Rivers and Dams Resource Roundup: Part 2
Where and how fast are dams coming down? And which ones are next?
Last week we shared a number of resources for learning about watersheds and rivers, and the consequences of various dams and water management schemes. Today we’re sharing news and resources focused on efforts to take out dams around the U.S. We’ll point you towards maps and summaries of the state of dam removal, share status updates on a few major efforts to take out dams in Salmon Nation, and then dig into a federal policy initiative for funding dam removal and repair. Make it through all that and then check out some time-lapse video of what a major dam removal looks like in action.
Dam Data: Maps, Reports, and More
Conservation group American Rivers put out three resources at the end of February for anyone really wanting to better understand the broader landscape with regard the the nation’s dams and the potential for removing them.
Free Rivers: The State of Dam Removal in the United States, is a short report detailing the reasons for removing dams, key removals that took place in 2021, and projects to pay attention to in the upcoming year.
The highlights:
Dams are coming down but not at the pace we need, given how excessively they were built. 57 dams were removed around the country this past year, and close to 2,000 throughout the last century. Yet as they note: “Unfortunately, the more than 1,956 dams removed represents less than two percent of dams in the U.S.”
Dam removal is a key climate mitigation strategy. “The reduction in methane emissions and improved resiliency of the river when removing a dam and restoring the impounded water to a free-flowing system makes dam removal an important strategy for climate mitigation and adaptation.”
Funding for dam removal remains a difficulty. According to American Rivers, there is an opportunity to address this by including the 21st Century Dams Act in the upcoming Water Resources Development Act. (More on these policy efforts below; I’ve got some reservations.)
Curious about where dams are coming down? Get a visual via Google Maps:
And for anyone who really digs data, you can they’ve also made their database of removed dams available for use.
Dam News: Removal Efforts on the Skagit, Snake, and Klamath Rivers
Conversations and plans on dam removal are moving forward for many West Coast rivers. Some updates on a few of the major projects:
The Klamath River
The AP reports on the completion of the draft environmental impact statement for the removal of four dams along the Klamath River, a major milestone that suggests dismantling of the dams could begin as early as next year. Salmon runs in the Klamath are in a dire state:
Coho salmon from the river are listed as threatened under federal and California law, and their population has fallen by anywhere from 52% to 95%. Spring chinook salmon, once the Klamath Basin’s largest run, have dwindled by 98%.
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% of juvenile salmon sampled tested positive for a disease that flourishes when river flows are low.
Some are concerned that 2023 will be too late for the fish. “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 told the AP.
Once done, the project will be the biggest dam removal undertaken in U.S. history.
The Snake River
Back in January, Earthjustice released a good summary of recent events suggesting that we’re also moving closer to breaching the four dams on the lower Snake River. The organization paused a lawsuit against the agencies operating the dams as the Biden administration finally agreed to work with stakeholders on a solution. This past fall, Washington governor Jay Inslee and U.S. Senator Patty Murray put forward a joint initiative to look at options for breaching the dams, with recommendations due in July of this year.
As with the Klamath, recent years have seen salmon die in extraordinary numbers:
In 2015, river temperatures were so high that more than 90% of all adult sockeye salmon were killed while returning to the Columbia Basin, and Snake River steelhead returns this year were the lowest ever recorded.
Meanwhile, renewable energy groups are looking at what’s needed to replace the hydropower currently made by the dams.
The momentum for breaching these four dams is obvious. Last August, at a rally in support of taking down the dams, I chatted with one of the event organizers, who told me they thought the growing consensus regarding the Snake River dams was “not if the dams are coming down, but when.” Yet if the process around the Klamath shows us anything—where the actual take-down of the dams keeps getting delayed, despite agreement by all parties to do so—it’s that the “when” really matters.
The Skagit River
Northwest of the Snake, any consensus at all about dam removal is a bit further off. The Sauk-Suiattle Tribe is currently engaged in a full-court press of lawsuits against Seattle City Light, which gets a fifth of its power from the three dams on the Skagit River. As Native News Online reports, Seattle City Light is fighting all three suits, despite the fact that the tribe is requesting only that the utility recognize how the dams impede movement of the fish and install passageways for salmon to go over the dams.
Others, though, including members of the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, are calling for removal of at least one dam: Gorge Dam, the first and oldest of the three on the river.
One could speculate that Seattle City Light’s reticence to fulfill the more mild requests of the Sauk-Suiattle stems from the fact that doing so would require data collection and assessments that could set the groundwork for the Upper Skagit to later file suits regarding wholesale removal of Gorge Dam. Until recently, City Light had refused to undertake studies of the ecological harms of the dams, even as general agreement has been building around that impact. As HCN reported last July:
Federal scientists are already convinced that Seattle’s dams are harming local salmon and orca populations. Two of the river’s salmon species, Puget Sound chinook and Puget Sound steelhead, and the river’s bull trout are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, while a third salmon species is a “species of concern.” The local killer whale population, which almost exclusively eats chinook salmon, is sliding toward extinction, with only 74 individuals left. While other factors are also to blame — mining operations, highway construction and farming have all damaged the river’s health — the National Marine Fisheries Service wrote in October 2020 that Seattle’s current dam operations are “not adequate to support survival and recovery” of the protected species.
After such news made the rounds last summer, the utility changed course and committed to carry out some studies.
The dams are currently undergoing relicensing; Seattle City Light filed the results of their studies with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on March 8th. You can track the relicensing process on the city’s website.
Dam Policy: Can Big Greens and Hydropower Groups Get Us Where We Want To Go?
Taking down dams is not a fast or easy process, as the repeatedly delayed effort on the Klamath proves. It doesn’t have to be as difficult as it has been, though, and there are plenty of parties interested in making sure repairs and removals can take place more swiftly. That’s where something like the 21st Century Dams Act comes in.
The 21st Century Dams Act is the result of an “Uncommon Dialogue” process hosted by Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, which brought together various conservation NGOs with representatives of the hydropower industry. The groups intend to promote rehabilitation of dams for safety purposes, retrofitting of dams to improve or add power generation, and the removal of dams that have “adverse environmental impacts that cannot be effectively addressed.”
This might all sound fine and dandy, and having a collaborative effort to help secure funding to improve dam safety and take down dams is useful. But I’ll flag a few things that have me slightly concerned
First: the table is missing some key players. In a joint statement, members of the dialogue process cite as their inspiration “the precedent-setting 2004 agreement involving Maine’s Penobscot River where the Penobscot Nation, the hydropower industry, environmentalists, and state and federal agencies agreed on a “basin-scale” project to remove multiple dams, while retrofitting and rehabilitating other dams to increase their hydropower capacity, improve fish passage and advance dam safety.” Curiously, given this, there were no representatives of tribal nations, Indigenous experts in water management, or Indigenous-led enviro groups participating in the process.
Second: Some of the NGOs involved have a sketchy track record, including basic human rights violations. The World Wildlife Fund may be the world’s largest conservation organization, but it’s also been found to engage in human rights abuses globally—and in attempts to cover up such abuses. Solidarity organizations like Survival International are actively at loggerheads with WWF and campaigning against efforts like the 30x30 plan in part because of these abuses and also because WWF’s conservation schemes often aid displacement. The latter is likewise true for The Nature Conservancy, another author of the joint statement. Though with TNC, the question is more: which scandal to choose? The fake carbon offsets? The land deals to benefit their board of trustees? Their drilling for oil on alleged nature reserves?
Third: The main champion of the act is Dianne Feinstein, who has vocally opposed Green New Deal efforts and other much-needed climate policies. (I have a whole rant on why Californians should quit electing Dianne Feinstein, though I’ll spare you the full version. But if you’re a California voter and reading this—WHY? Quit electing a neoliberal millionaire with personal stakes in the fossil fuel and real estate industries.)
I see these as red flags suggesting we ought to be concerned that the current effort to secure funding for dam removal might involve a fair amount of greenwashing and subsidizing of already profitable hydropower interests. And as I’ve been making the case here at Unsettling, a potential benefit of removing dams is restoration of the commons: take down the Dalles Dam, for instance, and we might get back traditional fishing sites at Celilo Falls. With the leadership behind the 21st Century Dams Act, though, I think we can expect additional forms of enclosure, including expanded hydropower facilities done without free, prior, and informed consent, and the establishment of parks and conservations areas that prohibit access to common resources.
Is that inherently the case? No. But for those of us who see the bigger potential for dam removal—beyond simple infrastructure repair—it’s something to watch out for, and also surely an area where a little advocacy might go a long way.
The 21st Century Dams Act did not find its way into the major infrastructure bills passed in the fall, but may be funded through the regular Water Resources Development Act, to be considered this year. Those wanting to keep tabs on the WRDA can do so on the House Transportation Committee’s WRDA page.
So what’s it look like when a major dam comes down, anyway?
And here’s a little bit of the downstream effect:
Thanks for reading Unsettling! We’ll be back with more soon.
Until then,
Meg