By HALLIE GOLDEN
Associated Press

The largest dam removal project in U.S. history was completed Wednesday, marking a major victory for tribes in the region who fought for decades to free hundreds of miles of the Klamath River near the California-Oregon border.

Through protests, testimony and lawsuits, local tribes showcased the environmental devastation due to the four towering hydroelectric dams, especially to salmon, which are culturally and spiritually significant to tribes in the region. The dams cut salmon off from their historic habitat and caused them to die in alarming numbers because of bad water-quality conditions.

Without the tribes’ work “to point out the damage that these dams were doing, not only to the environment, but to the social and cultural fabric of these tribal nations, there would be no dam removal,” said Mark Bransom, chief executive of the Klamath River Renewal Corp., the nonprofit entity created to oversee the project.

Power company PacifiCorp built the dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962. But the structures halted the natural flow of the waterway that was once known as the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast. They disrupted the lifecycle of the region’s salmon, which spend most of their life in the Pacific Ocean but return to the chilly mountain streams to lay eggs.

At the same time, the dams only produced a fraction of PacifiCorp’s energy at full capacity — enough to power about 70,000 homes. They also didn’t provide irrigation, drinking water or flood control, according to Klamath River Renewal Corp.

Since breaching the dams, salmon regained access to their habitat, water temperature decreased and its quality improved, said Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe.

But tribal advocates and activists see their work as far from finished, with some already refocusing their efforts on revegetation and other restoration work on the Klamath River and the surrounding land.

Here’s a look at just a few of the many tribal members at the center of this struggle for dam removal:

A fight for her children

When Karuk tribal member Molli Myers took her first major step into the fight for Klamath dam removal, she was six months pregnant, had a toddler in tow and was in a foreign country for the first time. It was 2004 and she had organized a group of about 25 tribal members to fly to Scotland for the annual general stockholders meeting for Scottish Power, PacifiCorp’s parent company at the time.

For hours, they protested outside with signs, sang and played drums. They cooked fish on Calton Hill over a fire of scotch barrels and gave it out to locals as they explained why they were there.

“I really felt an urgency because I was having babies,” said Myers, who was born and raised in the middle Klamath in a traditional fishing family. “And so for me I was internalizing the responsibility to take care of their future.”

The initial trigger for her to act came two years before that when she saw some of the tens of thousands of salmon die in the river from a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and warm temperatures.

“Looking back on it now I wonder where would we be if that hadn’t happened,” said Myers, 41. “Looking back on it now I can say, ‘Was this our creator’s call to action?'”

She spent the next two decades protesting and flooding state and federal meetings with tribal testimony, including waiting with other tribal members at the doors of a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting at 4 a.m. in 2007 to ask Warren Buffett what he was going to do about the dams. PacifiCorp was at that point part of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. conglomerate.

Today, those same children with her in Scotland are 21 and 19, and with the dams gone Myers said she sees the hope they and her other three children have about the future.

“They can do whatever needs to get done because they saw it happen, they lived it, so now there’s no impossible for them,” she said.

Finding common ground

For Yurok elder Jacqueline Winter, her feelings on the newly free-flowing river are more complicated. The 89-year-old’s son, Troy Fletcher, was the tribe’s point person for dam removal for two decades, testifying in front of the U.S. Congress and presenting to state and federal regulatory committees.

But his true power came through his ability to bring people with radically conflicting viewpoints — from farmers to commercial fishers to tribal members — together.

Winter said that came from his belief that everyone living along the river are relatives and deserve to be heard.

“We’re all family. None of us can be left hurting and all of us have to give a little,” she said was his message.

But at 53, the former executive director for the Yurok Tribe died unexpectedly from a heart attack, nearly a decade before that vision of a free-flowing river would finally be realized. Winter said when she saw the dams breached last month, it felt like his spirit was there through those he touched and she could finally let him go.

“His vision became reality and I think he never doubted it,” she said. “He never doubted it. And those who worked closely with him never doubted it.”

There’s more work to do

Former Klamath Tribes Chairman Jeff Mitchell’s work since the 1970s for dam removal came out of the belief that the salmon are their relatives.

“They were gifted to us by our creator and given to us to preserve and to protect and also to help give us life,” said Mitchell, chair of the tribe’s Culture and Heritage Committee. “As such, the creator also instructed us to make sure that we do everything in our power to protect those fish.”

The Klamath River’s headwaters lie on the tribe’s homelands in Oregon, and members once depended on salmon for 25 percent of their food. But for more than a century their waters have not held any salmon, he said.

Mitchell and other tribal members’ fight to bring them back has cycled through several forms. There were the years of protesting, even gathering carcasses of fish after the 2002 fish kill and leaving them on the doorsteps of federal office buildings. There were his days of walking the halls of the state Legislature in Salem, Oregon, meeting with lawmakers about the millions in funding needed to make dam removal happen.

Today, he said he feels like they achieved the impossible, but there’s still more work to do.

“I’m happy that the dams are gone and we have passage,” he said. “But now I’m thinking about what are those fish coming home to? And that’s really the focus now, is how do we get the parties to start taking restoration actions and making that the top priority in all of this?”

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By HALLIE GOLDEN
Associated Press

For the first time in more than a century, salmon will soon have free passage along the Klamath River and its tributaries — a major watershed near the California-Oregon border — as the largest dam removal project in U.S. history nears completion.

Crews will use excavators this week to breach rock dams that have been diverting water upstream of two dams that were already almost completely removed, Iron Gate and Copco No. 1. The work will allow the river to flow freely in its historic channel, giving salmon a passageway to key swaths of habitat just in time for the fall Chinook, or king salmon, spawning season.

“Seeing the river being restored to its original channel and that dam gone, it’s a good omen for our future,” said Leaf Hillman, ceremonial leader of the Karuk Tribe, which has spent at least 25 years fighting for the removal of the Klamath dams. Salmon are culturally and spiritually significant to the tribe, along with others in the region.

The demolition comes about a month before removal of four towering dams on the Klamath was set to be completed as part of a national movement to let rivers return to their natural flow and to restore ecosystems for fish and other wildlife.

As of February, more than 2,000 dams had been removed in the U.S., the majority in the last 25 years, according to the advocacy group American Rivers. Among them were dams on Washington state’s Elwha River, which flows out of Olympic National Park into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Condit Dam on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia.

“Now the healing can really begin as far as the river restoring itself,” said Joshua Chenoweth, senior riparian ecologist for the Yurok Tribe, which has spent decades fighting to remove the dams and restore the river. “Humans can do a lot to help that along, but what we’ve learned on Elwha and Condit and other dams is that really you just have to remove the dams, and then rivers are really good at kind of returning to a natural state.”

The Klamath was once known as the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast. But after power company PacifiCorp built the dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962, the structures halted the natural flow of the river and disrupted the lifecycle of the region’s salmon, which spend most of their life in the Pacific Ocean but return up their natal rivers to spawn.

The fish population dwindled dramatically. In 2002, a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and warm temperatures killed more than 34,000 fish, mostly Chinook salmon. That jumpstarted 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 removed. Crews also drained the other three dams’ reservoirs and started removing those structures in March.

Along the Klamath, the dam removals won’t be a major hit to the power supply. At full capacity, they produced less than 2% of PacifiCorp’s energy — enough to power about 70,000 homes. Hydroelectric power produced by dams is considered a clean, renewable source of energy, but many larger dams in the U.S. West have become a target for environmental groups and tribes because of the harm they cause to fish and river ecosystems.

The project was expected to cost about $500 million — paid for by taxpayers and PacifiCorps ratepayers.

But it’s unclear how quickly salmon will return to their historical habitats and the river will heal. There have already been reports of salmon at the mouth of the river, starting their river journey. Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe, said he is hopeful they’ll get past the Iron Gate dam soon.

“I think we’re going to have some early successes,” he said. “I’m pretty confident we’ll see some fish going above the dam. If not this year, then for sure next year.”

There are two other Klamath dams farther upstream, but they are smaller and allow salmon to pass via fish ladders — a series of pools that fish can leap through to get past the dam.

Mark Bransom, chief executive of the Klamath River Renewal Corp., the nonprofit entity created to oversee the project, noted that it took about a decade for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to start fishing again after the removal of the Elwha dams.

“I don’t know if anybody knows with any certainty what it means for the return of fish,” he said. “It’ll take some time. You can’t undo 100 years’ worth of damage and impacts to a river system overnight.”

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By Gillian Flaccus

The Associated Press

PORTLAND — U.S. regulators on Thursday approved a massive plan to demolish four dams and open hundreds of miles of salmon habitat. It would be the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the world.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s vote on the lower Klamath River dams is the last major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone for a $500 million demolition proposal championed by Native American tribes and environmentalists for years.

The project would return the lower half of California’s second-largest river to a free-flowing state for the first time in more than a century.

Commissioners called the decision “momentous” and “historic” and spoke of the importance of reviving the Klamath River. Native tribes that rely on the river and its salmon have been a driving force behind the plan to remove the dams.

“Some people might ask in this time of great need for zero emissions, ‘Why are we removing the dams?’” FERC Chairman Richard Glick said. “First, we have to understand this doesn’t happen every day … a lot of these projects were licensed a number of years back when there wasn’t as much focus on environmental issues. Some of these projects have a significant impact on the environment and a significant impact on fish.”

In the past, Glick added, the commission did not consider the effect of energy projects on tribes but said that was a “very important element” of Thursday’s decision.

Members of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley tribes and other supporters lit a bonfire and watched the vote on a remote Klamath River sandbar via a satellite uplink to symbolize their hopes for the river’s renewal.

“I understand that some of those tribes are watching this meeting today on the (river) bar and I raise a toast to you,” Commissioner Willie Phillips said.

Before the vote, Yurok vice chairman Frankie Myers said he was excited but nervous the decision would not go through after years of disappointments and multiple crises that almost killed the proposal.

“We’ve been doing this a long time and we’ve been let down so much over the last two decades,” he said. “If there’s still salmon in the water, they have a chance and we have a chance. … They will come down. They have to come down. Our existence depends on it.”

Oregon, California and the Klamath River Renewal Corporation – the entity formed to oversee the demolition and environmental mitigation – must sign off on the license surrender and address any additional requirements before work can begin.

The smallest dam, Copco 2, could come down as early as next summer. The remaining dams will be drained down very slowly starting in early 2024 with the goal of returning the river to its natural state by the end of that year.

Plans to remove the dams have not been without controversy.

Homeowners on Copco Lake, a large reservoir, vigorously oppose the demolition plan and ratepayers in the rural counties around the dams worry about taxpayers shouldering the cost of any overruns or liability problems. Critics also believe dam removal won’t be enough to save the salmon because of changing ocean conditions the fish encounter before the return to their natal river.

“The whole question is: Will this add to the increased production of salmon? It has everything to do with what’s going on in the ocean (and) we think this will turn out to be a futile effort,” said Richard Marshall, head of the Siskiyou County Water Users Association. “Nobody’s ever tried to take care of the problem by taking care of the existing situation without just removing the dams.”

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By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Federal regulators have issued a draft environmental impact statement saying there were significant benefits to a plan to demolish four massive dams on Northern California’s Klamath River to save imperiled migratory salmon, setting the stage for the largest dam demolition project in U.S. history.

The issuing of a statement by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission clears a major regulatory hurdle for the project and paves the way for public hearings on the document before a final draft is issued as soon as this summer.

A final environmental impact statement would allow the extensive preparations necessary for the nearly $500 million demolition and habitat restoration plan to begin in earnest. Dam removals could begin as early as next year if all goes smoothly, but a more likely scenario is 2024.

The aging dams near the Oregon-California border were built before current environmental regulations and essentially cut the 253-mile-long river in half for migrating salmon, whose numbers have plummeted. The project on California’s second-largest river would be at the vanguard of a push to demolish dams in the U.S. as the structures age and become less economically viable and as concerns grow about their environmental impact, particularly on fish.

Regulators wrote that moving ahead with the proposal would “maximize benefits” to salmon fisheries important to local tribes and restore the landscape to a “more natural state.”

Tribes that rely on the salmon for their sustenance and culture, including the Yurok and Karuk, cheered the milestone Friday. So did commercial fishermen and environmentalists who have worked for years to bring the dams down in a region already suffering through intense drought and dwindling water supplies.

“Our culture and our fisheries are hanging in the balance. We are ready to start work on dam removal this year,” Yurok Vice Chairman Frankie Myers said in a statement.

Coho salmon from the river are listed as threatened under federal and California law, and their population has fallen by anywhere from 52 percent to 95 percent. Spring chinook salmon, once the Klamath Basin’s largest run, have dwindled by 98 percent.

Fall chinook, the last to persist in any significant numbers, have been so meager in the past few years that the Yurok Tribe canceled fishing last year for the first time in memory. In 2017, they bought fish at a grocery store for their annual salmon festival.

In recent years, as many as 90 percent of juvenile salmon sampled tested positive for a disease that flourishes when river flows are low.

“The dams are a key factor in the diseases that are wiping out entire generations of salmon,” said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations.

Project proponents have thus far overcome opposition to the plan. Some local and state officials worry about flood control and residents who live around a large reservoir created by one of the dams have unsuccessfully sued to stop the project.

The dams don’t store agricultural water, aren’t used for flood control and aren’t part of the 200,000-acre Klamath Project, an irrigation project further north that straddles the Oregon-California border.

If the dams remained, power company PacifiCorp would likely have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit the structures to comply with today’s environmental laws. As it is, the utility has said the electricity generated by the dams no longer makes up a significant part of its power portfolio.

The original demolition proposal foundered after regulators initially balked at allowing PacifiCorp to completely exit the project.

A historic deal reached in 2020 made Oregon and California equal partners in the demolition with a nonprofit entity called the Klamath River Renewal Corp., which will oversee the project. That deal also added $45 million to the project’s $450 million budget after concerns that the available funds weren’t enough to cover any overruns.

Oregon, California and PacifiCorp, which operates the hydroelectric dams and is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, each provided one-third of the additional funds.

Some critics have said governors in Oregon and California were irresponsible to assume financial responsibility for cost overruns and object that part of the project is financed by a voter-approved California water bond.

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KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. (AP) — Removing four hydroelectric dams along the lower Klamath River in Southern Oregon and Northern California is expected to cost just under $434 million and could happen by 2022, according to a new filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The Capital Press reports the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corp. submitted plans with FERC in 2018 to decommission and demolish J.C. Boyle, Copco Nos. 1 and 2 and Iron Gate dams, which block about 400 miles of upstream habitat for migratory salmon and steelhead.

Regulators are now considering whether to transfer the dams’ operating license from PacifiCorp to KRRC before the project can move forward. A general contractor, Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. of Fairfield, Calif., is already on board and working on a plan for razing the dams.

But first, KRRC must answer questions from a six-member independent board of consultants appointed by the feds to prove they have the money, insurance and contingency for such a large proposal.

Mark Bransom, KRRC executive director, said the filing “proves that we understand the magnitude of our charge and are on the right path.”

“This is a project of vast importance for the environment, the river and the people and communities in the Klamath Basin,” Bransom said. “We have the funding, the team, the expertise and the plan to do it right and pen a vibrant new chapter of Klamath River history.”

Built between 1911 and 1962, the lower Klamath River dams are currently operated by PacifiCorp and have a total generation capacity of 169 megawatts. Efforts to remove the dams date back to the 2010, when farmers, tribes, environmental groups and government agencies all signed on to the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement.

By restoring a more free-flowing river, the parties hope to improve spawning and survival of fish species protected under the Endangered Species Act.

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The Columbia River Crossing isn’t the region’s only costly construction project in limbo.

In 2010, 42 groups signed the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, which calls for demolishing four Klamath River dams. The $450 million project was set to be approved in March 2012, but it is still awaiting Congress’ approval.

“We’re still hoping, pressing and waiting,” said Bob Gravely, spokesman for PacifiCorp, which owns the dams. “You know what happened with everything that was dependent on Congress last year.”

The agreement’s proposed starting date for deconstruction is 2020. However, if the situation were to remain on hold, that date will be pushed back, Gravely said.

For years, tribal, environmental, farming and fishing groups have advocated for the removal of dams along the Klamath River, saying water quality and wildlife have suffered since the dams were built in the early to mid-20th century.

The dams have caused fish populations to decrease, which has led to the closure of area fisheries, according to Craig Tucker, the Klamath campaign coordinator for the Karuk Tribe, one of the groups involved in the agreement.  The dams also have caused irrigation shutoffs, Tucker added.

“Everybody has a different reason for liking the deal,” he said. “It gets harder and harder each time because of political pressure, so I think if we’re going to pull this thing off, Congress had better do something here in the next legislative session.”

PacifiCorp is open to the project – demolition of the J.C. Boyle Dam in Southern Oregon and three, including the Iron Gate Dam, in California – because the structures would require costly renovations to continue operating.

PacifiCorp’s original operational lease from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 2006. The company has been operating with a year-to-year lease since then. Obtaining a new 50-year lease would require the company to spend nearly $300 million to install new fish screens and ladders, and invest more money to replace approximately 25 percent of the dams’ generating capacity.

FERC allowed the year-to-year lease arrangement based on the understanding that PacifiCorp would eventually demolish the dam, according to company spokesman Gravely.

Through the restoration agreement, the company was able to ensure that it would pay only $200 million of demolition costs and not be liable for any damage if something were to go wrong.

Another reason the company signed the agreement was because of outside pressure, Gravely said.

“(Making the necessary upgrades) is something we can do and probably would do, but around the same time the federal government, the state of Oregon, the state of California (and) several of the tribes came to the company and said, ‘We would like dam removal to be a part of that,’ ” he said.

The upgrade costs gave dam opponents an opportunity, Tucker said.

“In some ways it’s like having the gas-guzzling car,” he said. “You can invest to repair that car or you can get a Prius. We opt for the Prius here.”

The U.S. Interior Department is conducting studies to gauge the effects the project will have on surrounding habitats. Research suggests that the project will have a negative impact on the environment at first, but eventually benefit wildlife in the long run.

However, PacifiCorp’s Tom Gauntt, who oversaw communications during previous dam replacement projects, warned that such efforts are highly complicated and delicate. Each project has a unique set of circumstances – such as the surrounding landscape and the structure’s shape – that must be factored in, he said.

“I caution you about drawing any conclusions about what a Klamath removal would be like from … any other of the handful of major dam removals there have been in the last few years,” Gauntt said. “Basically, there is not a single, off-the shelf answer about how you remove a dam. (Everyone needs) to work together to come up with something that works for that river at that time.”

Besides congressional approval, additional permitting and environmental mitigation studies would be required for the project to move forward. All groups that signed the agreement recently drafted a plan to push for congressional approval by 2014.

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