Nature, Undammed
The largest-ever dam removal is underway, a milestone in the nation’s reckoning over its past attempts to bend nature to human will
It was a small moment, with little fanfare, in one of the most remote patches of northern California. Just the rat-a-tat of three Caterpillar excavators gnawing through concrete signaled the beginning of the largest dam removal project in the history of the country, and perhaps the world.
There was no ribbon cutting or ceremonial dynamite detonation. But the demolition on that June day arrived only after decades of argument and activism.
The Klamath River dams, built between the early 1900s and 1960s, fundamentally reshaped one of the West’s most important watersheds. They electrified this hard-to-reach part of the country for the first time, powering the nation’s vision of a Manifest Destiny.
The hydropower dams, which altogether stand at 411 feet, also devastated the salmon population and the Indigenous tribes who had subsisted on the fish for millennia. For many Native people here, the structures always have been monuments to American imperialism.
When all four dams have been reduced to rubble, scientists and tribes will begin a desperate restoration attempt to secure the future of a river whose struggles have grown more severe with climate change.
“It’s like you’re removing a clot — we’ve got four clots in our artery,” said Charley Reed, who grew up along the river and descends from the Hupa, Yurok and Karuk tribes, three of the Native groups who consider the Klamath their sacred and spiritual lifeblood. “And now we’re getting surgery done.”
For environmental advocates, this is a milestone. But in a region famous for its fiercely contested water politics, the project is controversial. Ranchers and recreationalists see removal as a government overreach and a threat to their livelihood.
The lower Klamath operation is part of a growing movement to pursue more dam removals across the country, a piece of the broader reckoning over the harmful impact of large infrastructure projects meant to bend nature to human will.
More than 2,000 dams have been removed since 1912, according to data gathered by the nonprofit group American Rivers, a fraction of the country’s existing dams. Nearly half of those demolitions, however, have happened in the last decade. And after a new injection of federal funding, the pace is expected to accelerate in coming years.
Historically, dam removals have been concentrated in the Rust Belt, but California has led the nation lately, fueled by changing social and political climates.
“I’ve been working on removing dams for about 25 years, and there’s been a progression over that time: When we first started it was ‘Should we be removing dams?’ Then, in the mid-2000s, it became ‘How do we remove dams?’” said Brian Graber, the senior director of river restoration at American Rivers. “And now, it’s ‘How do we remove dams at scale?’”
(Alice Li/TWP)
‘The church is our river’
More than a century ago, before the White homesteaders and the American federal government arrived on the scene, this great waterway wound unencumbered from the foot of the Cascade Range in southern Oregon through northern California, emptying into the Pacific Ocean after more than 250 miles.
Dubbed “a river upside down” because of its unique geography, the Klamath flows through a breathtaking array of habitat, from arid high desert, to rugged mountains, coastal rainforest and across an area once known as “the Everglades of the West” for its vast stretch of wetlands that have now been mostly drained for agricultural use.
The Klamath’s fall and spring salmon runs used to be some of the largest in the nation. Chinook, coho, steelhead, sturgeon and lamprey swam so thick that the ancestors of the Indigenous people who still live in its watershed could fill their nets again and again — and fill their plates with an average of 450 pounds of fish per person per year.
“To the Natives, the church is our river, and the cross on top is our spring salmon, and that is the pedestal of our religion,” said Kenneth Brink, the vice chair of the Karuk tribe, who worked in fisheries biology for more than 20 years. “The salmon is not just something we eat, not just something from the river; it’s a way of life.”
The Gold Rush brought miners to the region and unleashed a massive, state-sponsored massacre of Native people across California. In the 1850s, two-thirds of Karuk tribe members were killed and many villages in the region were violently relocated. Over the next 50 years, more waves of White settlers arrived to homestead plots of land granted to them by the federal government.
Following this expansion, the California Oregon Power Company, known as “Copco,” began an ambitious hydroelectric project in the early 20th century. The new plants would light up the area’s constellation of fast-growing mill towns and power the emergent agriculture and timber industries.
The last of the lower Klamath’s four dams — J.C. Boyle in Oregon and Copco 1, Copco 2 and Iron Gate in California — was completed in 1964, each new construction blocking more salmon spawning habitat and disrupting the natural flow of nutrients up and down the river. In the decades that followed, salmon runs experienced a steep decline and the diets of Indigenous people living along the Klamath changed radically.
According to an academic study, many Karuk people had stopped eating spring Chinook by the 1970s. Populations of lamprey and sturgeon, other important nutritional staples, also plummeted — and diabetes among tribe members spiked. The dramatic shift prompted the study’s authors to argue that “the dams on the Klamath are currently responsible for the most significant human rights violation resulting from any dam construction in the United States.”
In 2001, during a deep drought, federal officials cut off water bound for farmland in the upper Klamath basin after scientists found that diverting it for irrigation would harm protected fish and violate the Endangered Species Act.
Farmers and their families protested en masse, forming a 10,000 person bucket brigade, clashing with authorities and forcing the dam gates open. One year later, the U.S. government faced the same decision: Send the water to the fields, or save the imperiled salmon and suckerfish?
The conundrum caught the attention of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who sensed a looming political threat. He personally intervened, persuading federal agencies to reverse their position and open the spigot for farmers and ranchers, according to Washington Post reporting on the unprecedented move.
What followed was one of the largest fish kills in the history of the West, with tens of thousands of salmon dying in the Klamath and rotting on its banks. The constricted flows had left the river level low, which made salmon migration and spawning difficult and increased the water temperature, creating a hotbed of disease.
The episode galvanized local tribes and environmentalists, who coalesced into the Un-Dam the Klamath movement, which would lead the way in dam removal advocacy over the next two decades.
Charley Reed’s father, Ron Reed, a traditional Karuk dipnet fisherman, threw himself into anti-dam activism, bringing his son to rallies across the West. Charley Reed, now 29 years old and a father himself, remembers the fish kill with a visceral intensity: The smell of decay hung in the air for days on end.
“The picture of a pile of fish,” he said, “is still glued in my brain, burned into my brain.”
(Shane Anderson/TWP)
‘What’s the point?’
After all the years of organizing and opposition, the decision to remove the dams, in the end, came down to money.
To renew its license to manage the dams and meet modern-day environmental standards, PacifiCorp, the Berkshire Hathaway-owned Copco successor, needed to make costly upgrades, such as adding fish ladders to each structure.
But the four dams on the lower Klamath do not supply water for agriculture or municipalities, they are not used for flood control and in time they became obsolete as generators of electricity after the region found cheaper, more efficient sources. Eventually, PacifiCorp concluded the aging infrastructure wasn’t worth the trouble and began supporting dam removal.
“It was very much an economic and business decision, but one that was driven by advocacy,” said Mark Bransom, CEO of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit created to oversee dam removal.
Late last year, a federal agency gave the project its final blessing, and work is now underway. Destruction of Copco 2, the first and smallest of the condemned dams, began in June and concluded this fall. The other three dams will come down in 2024, after Bransom’s organization conducts a careful drawdown of the reservoirs, including Copco Lake, with its 1,000 surface acres of water that dozens of families have settled around.
In all, the project will run $450 million, a cost covered by past rate hikes on PacifiCorp customers and money from a state water bond. By October of next year, Bransom said, all four dams will be out of the river and some 400 miles of salmon and steelhead habitat will be reopened for the first time in generations.
“It’s one of the most important rivers for salmon on the whole West Coast,” said Regina Chichizola, executive director of Save California Salmon, an advocacy group. “California salmon are facing extinction in a very serious and near-term way. So to be able to restore the Klamath is critical to making sure there are salmon left in the state at all.”
But not everyone is celebrating.
For as long as there have been supporters of dam removal, there has been a fervent local effort to keep the structures in place. In 2010, nearly 80 percent of voters in Siskiyou County, home to all three of California’s Klamath dams, said they opposed dam removal. Two years later, a local tea party group in Oregon’s neighboring Klamath County helped stall the removal process.
All four dams sit in a part of the Pacific Northwest that sometimes calls itself the State of Jefferson, a collection of counties in California and Oregon whose residents have long felt ignored by their state governments. For many ranchers and farmers here, dam removal is another example of environmentalists and bureaucrats in faraway capitals interfering with rural life.
Richard Marshall, the president of Siskiyou County Water Users Association, a group founded to oppose dam removal, said he has deep misgivings about the involvement of environmental groups who are advocating for the project alongside Indigenous tribes.
Marshall, who lives on a ranch in Fort Jones, Calif., said he fears dam removal is part of a larger effort to eradicate ranching and agriculture in northern California, citing a conspiracy theory tied to a nonbinding United Nations resolution known as Agenda 21.
“A lot of us believe that’s really the game plan,” Marshall said.
Like others who oppose removal, Marshall also cites concerns over the fate of property values once reservoirs are drained and homes lose their lakefront status. Around Copco Lake, residents will lose their docks and, eventually, the community’s namesake body of water. For some, houses here were an investment or a retirement nest egg, and removal feels like a dangerous financial gamble. And no one can be quite sure what the new waterway will be until the river returns.
A mitigation fund set up to compensate those impacted by removal has done little to quell the resistance.
Marshall’s group has also argued that salmon historically never migrated above the dam sites and will be no better off when they’re removed.
“We’re moving headlong into this process, removing dams that will never be able to be replaced,” Marshall said. “If the results are not what everybody intended, then what’s the point?”
A federal lawsuit filed by an Oregon state senator and a water users association board member made similar claims but was dismissed in August. And many scientists emphatically disagree with the assertions about salmon range, citing historical evidence of the fish in the upper Klamath watershed.
“Many agencies, many people have reviewed the literature. That discussion has been had,” said Tommy Williams, a research fish biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has been working on the Klamath for nearly two decades.
Now, instead of returning from the Pacific Ocean, traveling up the Klamath and into one of its cold, spring-fed tributaries to spawn, salmon swim through slack river water turned toxic with algae that thrives in the dam’s hot, still reservoirs. Removing the dams will improve water quality and restore the environment’s variability and diversity, which are crucial for fish survival, Williams said.
(TWP)
‘Not a panacea’
Dam destruction is a massive undertaking. Workers and machines will extract 100,000 cubic yards of concrete and 2,000 tons of steel, sending it to recycling centers and landfills.
But in some ways, removal is the easy part, the predictable part.
The real challenge is what comes next. That’s where Dave Coffman, along with a small army of tribe members and scientists, comes in. Coffman is the regional director of Resource Environmental Solutions, the company tasked with carrying out the largest river restoration of its kind.
“Once the fish are able to get past the dam, my job starts, and I want to give them a place they want to come back to,” Coffman said. “I want them to come screaming up the river and say, ‘All right! Thanks, guys!’”
If the dams wounded the river and their removal is a surgery, think of restoration as the stitches pulling the natural world back together.
For the past five years, Coffman’s crew and members of the Yurok tribe have been collecting native plant seeds from across the Klamath River watershed to place in the areas where the dams and their reservoirs now stand. The team has amassed 17 billion seeds and thousands of tree saplings.
Meanwhile, scientists will be closely monitoring the unleashed river, which could take a year or longer to settle on its exact path.
Because of the project’s unprecedented scale, there is naturally some science-based guesswork involved in predicting how the river will respond, experts say, but the recent run of dam removals offers some key lessons.
In 2011, workers began tearing down two dams on Washington state’s Elwha River, the largest dam removal until now. The Elwha dams choked off salmon migration, too, and their removal was also the subject of a decades-long political battle.
Amy East, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, is one of several scientists who has spent years studying the Elwha and the Klamath. Her biggest takeaway: After a dam is dismantled, the river responds quickly.
“The rivers where large dams have been removed have shown resilience,” East said. “Within one to two years, you start to see recovery toward a better condition than when it was dammed. I hope that bears out on the Klamath.”
Already, the river is reclaiming its historic channel through a canyon that dried out when Copco 2 was built. But unlike the Elwha, the Klamath will still have two dams in its upper section, where the struggle for water rights remains contentious. Removing the lower Klamath dams won’t solve the upper basin’s issues or reverse the warming atmosphere, East said.
“In the Pacific Northwest, taking out dams is not a panacea,” East said. “There is a lot of habitat change going on because of climate change, and that stress is still going to be there even when the dams are gone.”
(Alice Li/TWP)
‘This burden on our shoulders’
Perhaps no one is more acquainted with those challenges than the Indigenous people who rely on the river.
On a typically drizzly summer day in Requa, a tiny northern California town, Barry McCovey stood on a sandbar near the mouth of the Klamath, where the river’s freshwater finally swirled into the salty Pacific Ocean.
It’s a sacred place for the Yurok tribe, where McCovey is a fisheries biologist, and it’s one of his favorite spots in the world. Brown pelicans and osprey circle overhead. Humpback whales glide offshore. Seals lounge on the sand and stands of redwoods tower behind them.
From this vantage, it’s obvious to McCovey that the health of the river, those who subsist on it and the surrounding land is all intertwined. The Yurok tribe has seen how banning controlled burns in nearby forests has led to an increase in sediment in the river and its streams, along with laying the foundation for larger, catastrophic wildfires.
This year is expected to be one of the smallest runs of fall Chinook since the Yurok tribe began keeping track, McCovey said. The situation is so dire that the state canceled the 2023 salmon season.
And in August, the Yurok tribe celebrated its 59th annual salmon festival — without any salmon. It was the latest sign of how degraded the river has become.
But the removals on the Klamath are energizing, he said. Hopeful.
“We know it’s going to take a long time — it’s going to take generations,” McCovey said. “That’s who we are as tribal people. We’re all born with this burden on our shoulders to restore balance to the ecosystem.”
At the salmon festival, one sign of progress was found in an unlikely place, the empty fish cooking pit. There was no open fire, no Chinook roasting on wooden skewers. Instead, there sat the remnants of an even bigger catch: bits of concrete from the demolished wall of Copco 2.
correction
A previous version of this article included a photo caption that incorrectly said that sea lions were congregating at the mouth of the Klamath River. The photo actually shows seals. The photo caption has been corrected.