water, then sprang back, whiplike. The line dangled broken and limp. “Oooh, oooh, it was as big as my arm!” he yelled. “Dude, you’re making me miss fish!” So we shut up and fished until we came to our take-out, a bridge preceded by a small rapid occupied by a canoe that appeared to be stuck. The paddlers, who were profoundly drunk, had attempted to run the rapid, a Class II, backwards. They had failed. One waved to us:“Hey,maaaan,can we get a lift?” Now that, I thought, is what a river’s supposed to look like. OUTSIDEONLINE.COM
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The new era of dam removal means habitat restoration, fish comebacks, and—bonus!—new whitewater BY KYLE DICKMAN “HEMLOCK’S DOWN AND Trout Creek’s
coming up!” My friend Sam Drevo, a Portland, Oregon–based kayaker, was on the phone. What he meant was “Let’s go paddling.” The Forest Service had recently jackhammered the 26foot,72-year-old Hemlock Dam out of Washington’s Trout Creek, an indirect tributary of the Columbia River.Hemlock had drowned a Class V section of whitewater, and early spring storms were expected to raise the water level. With the dam gone, we had the rare opportunity to run new, potentially classic rapids. I flew to Portland. Hemlock was the first of about 20 dams scheduled to come out of northwestern rivers over the next decade. The American era of river reclamation—which meant rampant dam building to increase the nation’s power— lasted from 1900 until the mid-seventies, when the Army Corps of Engineers erected four dams on Washington’s Lower Snake River. Those beasts went a long way toward wiping out what was once the most prolific salmon run on earth and sent enviros clamoring for a reversal. Finally, some 30 years later, the time seems to have arrived: 430 of America’s 86,000 dams have fallen since 1999, and some big ones are on deck. Two behemoths are coming out of Washington’s Elwha River next summer, along with four on Oregon’s Klamath that are scheduled to fall by 2020. Last August, The New York Times proclaimed that the era of dam removal was upon us. But that’s a little simplistic, because there’s more than one kind of dam. Most of the 430 removed thus far have been, like Hemlock, small structures that produced little electricity. The forthcoming removal of big dams on the Elwha and the Klamath is good for salmon lovers, but it’s not necessarily a harbinger of snowballing dam destruction: It took 25 years of debate before the National Park Service committed to demolishing the Elwha dams. And some large hydroelectrics, like the four contested dams on the Lower Snake, provide so much power—enough to run Seattle for a year—that removal is, if not a pipe dream, a ways off. In March, the Obama administration, eager to wean the country off oil, pledged to develop clean hydropower by adding turbines to existing dams. “People say dams are a thing of the past,” says George Robison, dam-safety 94 Outside
The author on a damless Trout Creek
FLUID THINKING
WI RE TH E WATER In 2000, when Georgia suffered a severe drought, the Flint River watershed nearly ran dry. The problem? The region’s 6,750 center-pivot irrigation systems sprinkled not just crops but also rocky, fallow ground. So in 2004, researchers at the University of Georgia, with the help of the Nature Conservancy, connected 22 farmers’ fields to a computerized soil map. Result: The farmers could select which areas to water with the click of a mouse, preventing incidental waste. The system saved some 150 million gallons of water. This year, the conservation group, called the Flint River Basin Partnership, will insert moisture probes in 27 pilot fields. Eventually, the probes could trigger the irrigation systems automatically, ensuring that only the fields that need water get it.“Implemented on a large scale,” says FRBP director David Reckford,“this could conserve billions of gallons.” —R.K.
FLUID THINKING
B RI NG DOWN T H E BI G O NES Will four contested dams on Washington’s Lower Snake River ever come out? Former Interior secretary (and unapologetic salmon lover) BRUCE BABBITT makes the case. These fish go all the way up to Redfish Lake, at 6,500 feet, 900 miles from the ocean. It’s a natural phenomenon with no parallel anywhere in the world. The evidence is quite clear that were we to remove four dams on the Snake River, fish teetering on extinction could be rescued. The only way the dams will come down is by congressional authorization, but the administration has the bully pulpit and ought to be using it. This administration is failing on that account, just as previous administrations have. I’m not suggesting that we were free of blame in the Clinton years. At the very early stages of this analysis, it was not clear to me that dam removal was the only option. Having said that, we should have been more aggressive about getting this issue into the open. We now have 12 years of analysis, and public opinion is evolving. The case for the removal of these dams is so strong, I have no doubt they will come down. It isn’t going to happen in the next five years. But I think there’s a good chance it will in 20. —AS TOLD TO GRAYSON SCHAFFER
SAM DREVO
ROYAL FLUSH
coordinator for Oregon’s Water Resources Department. “That’s delusional.” So what’s the story? The era of dam removal or the era of clean hydro? Some think both are possible. “The goal is to increase the total amount of power without building new dams,” says Jeff Opperman, a hydropower expert with the Nature Conservancy. “We want to see a more holistic approach—increase hydropower from existing dams, then look at removal for the little dams that might be giving only two megawatts.” In fact, according to American Rivers, there are tens of thousands of such dams—a number that has paddlers licking their chops. Hemlock certainly qualified as obsolete. Since its turbines were turned off in 1957, the dam had done little more than provide
Riverkeeper is forcing General Electric to dredge 2.4 million cubic yards of PCBs from the Hudson. FLUID THINKING
J UM P I N Want to pick a fight? Consult our guide to the nation’s top riveradvocacy groups. AMERICAN RIVERS americanrivers.org This Washington, D.C.–based organization ranks America’s ten most endangered rivers every year. BEST FOR: Educating yourself; people who don’t like swimming near diapers SAVE OUR WILD SALMON wildsalmon.org A small, Portland, Oregon–based group, SOS leads the fight for the removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River blamed for the collapse of the Columbia’s salmon run. BEST FOR: Monkeywrenchers; spey-rod owners WATERKEEPER ALLIANCE waterkeeper.org Waterkeeper, which has nearly 200 affiliates on six continents, specializes in busting polluters. BEST FOR: Kennedys; Gulf Coast oystermen AMERICAN WHITEWATER americanwhitewater.org This North Carolina–based group advocates for paddlers’ interests and coordinates nationwide river cleanups. BEST FOR: Toyota Tacoma drivers
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TROUT UNLIMITED tu.org TU originated in Michigan 50 years ago and now has 400 chapters. The current focus is on restoring native fish— Atlantic salmon, westslope cutthroat, golden trout—to native habitats. BEST FOR: Tobacco chewers —K.D.
irrigation for farms and block steelhead. The day Trout Creek’s natural flow was restored, someone spotted a steelhead upstream. A few months later, in March 2010, I stood on the bank with Drevo and another kayak buddy. The stream was 20 feet wide, lined by Douglas firs, and dry—the storms had never materialized. For four miles we bloodied our knuckles scraping down the rocks: Come hell or low water, we’d paddle whatever new rapids existed. Finally, we arrived at the old dam site and found … a wide mudflat. We drifted through until the water threaded gently between some boulders. Trout Creek’s newest rapid was a Class II. Next time, I’m bringing my fly rod.
THE OLD GUARDS
They pick the big fights: Con Edison, General Electric, Exxon. Riverkeeper, founded by fishermen some 40 years ago, made its name by confronting industrial giants to protect the Hudson River. Today, the group’s legislative battles continue, as do its day-to-day operations: patrolling the river for small-time polluters. But as a cleaner Hudson experiences a surge in recreation, the work only gets more complicated. Riverkeeper president Alex Matthiessen, 46, has run the organization for the past decade but is leaving to form an environmental-consulting firm. On the eve of his departure, MICHAEL ROBERTS asked him about Riverkeeper’s legacy. Outside: So is it really safe to swim in the Hudson? MATTHIESSEN: From June through September, the Hudson is basically a 150mile beach. You can safely swim in the river most days in most places, whereas 30 years ago it wasn’t safe to swim anywhere. Riverkeeper has established a waterquality-monitoring program so that, ultimately, river lovers can use real-time data to determine whether or not it’s safe to swim “today.” What have been Riverkeeper’s biggest wins? After a 30-year battle, Indian Point nuclear plant has been ordered to reduce by 97 percent their cooling-water withdrawals from the river, which slaughter an estimated one billion fish each year. General Electric has also finally started its long-overdue cleanup of PCBs from the
riverbed. And Riverkeeper spearheaded the establishment of the Hudson River Estuary Preserve, which will facilitate land preservation along the Hudson for generations to come.
as primary investor in infrastructure. We also have these antiquated systems that combine sewage and storm water. After heavy rains, raw sewage is diverted right into our waterways.
How can smaller conservation groups have that kind of success? You have RFK Jr. on your board. There’s no question that Bobby Kennedy is a big asset. But Riverkeeper has built a brand and reputation, apart from Bobby, as a highly effective group of advocates. We’re respected by friends and foes alike for being tough but reasonable. We’re about getting things done.
Ick. How about a positive vision for the Hudson? In 30 years, we’ll have eliminated pollution through a self-regulating pollution tax. The valley’s homes and businesses will be powered, heated, and cooled by renewable energy. American and short-nosed sturgeon, striped bass, American shad, and herring will be thriving in the river again.
What’s the biggest challenge facing the Hudson? Wastewater treatment. In New York and across the country, the federal government has abandoned its role
How realistic is that? It’s undoubtedly ambitious— but very much within reach. What most people don’t realize is that we, and not corporations, have all the power. We just don’t exercise it. OUTSIDEONLINE.COM
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L.A. STORY
Renegade kayakers help give the ugliest river in America a facelift BY FREDERICK REIMERS TWO YEARS AGO, some friends and I pad-
In 20 years, the L.A. River could be lined by parkland and bike paths.
quickly as possible. Which is highly ironic; since then, the city has spent billions piping water in from the Owens Valley and the Colorado River. Now rain courses into the concrete-lined ditch, which promptly floods—and escaping a flooding L.A. River is like trying to climb the walls of a water slide. Rescues and drownings are not infrequent. As a flood-control facility, it works beautifully. As an ecological habitat and a playground, it’s a disaster. Our expedition aimed to call attention to a 2008 Corps decision that could strip parts of the river of its Clean Water Act protections. The Corps had argued it might not have jurisdiction to prosecute polluters because the
FLUID THINKING
L E T ’E M RUN At press time, Colorado legislators were haggling over a 30-year-old dispute that tackles an essential—or absurd, depending on your perspective—question: Can a person own a river? Since 1979, landowners in the state have insisted that rafters passing through their property could be prosecuted if they so much as set foot on the riverbed. Rafters say no way: Rivers are theirs to float freely, as long as they don’t trash the banks. But Colorado’s law has remained murky—allowing some rafting companies to float “historically run” rivers, while permitting property owners to block other waterways (occasionally with barbed wire). This spring, the issue sprang up again when a Taylor River landowner tried to block passage through his land. Now, landowners and raft companies are haggling in court and introducing ballot initiatives for next November’s elections. Some experts say the issue could take years to sort out. So before things get ugly—and they will get ugly—we’re going to chime in: Let’s dispense with the antiquated notion that someone has a right to erect fences through moving water. —THE EDITORS Roadblocks have no place on navigable rivers. 96 Outside
river is a nonnavigable waterway—the criteria for a river to be afforded protection under the Clean Water Act. We set out to prove the river’s navigability by … navigating it. It was a satire of a river trip, but as with all good satire, it had a point. In the end, the cops—likely swayed by the documentary film crew trailing us—let us complete our trip. A few weeks later, following a barrage of local news stories, the EPA offered special protections for the L.A. River. There’s more good news, too. In 2007, the city government adopted a $2 billion revitalization master plan, prescribing everything from parkland and bike paths along the river to a rainwater-diversion scheme that would direct runoff into the ground, replenishing the aquifer. The plan will take more than 20 years to implement, but it could eventually mean the swapping of some concrete banks for a vegetation-lined riverbed. The utopian vision has been slow to develop, due to budget shortages, but last year the city invested $17 million in a six-acre riverside parcel that will join two other recently created parks. “The political will to revitalize the river is there,” says Carol Armstrong, the Los Angeles River Master Plan project manager. If our trip was any indication, the civic will is there, too. As the cops left the bank and our group stepped into our kayaks to continue downstream, the crowd that had gathered above let out a raucous cheer, glad that someone was treating the country’s ugliest waterway like, well, a river.
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dled 51 miles of the Los Angeles River, past the back lots of Warner Bros. and Universal studios, past the chemical refineries, and, finally, to within sight of the Queen Mary, the cruise ship turned hotel in Long Beach Harbor. Our course was a ribbon of algae-choked water in a 400-foot-wide, graffiti-lined concrete basin. If you’ve seen Grease or Terminator 2, you’ve seen the L.A. River. Its paved riverbed served as the set for a hot-rod race in the former and Schwarzenegger’s motorcyclevs.-big-rig chase in the latter. We, too, saw vehicles in the river: maintenance trucks removing plastic bags and spray-paint cans. We also saw great blue herons and black-necked stilts, as well as stranger native inhabitants. One guy camping on an island gave me the lowdown on the community of homeless people living there. He was naked. His pet teddy bear, which was pink, floated nearby, tethered to shore. Following our chat I paddled back into the water but was interrupted: A police helicopter hovered overhead, and over the loudspeaker the pilot ordered me to shore. Paddling the Los Angeles River is illegal because, technically speaking, it’s not a river at all but,rather,a“flood-control facility.” In the twenties and thirties, it was still a naturally flooding river that ran approximately 50 miles from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach and inundated the city several times. So in 1938 the Army Corps of Engineers paved the channel to move water out of the city as