For the first time in more than a century, salmon will swim freely in a major watershed near the California-Oregon border as the largest dam removal project in U.S. history nears completion this week.
Workers broke the last dams on a key section of the Klamath River on Wednesday, clearing the way for the river to flow unobstructed.
Crews used excavators to remove rock dams that diverted water upstream from two dams, Iron Gate and Copco No. 1, both of which had already been mostly removed. Each time, more and more of the river’s water was allowed to flow into the historic channel. The work allowed salmon to move to key habitat areas, just in time for the fall chinook, or king, spawning season.
“Another wall came down today. The dams that divided the basin are gone and the river is free,” said Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, which has fought for decades to remove the dams and restore the river.
“Our sacred duty to our children, our ancestors and ourselves is to care for the river, and today’s events represent the fulfillment of that obligation,” Myers said in a statement.
The demolition comes about a month before the removal of four massive dams on the Klamath is scheduled to be completed as part of a national movement to return rivers to their natural course and 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.
“I am excited to move forward with the restoration of the Klamath River,” Karuk Tribal Chairman Russell “Buster” Attebery said in a statement. “Restoring hundreds of miles of spawning grounds and improving water quality will help bring back our salmon, a healthy and sustainable food source for many tribal nations.”
Salmon are culturally and spiritually important to the tribe, as well as other people in the region.
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 led to 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 also emptied 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 western United States 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.
Dennis Linthicum, a Republican senator from Oregon, opposed the dam removal plan, saying it removes important sites for water storage, flood control and fire prevention.
“We have fisheries, hatcheries and salmon that have been coming here for years, and in some ways it’s not enough,” he said. “The salmon have to keep coming up past the dam, past JC Boyle, to make history,” he continued, referring to a dam upstream.
It’s unclear how quickly the salmon will return to their historic habitats and how effectively the river is regenerating. 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 that fish can jump into to get past a 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.”
