Dam removal movement marches to Pacific

Dam removal movement marches to Pacific
Published: 06/20/11

In September, river advocates will be holding a celebration like none seen since 1999.

That was the year the Edwards Dam was removed, allowing the Kennebec River in Maine to flow free for the first time since Nathaniel Hawthorne walked its banks 160 years before. The celebration will note the removal of the Elwha and Glines dams in Washington’s Olympic peninsula.

The Elwha dams are bigger and have been authorized for removal for far longer. Their removal in many ways marks the maturation of the river restoration movement that got its start when a bipartisan coalition sought to set the Kennebec River free.

More than 400 dams have been removed since the Swan Falls-sized Edwards Dam came down, restoring the health of 17 miles of river. The 210-foot-high Glines Dam will be the largest to come down and that contributes to the symbolic power of the act.

In October, the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia, will be blasted open. It will join the Marmot Dam on the Sandy River, and the Gold Hill, Savage Rapids, and Gold Ray Dams on the Rogue River that have come down to aid Pacific salmon.

But the real story of these events is how long it takes to get the consensus necessary to carry through such a dramatic shift in policy.

In 1997, the same year the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved removal of the Edwards Dam, the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board called for breaching of the four federal dams on the lower Snake River in Washington to save salmon and protect Idaho water. Only two years later, Edwards Dam crumbled, but the Clinton administration chose not to push for breaching the Snake dams.

By then, Maine river activists had been campaigning for more than a decade for the removal of Edwards Dam. Steve Brooke, a Republican who led the fight as director of the Kennebec Coalition, told me in 2005 to expect an even longer wait on the Snake dams.

“It’s different out your way — you have to deal with tradeoffs,” said Brooke. “You need to seek balance.”

Former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne knew that when he dove into the polarized battle over the Klamath River in southern Oregon in 2008. He sat down with all sides — farmers, Indians, PacifiCorp, environmental groups and others — to craft a deal to remove four dams to help salmon.

But those dams are not slated to come out until 2020, a recognition of their value and the tradeoffs involved.

No matter how U.S. District Judge James Redden rules this summer on the lawsuit brought against the federal government on the Columbia and Snake dams, it is unlikely he’s going to order the four dams removed. Even if he could, it would be years before they would come down.

Still, the Elwha celebrations this fall will show that the dam-removal movement is going strong with the hope of free-flowing rivers being aided by nature herself, which continues to fill the dam reservoirs with silt.

But it also reminds us that the equally optimistic movement that built the dams, and still depends on them for human development, is not going away either.

Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2011/06/20/1695728/dam-removal-movement-marches-to.html#ixzz1PpvqIbXs