Salmon will soon swim freely in the Klamath River for the first time in a century after dams are removed
For the first time in more than a century, salmon will soon be able to flow freely along the Klamath River and its tributaries — a major watershed near the California-Oregon border — thanks to the The largest dam dismantling project in the history of the United States is almost complete.
Crews will use excavators this week to break through rock dams that divert water upstream from two dams which had already been almost entirely removed, Iron Gate and Copco No. 1. The work will allow the river to flow freely in its historic channel, providing salmon passage to key areas of their habitat just in time for the chinook, or king, salmon spawning season in the fall.
“Seeing the river return to its original channel and this dam disappear bodes well for our future,” said Leaf Hillman, ceremonial chief of the Karuk Tribe, which has been fighting for at least 25 years to have the Klamath dams removed. Salmon are culturally and spiritually important for the tribewith others in the region.
The demolition comes about a month before work is scheduled to be completed on four massive dams on the Klamath. as part of a national movement to allow rivers to return to their natural course and to restore ecosystems for fish and other wildlife.
According to the American Rivers Association, more than 2,000 dams had been removed in the United States as of February, most in the past 25 years. Among them are the dams on the Elwha River in Washington state, which flows from Olympic National Park into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia.
“The healing can now begin, and the river can regenerate,” said Joshua Chenoweth, senior riparian ecologist for the Yurok Tribe, which has been fighting for decades to remove the dams and restore the river. “There’s a lot that humans can do to help, but what we’ve learned from Elwha, Condit and other dams is that all it takes is removing the dams and the rivers can return to their natural state.”
The Klamath was once known as the third-largest salmon river on the West Coast. But after the power company PacifiCorp built dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962, the structures interrupted the river’s natural flow and disrupted the life cycle of the region’s salmon, which spend most of their lives in the Pacific Ocean but return to their natal rivers to spawn.
The fish population has declined dramatically. In 2002, a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and high temperatures killed more than 34,000 fish, mostly Chinook salmon. That prompted decades of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups, culminating in 2022 when federal regulators approved a plan to remove the dams.
Since then, the smallest of the four dams, known as Copco No. 2, has been dismantled. Crews have also drained the reservoirs of the other three dams and began dismantling those structures in March.
Along the Klamath River, the dam removals are not expected to have a major impact on electricity supply. At full capacity, they produced less than 2 percent of PacifiCorp’s power, enough to power about 70,000 homes. Hydroelectric power from dams is considered a clean, renewable energy source, but many large dams in the American West have become targets of environmental groups and tribes because of the damage they cause to fish and river ecosystems.
The project was expected to cost about $500 million, funded by taxpayers and PacifiCorps contributors.
But it’s unclear how quickly the salmon will return to their historic habitats and how effectively the river will regenerate. There have been reports of salmon at the mouth of the river beginning their journey. Michael Belchik, a senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe, said he hopes they will soon make it past Iron Gate Dam.
“I think we’re going to have some success early on,” he said. “I’m pretty confident we’ll see some fish coming up the dam. If not this year, it’ll definitely be next year.”
There are two other Klamath dams further upstream, but they are smaller and allow salmon to pass through fish ladders – a series of pools into which fish can jump to get past the dam.
Mark Bransom, executive director of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit entity created to oversee the project, noted that it took about a decade for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to resume fishing after the Elwha dams were removed.
“I don’t know if anyone knows for sure what this means for the return of fish,” he said. “It’s going to take time. You can’t repair the damage and impacts that have been done to a river system for 100 years overnight.”
