CALIF. TO BUILD CHANNEL TO ALLOW FISH TO BYPASS DAM
$60M project along Yuba River to aid threatened species
California officials on Tuesday said they will spend about $60 million to build a channel along the Yuba River so that salmon and other threatened fish species can get around a Gold Rush-era dam that for more than a century has cut off their migration along the waters of Sierra Nevada streams.
The project is the latest example of state and federal officials trying to reverse the environmental harms caused by the century-old infrastructure along California’s major rivers and streams. Those dams and canals allowed the state to grow into the economic powerhouse it is today. But they have devastated natural ecosystems that have pushed salmon — a species once so abundant it sustained Native American populations — to the edge of extinction.
Last year, federal regulators
approved the largest river restoration project in U.S. history that will remove four dams along the Klamath River near the OregonCalifornia border. State and federal officials have plans to remove other dams that impede fish migration, including the Matilija Dam in Ventura County and the Rindge Dam in Los Angeles County.
Tuesday’s announcement will affect the Daguerre Point Dam near Marysville. The federal government first built the dam in 1906 as a way to
stop the flow of debris left over from hydraulic mining during the height of the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s.
The dam is mostly underwater, allowing the water to spill over the top of it while holding back a mountain of sediment. But it also blocks three species of fish from migrating up the river to spawn — spring-run Chinook salmon, steelhead trout and green sturgeon.