Enough Dam Nonsense

By: Emma Wilson

The Klamath River is the third largest river in the United States traveling from northern California to southern Oregon which flows from the Columbia and Fraser rivers. The dams along the river have been causing problems for a little over a century. Efforts to remove these dams started in 2002, but the dams are finally scheduled to be removed by 2024. The dams are owned originally by PacificCorp, who intended the dams to generate hydropower, in other words electricity. All the pieces are in place for these dams to be removed by 2024.

After decades of being unable to fish due to bans placed in the 1930s on the tribal communities in 1978, the Supreme Court of California upheld the ban on fishing for tribes. The Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes have attempted to mend their cultural heritage and subsistence fishing for salmon. The Klamath dams block salmon and steelhead from reaching more than 300 miles of spawning habitat in the upper basin of the Klamath river. Today only less than 3% of salmon remain because they cannot access their historical habitat in the Upper Klamath Basin. Six dams have been placed on the Klamath River. Four of these dams are being removed. The four dams include: Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, Iron Gate, and J.C. Coyle (in Oregon), built between 1922 and 1962. A non-profit organization, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC), was formed in 2016 to take ownership of four Pacifi-

Corp-owned dams for the purpose of managing the dam removal process. Funding for the projects is set, with up to $450 million secured from PacifiCorp ratepayers and the state of California through the 2014 Proposition 1 Water Bond. Removing the Klamath dams will be the largest dam removal project and river restoration project in the United States. Restoring the river’s health and abundance of fish will provide social justice to Indigenous Peoples who’ve relied on the subsistence of salmon for thousands of years. Officials said they began through “early removal work” with the smallest dam, Copco 2, slated to be removed first in late summer/early fall of 2023. Deconstruction of the remaining three dams will occur in 2024, with all four dams removed by the end of that year.

The Dam’s Main Purpose

Alison O’Dowd, who is the Environmental Science and Management chair at California Polytechnic University, Humboldt campus, explains how these dams work and why they were built to begin with. “They generate electricity, which a lot of the electricity was sold to folks, you know, in northern California and southern Oregon for very cheap rates. So you have all this environmental destruction and degradation related to the dams and people getting really cheap power out of it,” said O’Dowd.

Impact to River Communities

The dams have been affecting downriver tribes for a century now. Parts of Karuk Tribal territory lay near the Iron Gate of the Klamath where diminished water quality and salmon populations are highly affected.

The largest tribe in California, the Yurok Tribe, is located downstream closer to the mouth of the Klamath River and is in support of the dams’ removal. The Hoopa and Klamath tribes, located by the Trinity River and the upper basin, have mixed feelings about the issue.

The Shasta Nation Tribal Center is against dam removal and is for the cultural preservation perspective, which means to maintain the organism alive, uncontaminated, and without variation or mutation, that is, to preserve the culture in a condition that is as close as possible to the original isolate. The Shasta Nation Tribal Council of The Shasta Nation Tribal Center sent out a letter to the Pioneer Press Guest Opinion on Nov. 4, 2009, stating “The Shasta Nation Tribal Council has been an aggressive opponent to the dam removal efforts from the very beginning. The Shasta Nation has been invited to critical meetings, and has had vital and privy KBRA information from the beginning. We oppose dam removal and we will be as integral, as we have been from the beginning of this dam nonsense, part of the solution.”

There is broad support for the removal of these dams, especially from the Yurok people, who are the biggest supporters of the Klamath dams’ removal. There is, however, some local opposition to the project around the reservoir’s local landowners, ranchers and farmers. Either way, there are many reasons for conflicting parties to be for or against the removal of these dams.

The Interpretation Coordinator of the Yurok Tribe, Nicole Peters, explains the magnitude of the dam removal, Peters says “Ceremonies matter to us because it is part of our spirituality and daily life, they are intimately intertwined as mentioned before…We connect more with the natural environment and rely upon the health of the environment to take care of us; it provides us with food, medicine, and other resources that ensure that we are well.”

Peters explained the types of ceremonies they celebrate, “Ceremonies occur along our rivers as our homes were traditionally along the rivers. We practice the Jump Dance (Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk practice a similar dance), White Deerskin Dance (Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk practice this dance), Fish Dam Ceremony (Yurok and Hupa), Brush Dances (Yurok, Hupa, Karuk) and others that I do not know much about as they are not practiced anymore,” said Peters.

The four dams mentioned are being removed for the improvement of the water quality to the Klamath River, fish diseases become less prominent in the water, the temperature will lower, and salmon will repopulate the upper basin once dam removal is complete. Michael Belchik, a Senior water policy analyst who has worked with the Yurok Tribe for 27 years explains that the first dam that was built in 1917 was named Copco 1. Copco 1 was made to create electricity since many houses were without at the time. Copco 2 was built in the 1920s/30s and in 1962, the Iron gate was the final dam to generate a better and more stable flow with the other rivers.

Impact on Fish and Wildlife

The primary impact of these dams is that they block the salmon from their habitat, “The habitats that are accessible above the dams are different and unique from the habitats that are available below the dam. So you lost a lot of genetic diversity. The fish rooms, the fish, were adapted to go into the dams. So that’s genetic diversity, and then you also reduce the geographic diversity. And that’s important because the more places you have a population of animals like fish or anything like that, then the less vulnerable they are to if a catastrophe strikes one of the places, right, then they’ll still be animals left in other parts of the watershed that didn’t have that flash flood or fish disease outbreak or something like that. So genetic and geographic diversity go hand in hand, and they’re both equally important,” said Belichik.

Toxic algae called cyanobacteria or blue algae, which is a byproduct of the dams, directly affects the health of tribal members. In the late summer, it was advised not to make any contact with the water, even touching with your hand. Sediment over time builds up from the dams being put in place disrupting the flow of the river. Impact from the dams on the river have caused the river bed to not have the same flow species of host cell cyanobacteria, which is a deadly disease also to fish. “So what happens is there’s a blue green algae called Microcystis Algae, it’s also known as blue green bacteria or cyanobacteria. But it’s really sort of a cross between algae and bacteria. And it has a deadly poison in it. It’s a liver toxin. And even if the algae itself doesn’t make it downriver in the fall, when the algae cells all die, that chemical inside them gets dissolved in the water column, and then it’s transported down river and you can take water samples and run specific tests,” said Belchik.

In Sept. 2002 the Klamath River fish kill occurred on the Klamath River in California. According to the official estimate of mortality, about 34,000 fish died. The 2002 fish kill was a result of drought, low flows, and water misman agement. Ich disease, also called white spot disease, or parasitic disease, affects a variety of freshwater fish species. Ich spreads when fish are packed at cold water refuges, while flows are really low.

PacificCorps started licensing the dams under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, also known as FERC process in 2004 but the 2002 fish kill built a lot of momentum to get the dams out.

The Klamath Justice Coalition traveled to Scotland, as O’Dowd mentioned.

“The tribes have been at the forefront of pushing for dam removal. Protesting and different letter writing campaigns, going to Warren Buffett’s house, flying to Scotland, to the Shareholders Meeting of Pacific Corps, for over 20 years since the early 2000’s,” said O’Dowd.

Brook Thompson, Yurok Tribe Restoration Engineer, both Yurok and Karuk, explained how salmon will be restored again. “Engineers have learned from past dam removal, and currently the understanding is that there are expected to be impacts for a few years, but it will take the salmon and time to recover.”

Thompson explained further, “Salmon have been around for millions of years and have adapted to the Pacific Northwest. Taking down these dams gives us a chance to rebuild rivers that are really dynamic as they try to reach equilibrium,” Thompson said.

“It is impossible to know for certain the future of salmon behavior, there are many more factors than just dam removal that salmon will make their decisions on… I personally feel confident in salmons’ ability to amaze and their intelligence in understanding through smell and other senses the dam removal will give them new opportunities,” said Thompson.

The salmon and lamprey will benefit from dam removal by having access to more than 300 miles of habitat that were cut off by dams. They will have access to cold water habitats on tributaries that were not accessible previously, which will have increased dissolved oxygen— which the salmon need to breathe— and decreased disease risk. The dam removal will also decrease toxic algae which will benefit the ecosystem. Just three years after the Elwha dam removal in Washington, lamprey populations increased by 120%. Salmon are a keystone species which is an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem, with many other species from river, aerial, and ocean animals benefiting from increases in salmon and lamprey.

“This is not just a win for tribal citizens or for salmon, but for hope in a time of climate change and mass extinction,” Thompson said. “The dam removal would not have happened if it was not for the undying persistence of those who deeply care for the salmon and water. This was a fight over twenty years in the making, which when looking at the start felt like a Mt. Everest of a task.”