Unshackling a river after 100 years
Removal of dams aims to bring Klamath back to its natural state
The nation’s largest dam-removal project is reaching a major milestone this month as work crews release the water behind three dams on the Klamath River, leaving the storied waterway in Northern California and southern Oregon to flow freely for the first time in a century.
The drawdown of the reservoirs and the unleashing of the river, which began Thursday at the 189foot-high Iron Gate Dam, is a necessary — and hugely transformative — step before the three hydroelectric facilities in the remote Siskiyou Mountains are fully removed. Last fall, workers took out a smaller, fourth dam on the river.
The deconstruction effort, about a six-hour drive from San Francisco, is the culmination of a decades-long push by Native Americans, environmentalists and fishermen to bring the 250-mile Klamath River back to its natural state. Most fundamentally, advocates want to see more salmon return to the pristine waters born in Oregon’s high desert and emptying on the California coast where the power project has blocked fish passage since the early 1900s.
“We’re now pulling the plug and throwing it away,” said Frankie Myers, vice chair of the Yurok Tribe, one of the Indigenous groups supporting dam removal and celebrating this month’s drawdowns. “Not to get too mushy about it, but being able to look at the river flow for the first time in more than 100 years, it’s incredibly important to us. It’s what we’ve been fighting for: to see the river for itself.”
The remaining two reservoirs upstream of Iron Gate Dam are scheduled to start draining over the next three weeks, at which time the waterway will be unshackled.
Still, even after the Klamath re
sumes its historical course and the dams are dismantled, which is planned for later this year, the work will not be done.
Attention will soon turn to a colossal effort to restore the natural habitat along the river. The restoration, continuing through at least the end of the decade, focuses primarily on revegetating 2,200 acres of land that will be newly exposed when the reservoirs are empty.
More than 17 billion seeds are slated for planting, alongside a quarter-million trees and shrubs. At least 1,000 additional trees will be flown in by helicopter and dropped into the river to create pools that might have existed in the absence of the dams, for bugs to gather and fish to feed.
This week, planting crews were already preparing to descend on the shores of the retreating waters of Iron Gate Reservoir, above Iron Gate Dam, to scatter acorns in the still-soggy lake bottom.
“The river needs rehabilitation. It needs restoration,” Myers said. “When you think about how long these dams have been in place, they’ve been doing a lot of environmental damage for some time, and it’s going to take time to repair that.”
The dam removal, including the restoration, is being managed by the Klamath River Renewal Corp., a nonprofit set up to represent the states of California and Oregon, tribes and other groups vested in the undertaking.
The hydroelectric facilities had been operated by PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy, but the power company decided upgrades to the aging infrastructure weren’t worth the electricity being generated.
At the urging of the public, predominantly Indigenous communities, and after years of negotiation, PacifiCorp agreed to relinquish the dams to the Renewal Corp. and the two states and front $200 million for their demolition. California bond money is covering the remainder of the project’s nearly half-billion-dollar cost.
“We all worked our tails off to get this done,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a budget briefing this week. “I think that’s pretty exciting, and it’s happening in your state.”
Transforming a reservoir
In the weeks before the drawdown of the reservoirs, 18-wheel semitrucks began rumbling up quiet Copco Road in Siskiyou County, off Interstate 5 north of Yreka, with dozens of pallets of seeds for planting.
The seeds, many of which had been collected near the dams and sent to nurseries in three states for cleaning, storage and making more seed, are the product of five years of planning for the river restoration by Resource Environmental Solutions LLC, or RES.
RES, a subcontractor of the Renewal Corp., is leading the Klamath’s post-dam recovery. Under the company’s direction, crews will work to blanket the riverbanks with 97 species of often colorful native grasses, forbs, shrubs and trees, each slated for specific areas where the plants have historically grown.
Lands around Iron Gate, the lowest-elevation dam, will be sowed with seeds, and later shrubs and seedlings, to help establish hardy oak woodlands and wildflower-dotted grasslands while hills at the higher-elevation J.C. Boyle Dam in Oregon will be primed for fragrant conifer forests.
Along the entire course of the newly freed Klamath River, RES managers hope pockets of willow and cottonwood will emerge. Upslope, such plants as biscuitroot, yampah and blazingstar are expected, each a dietary or medicinal staple of the native communities.
“Over time, you will start to see a blending of the reservoir footprints with the surrounding landscape,” said Dave Coffman, a geoscientist and director at RES who is overseeing the work.
The restoration, which will continue intermittently through at least 2030, accounts for about a quarter of the project’s total budget.
One of the biggest challenges, Coffman and others say, will be giving the new vegetation a foothold before nonnative plants can invade. Hard-to-stop weeds, including cheatgrass, yellowstar thistle and Medusahead, threaten to outcompete the new growth.
“If we get the native plants down and they soak up the available real estate, there’s no room for the invasive species to get in,” Coffman said.
Many of those on the front lines of the restoration are members of the Yurok Tribe, who view the work as intensely personal.
“This river is a home, it’s an identity,” said the Yurok’s Richard Green, who has spent much of the past two years working on a RES-contracted revegetation crew made up of tribal members. Green is also a forestry student, taking classes remotely at Cal Poly Humboldt. “This (project) is too important for me not to be here.”
The Yurok’s cultural and spiritual ties to the Klamath are rooted in their historical reliance on salmon. As many as a million chinook salmon once swam from the ocean up the Klamath each year to spawn. But the annual migration now counts less than 10% of what it was, in part because of the dams. Tribal members hope rewilding the waterway will bring back enough salmon to reinvigorate their fishing tradition and shore up their bond with the river.
Green’s crew, before dispersing any of the billions of seeds, has focused largely on clearing invasive plants to better accommodate the restored landscape they’ll help create.
The work isn’t easy. Crew members have spent week after week pulling weeds in rocky, volcanic soils, sometimes in triple-digit temperatures or nearfreezing cold. On a typical day, a single worker removes about 100 pounds of vegetation, which is bagged and hauled off on flatbed trucks.
The crew also has assisted with seed collection, tromping hillsides in search of hard-tofind flowering plants, often hand-picking specimens that are sticky or feel like “fiberglass.”
“This (restoration) has all been kind of theoretical so far,” Green said, taking a break from mixing seeds for planting. “But it’s very quickly turning into the vision we wanted it to be.”
A wild river once more
The drawdown of the 59,000acre-foot Iron Gate Reservoir, about the size of San Francisco’s Crystal Springs Reservoir, began Thursday morning when work crews widened the opening of the gates of a seldom used tunnel at the base of the dam.
Reservoir water, which was already trickling through the shaft, accelerated into the river channel below. Flows were expected to proceed at a rate of about 2,000 cubic feet per second, double what the reservoir’s controlled releases have typically been this time of year.
Residents downstream were warned not only of higher and swifter water but of greater turbidity with the surging river. Fish below the dam were also of concern. RES employees worked with members of the Karuk Tribe to relocate coho salmon, which are even less numerous than chinook on the Klamath, so they wouldn’t get buried by debris.
With the drawdown, as much as 7 million cubic yards of sediment, or about a half-million dump trucks full, is expected to wash out of the three remaining reservoirs, where rocks, clay and dead algae have collected for decades. The sediment load is likely to peak shortly after the reservoirs drain, but project managers say murky water could linger for two years.
Work crews Thursday wielded fire hoses and hand tools to help dislodge debris behind Iron Gate Dam.
“This accumulation of sediment from the past 100 years is not natural, so the idea is to move as much of it out during the first push,” said Mark Bransom, CEO of the Klamath River Renewal Corp. “This is the time of year when the river sees the least biological activity. We don’t have to worry about (fish) runs moving up the river.”
Iron Gate Reservoir is expected to be nearly empty of water in about two to three weeks, with water levels dropping at least 5 feet a day.
Next week, work crews plan to similarly pull the plug of the 3,500-acre-foot reservoir behind J.C. Boyle Dam in Oregon, about 35 miles to the northeast. The following week, they’ll do the same at the 34,000-acre-foot reservoir behind Copco No. 1 Dam back in California, about 15 miles north of Iron Gate.
Copco No. 1 could be the trickiest. Instead of using an existing outlet to release the water, like at Iron Gate, crews plan to set off explosives to blast a small hole through the 230-foot-high concrete dam.
The drawdown of the three reservoirs sets the stage for taking out the dams, which is planned for after the wet season.
Project managers are waiting, likely until late spring, because they want to be sure river levels remain low when the heavy machinery moves in. That said, they don’t want to wait too long because they’re hoping to remove the dams before chinook salmon migrate up the river come fall.
“We don’t want to be working in the river in September and October,” Bransom said. “If need be, we’ll add crews, equipment.”
Two dams farther upstream on the Klamath are not part of the deconstruction effort and will remain in place. Each is equipped with fish ladders for salmon passage.
While some lament the teardown of the dams, citing concerns about losing power production, recreational activities on the reservoirs and lakeside real estate, the dams have limited value, and hence limited support. The water impounded by the facilities is not used to irrigate farmland nor to supply cities and towns, and the dams do not provide flood control.
“Some people are going to lose something that’s important to them, but for the broader community this is the best possible outcome,” said Ann Willis, California regional director for the environmental group American Rivers.
Willis said the project is serving as a model for what can be done at other rivers where thousands of mostly smaller dams are unnecessary or obsolete.
“It’s incredible what’s happening today,” she said after visiting the drawdown at Iron Gate. “Visually we can see the river changing, and emotionally you can feel people embracing and acknowledging what a milestone this really is.”