Dam removal: no one has a model of how to go forward
Washington state's Condit and Elwha dam removals are getting attention. But no one has figured out a way to make the trend into a policy.
Jason Jaacks, ReturntoElwha.com
Washington Department of Ecology
Washington State Department of Ecology
Washington State Department of Ecology
I missed the Oct. 26 breaching of the 98-year-old Condit Dam down on the White Salmon River, but I did watch the movie (actually, the video), and the other day, I took a real-life look at the Elwha River restoration project. A little west of Port Angeles, I walked down a short trail through some cedars to an overlook from which I could see the river, swollen from the drawdowns of lakes Aldwell and Mills, thundering down the bedrock cascade of the diversion channel beside the old Elwha Dam site. /a huge jackhammer on the end of a crane boom hammered at chunks of concrete; two big excavators loaded shovels full of silt and rubble into the beds of yellow Volvo dump trucks, which then crawled across a narrow temporary bridge and labored up the steep dirt road out of the canyon.
Trees were turning color along the old lake shore, now high above the water. Stumps of the old forest were visible above what was left of the lake. One of the excavators was scooping silt from the old channel, getting down to the river bed that used to be.
The 108-foot dam, with its weathered pre-World-War-I concrete, looked, not long ago, like a permanent a part of the landscape, much like the gray rock on which it stood. But now it was gone. The penstocks and power house remain, but eventually, they'll be gone, too. Forget Roman aqueducts, Mayan pyramids, the Great Wall of China — a large masonry structure doesn't have to be forever.
In 1992, when Congress first voted to take out the two Elwha River dams (ifthe Secretary of the Interior decided that dam removal was the best way to restore the Elwha's salmon and ecosystem), tearing them out seemed revolutionary. Now, it seems part of a trend, although one that seems to have more happening rather than being planned out along any clear model.
Dam removal has captured headlines well beyond the borders of Washington state. Since the Edwards Dam on Maine's Kennebec River bit the dust in 1999, more than 400 dams have been cleared from America's rivers and streams. Two years ago, the Savage Rapids Dam was taken out of the Rogue River, which it had blocked since 1921. Two years before that, the Marmot Dam was removed from the Sandy. Two years ago, the federal government, the states of Oregon and California, Indian tribes, environmental and economic interest groups agreed with the owner, PacifiCorp (which is owned by MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, which is largely owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway), on a process to — maybe — take out four hydro dams that block the Klamath River.
And then there is the Elwha, which — unless and until the Klamath dams come out, which at best won't happen before 2020 — is the biggest dam removal project in America's, or perhaps anyone else's, history.
Once upon a time, chinook, sockeye, coho, pink and chum salmon, plus steelhead, bull and cutthroat trout all swam up the Elwha to spawn in what is now the Olympic National Park. A quarter-million pink salmon crowded the river in good years. Individual chinook weighed 100 pounds. Now, distant descendants of those fish may once again swim in the 65 miles of river above the lower dam. Park visitors will be able to see them spawning (something they can't see in any other national park outside Alaska). Once they've spawned, critters of many kinds will be able to eat them. (It was research on another Olympic Peninsula river that first proved a wide array of animals, from bears to birds to deer, ate or at least nibbled salmon carcasses.)
And yet, there is this: dam removal may be chic, but the Elwha's budding success story does not provide a template for removing dams or restoring salmon runs anywhere else. Taking out the Elwha dams has required decades of planning and expenditure, but when push came to shove, it was pretty simple: No big economic interests hung in the balance. The dams supplied some of the power to a single Port Angeles paper mill, and kept silt out of an intake that supplied some municipal and industrial water to the city of Port Angeles. The dams' owner, Crown Zellerbach, which also owned the mill (since acquired by Nippon Paper Industries USA), was potentially liable for either installing fish passage or taking out the dams.
The Elwha S'Klallam tribe, which has a reservation at the mouth of the river, the National Park Service, and various environmental groups all wanted the dams gone. Other people wanted the benefits that the dams provided, but they didn't really care about the dams. As it happened, the federal government bought the dams, absolved the owner of liability, provided cheap BPA power to the pulp mill, and built another water intake for the city. It has also built a new hatchery for and provided additional land to the Elwha S'Klallam tribe. Basically, it bought off everyone but the bass fishermen who liked fishing in the lakes.
Of course, the federal government still had money with which to buy people off — although two years ago, it took a $54-million infusion of Obama stimulus funds to get the dam removal process back on schedule.
A comprehensive Klamath Basin solution would probably require even more federal largesse — and in this economic and political climate, that seems unlikely. A comprehensive Snake River solution might be politically feasible if BPA revenues were used, as they probably would be.
"To the extent there is a classic dam removal story," says Steve Pederey of Oregon Wild, the Elwha is it: The dams were pretty well the whole problem. They turned out to be more expensive to remodel for fish passage than to remove. Groups applied pressure. A major funding source was willing and able to buy off the interest groups. In contrast, he say, "The Klamath is a completely different model."
Two days after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar attended the ceremony marking the start of Elwha dam demolition, he announced that Klamath dam removal would cost hundreds of millions of dollars less than anticipated — $290 million, rather than $450 million — and would create 4,600 jobs. ("Every time it looks like the deal is faltering, there's a new press conference," Pedery says.) PacifiCorps ratepayers, mostly in Oregon, are on the hook for the first $200 million. The state of California will pick up the rest of the tab. Or will it? The state can always opt out. And, given its widely publicized financial woes, what are the chances that legislators will pony up even $90 million for fish?
And that's just the dams. Above the dams, Pedery says, the problems go well beyond the dams to include a century of over-promising water and destroying wetlands in the Klamath Basin. The first of the dams went up in 1918, the last in 1962. But long before that, in 1905, the federal government formed the Klamath Irrigation Project, and people started draining what by now amounts to three-quarters of the basin's original vast wetlands. (Nevertheless, the basin and its wildlife refuges still attract an estimated three-quarters of all migratory birds using the Pacific Flyway.)
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Nov 1, 5:38 a.m. Inappropriate
The dams should stay in place at least as long as our ambiguous enforcement of our immigration laws does. Researchers at Oregon State University have determined the number one threat to PNW salmon and their habitat is immigration into the region; the vast majority of which comes from outside the U.S. and Canada. Absent control on that, they say, nothing else we do will "save" salmon in the region. So... leave the dams. We're going to need the electricity. We can either have our cake or eat it. Our immigration actions indicate we are choosing to eat it.
Posted Tue, Nov 1, 10:02 a.m. Inappropriate
BlueLight can you tell me the law that says that someone from Idaho can't move to Whidbey Island?
Posted Tue, Nov 1, 1:45 p.m. Inappropriate
BlueLight. Please provide a reference to substantiate your statement. I suspect that what the researchers have actually found is that the primary threat to PNW is "migration" impacts (which is a pretty broad catch all from over fishing in estuaries and open ocean to impacts of dams). I'm open to to hearing otherwise, but a search did not turn anything up to substantiate your statement.
Posted Tue, Nov 1, 1:55 p.m. Inappropriate
Blue Light -
Your assertion is absolute nonsense.
Ross Kane
Warm Beach
Posted Tue, Nov 1, 8:36 p.m. Inappropriate
I usually don't agree with BlueLight's posts. However, this one has some merit, and here's an OSU-related reference to support the proposition that human population growth in the PNW is likely to inhibit salmon recovery: http://www.epa.gov/wed/pages/staff/lackey/pubs/illusion.htm
Lackey's article concludes:
"Restoring runs of wild salmon to the Pacific Northwest to levels that will support substantial fishing will not happen if current trajectories continue... Those causes deal with both individual life style and sheer numbers of people. Thus, it is likely that society will continue to chase the illusion that wild salmon runs can be restored without massive changes in the number, lifestyle, and philosophy of the human occupants of the western United States and Canada."
Lackey nowhere claims that human population is "the number one threat to PNW salmon and their habitat."
Posted Tue, Nov 1, 8:56 p.m. Inappropriate
It's great that the Elwha dams are coming down. How much of the total costs have actually been appropriated? One dam may be down, but there is a second, and it would seem like we are still at the mercy of continued money coming from the other Washington. Perhaps we should save some of the champagne for when the job is fully funded and completed?
Regarding the problems of restoring Puget Sound runs, there are many relatively easy things that could be done, but aren't. Such as decommissioning the countless miles of crumbling Forest Service logging roads that blow out every year, smothering the streams below them.
Just one example: the Canyon Creek - Tupso Pass road, which ascends 18 miles up the steep, unstable Canyon Creek valley, a tributary of the Stillaguamish joining it just below Granite Falls. Canyon Creek was once one of the premier salmon streams in western Washington until this road was built. The road has blown out countless times, each event degrading Canyon Creek some more. Ostensibly it is kept open so a trail to Goat Flat and Three Fingers mountain can be more conveniently reached and day hiked.
The handful of hikers who insist on easy access just provide the excuse. The real reason the Forest Service keeps doggedly rebuilding this and most other roads is that it brings in budget. Annual injections of emergency repair funds help keep a handful of bureaucrats employed. There are dozens of these kind of roads up and down the Cascades and Olympics. A few - very few - have been decommissioned, greatly lessening the harm they do, but the vast majority continue to bleed fish smothering sediments with every rainstorm.
If we can't even tackle such an obvious, low cost, even money-saving way to restore salmon, how are we ever going to take on the tough job of reducing runoff from populated areas?
Posted Tue, Nov 1, 9:22 p.m. Inappropriate
from an interview with Dr. Lackey:
Q: What is the most important single factor determining the future of wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest?
A: “The most important single driver determining the ecological future of the Pacific Northwest is the human population – its size and distribution, as well as the activities of individual people and their institutions.”
transcript here: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/fw/lackey/SALMON-2100-PROJECT-INTERVIEW-WITH-BOB-LACKEY-2008.pdf
Posted Wed, Nov 2, 4:51 p.m. Inappropriate
Ah Bluelight, population increases in the PNW isn't illegal immigration it's legal movement of US citizens and their having children. And yes increase population puts pressure on fishing habitat by the runnoff from the roads and other non porous surfaces.
However preventing habitat restoration while you await a one child per couple, travel papers please! government to arrive is stupid.
We are already seeing the benefits of the Nisqually river delta restoration. And it's only been a couple of years.
Also your favorite rant, "the tribes" sued the state to enforce a treaty to fix the culverts which block salmon from streams and won. That's a huge victory for salmon and all fisherman, both sport, tribes and commercial. Remember we split the catch, so the more their are, the more everybody gets.
Posted Thu, Nov 3, 8:59 a.m. Inappropriate
"Cowed technocrats, whether driven by ignorance, fear, or reckless utopianism, cannot be trusted. They function as accommodationist servants to those political groups favoring mass immigration and endless population growth. They are not reliable allies in the hard battle for a better environmental future for salmon or people."
From this: http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_21_3/tsc-21-3-hurlbert-salmon.shtml
Posted Thu, Nov 3, 3:16 p.m. Inappropriate
"Cowed technocrats" WTH? Where are technocrats in this article? There are plenty of scientists who advocate for the removal of dams which generate little to no power and block fish habitat. Not every dam we have ever built is necessary now and forever more.
And the headline of this article is BS, there are plenty of models for dam removal including the ones we are removing. It was necessary to have those models to get approval to remove the dams in the first place! And the results of those models showed that moving fish upstream of the dam before breaching was necessary for fish survival.
Crosscut, we deserve better journalism than this.
Posted Sat, Nov 5, 12:12 p.m. Inappropriate
"...no salmon has spawned above the Elwha Dam for more than 90 years. No fish now living remembers the smell of vegetation and minerals in a stream above the dams. What will take anadromous fish back into the upper watershed isn't homing but straying."
This is certainly true, and George Pess' point about the relationship between body size and age of the former Elwha River Chinook slabs is well taken. Still, salmon have tremendous evolutionary resiliance, as evidenced by their ability to retreat from and recolonize habitats made uninhabitable by several glacial periods in the North Pacific rim since at least the Miocene 23 to 5 million years ago.
UW Professor Tom Quinn and others have conducted research that shows that salmon life history traits including age at return are influenced to varying degrees by both genetic and environmental factors, and that populations of salmon can adapt relatively quickly (with respect to evolutionary time scales) to changes in local environmental conditions. For example, in as little as 20 generations hatchery Chinook salmon transplanted from the Sacramento River into several New Zealand rivers about a hundred years ago adapted to the dramatically different geomorphic and marine conditions of those rivers and adjacent oceanic areas and established self-sustaining natural runs.
If salmon and steelhead were allowed to colonize the Elwha naturally and were substantiallly protected from harvests for some reasonable period of time--I would leave it to scientists such as Drs. Pess and Quinn to determine the amounty of time would take--it seems quite possible that self-sustaining populations of large-bodied fish would re-establish in the river. The key factor would be protecting these fish from harvest long enough time to ensure that large-bodied fish became a major component of the newly established Elwha population.
Unfortunately, tribal and non-tribal fisherman have strongly opposed efforts to restrict harvests in this way, and NMFS--the ultimate decider in matters related to recovery of ESA listed salmon populations--is too politically craven to resist demands to continue business more or less as usual with regard to harvest management and hatchery operations on the Elwha and elsewhere in Puget Sound. Fish hatcheries--even so-called "conservation" hatcheries--almost inevitably go hand in hand with high harvest rates that tend to selectively harvest the largest fish in any population. In addition, salmon propagaged in hatcheries are subjected to deleterious genetic selection at juvenile life stages by promoting the survival of weak individuals that would not survive in the natural environment. Release of hatchery juveniles into the natural invironment also places stress on wild juveniles by forcing them to compete with the hatchery juveniles for limited amounts of food and space in the natural environment. It's like releasing busloads of gangbangers into a placid suburban neighborhood where almost all the kids grow up playing by the rules.
All of this is a vicious cycle that NMFS is loath to break, but with luck perhaps a federal court judge will intervene and usher the agency into an effective hatchery addiction recovery program.
Posted Sat, Nov 5, 4:46 p.m. Inappropriate
Mud Bay is correct about NMFS and the Elwha hatchery issue. FYI, here's a link to the ESA 60 day letter required before lawsuit can be filed: http://wildfishconservancy.org/about/press-room/press-releases/agencies-warned-over-elwha-river-fish-hatchery (The 60 days before the actual lawsuit can be filed won't pass until mid November.)
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