Expanded Table of Contents
Undammed
Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life
Tara Lohan
Introduction
Free-flowing rivers are endangered species. More than a half million dams obstruct rivers and streams across the United States. While dams can provide useful functions, many are outdated, obsolete or hazardous. They pose threats to public safety, clean water, cultural resources, climate resilience, and wildlife, particularly migratory fish. This book chronicles a growing dam removal movement that has resulted in about 2,200 dams blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers most of those in the past twenty-five years. This sharp shift in practice from dam building between 1950 and 1979 about 1,700 dams were built a year to dam removal, is restoring rivers and the communities that depend on them.
Chapter 1: Rewilding the Elwha
The story of two dam removals on the Elwha River in Washington helped rewild an iconic watershed. The Elwha River runs through Olympic National Park and the watershed largely undeveloped. But two dams built in the early 1900s, including one inside the park, blocked passage for ten runs of anadromous fish, including all five species of Pacific salmon. Both dams were built in the traditional homelands of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and against their wishes. The tribe launched an effort in 1986 to challenge the dams when they came up for relicensing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and were soon joined by environmental groups, and later federal agencies. In 1992 George H.W. Bush signed a law to restore the Elwha River, but funding for dam removal was held up for decades. Deconstruction finally started in 2011 and finished in 2014. Afterwards, nearly 700 acres of the former reservoirs were expertly replanted, which brought back not just dozens of species of native plants, but wildlife including birds, bears, elk, beavers, and cougars. Native migratory fish runs are now on the mend, too. The Elwha River dam removal effort was the largest of its kind at the time and created a road map for future projects, including the Klamath River.
Chapter 2: The Movement Gets its Start
Since 1837 the Edwards Dam blocked passage for eleven native species of migratory fish in Maine’s Kennebec River. It was one of thousands of mill dams erected across New England rivers beginning with the arrival of European colonists in the 1600s. By the 1980s Atlantic salmon were on the brink of extinction and numbers of other sea-run fish fell dangerously low. A group of anglers decided to challenge the hydroelectric dam’s future as it came up for relicensing in 1993 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The dam provided a miniscule bit of power but generated outsized environmental harms. Their argument won over powerbrokers and regulators, sparking a landmark ruling by FERC in 1997 when, for the first time, the commission called for a dam removal against the wishes of a dam owner. The dam’s demolition two years later ignited more dam removals across Maine, and the entire country, that caused a seismic shift in conservation and river restoration.
Chapter 3: Deadbeat Dams
In some states the majority of dams no longer serve their intended purpose or any purpose at all. These “deadbeat dams” are especially prevalent in New England, where thousands of dams were built during the Industrial Revolution and earlier. Plymouth, Massachusetts provides a case study in not letting history stand in the way of progress. Plymouth has removed 13 dams, including five along Town Brook, a storied stream in the heart of the town’s historic district. The removal of these obsolete dams freed the town of its inherited financial burden, and helped restore migratory fish runs. It also provided other benefits to recreation, public safety, and water quality. And it showed how dams can be removed while following historic preservation guidelines. Deadbeat dams aren’t a regional problem though. Thousands of other deadbeats exist across the country – two of the most notorious are in Southern California. The 168-foot-tall Matilija Dam near Ojai was built for water storage but filled with silt in just fifty years. And an hour south on Malibu Creek, the 100-foot-tall Rindge Dam sits brimming with sediment, too. That dam decommissioned in 1967 took only thirty years to silt up. Both are reminders that dams hold back not just water, but sediment. And that our engineering feats can’t always be easily undone.
Chapter 4: Thinking Small
When it comes to river barriers, small doesn’t mean insignificant. The removal of a small dam on Rock Island Creek in Virginia shows that even a six-foot-tall structure can be harmful to aquatic animals, like native fish and freshwater mussels. And its removal can help benefit those species and many more. Ousting dozens of such dams, like in Southern California’s Cleveland National Forest, where 81 small dams got the boot, can also have watershed-wide advantages. So too can combining dam removals with water pollution clean-up projects, like Pennsylvania, which tackled acid mine drainage remediation and reconnected stream miles by removing small dams to help improve habitat for native brook trout and eastern hellbenders. Small dam removals don’t just benefit nature, though, low-head dams also pose big safety risks. At least
1,400 people have drowned at low-head dams where river users often don’t know that small dams can have dangerous hydraulics that can trap a person in a recirculating current.
Chapter 5: Rapids Return
In 1969 when Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire it had been written off as so polluted to be devoid of life. But the Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, gave the river another chance. Decades of cleanup work could take it only so far, though. By the early 1990s scientists determined that achieving water quality goals hinged on dam removal. Over the last twenty years, four dams have been removed and another bypassed to allow the river to freely pass. A sixth – and final –project is now also underway to remove one more dam. The work has allowed the river’s water quality to rebound and for aquatic life, including 70 species of fish, to return. So have people, too. The river now draws whitewater paddlers and other river enthusiasts, adding to the area’s recreation and economic opportunities. Other cities are also following suit to remove dams and allow people safer access to in-town river fun. Grand Rapids, Michigan is removing four dangerous low-head dams that will improve ecological functions but also create economic and recreational opportunities. And they’re following a playbook enacted in the outdoor capital, Bend, Oregon, where whitewater recreation has flourished after dam removal.
Chapter 6: Climate Changed
Could Glen Canyon Dam’s days be numbered? The mammoth structure turned 186 miles of the Colorado River into Lake Powell in 1963. But for the last 20 years, the pressures of drought, climate change, and over-allocated water rights have caused the lake to fall significantly. Scientists studying the reemerging terrestrial landscape have rekindled support among conservationists for the dam’s demise and the restoration of a once-prized landscape to be restored. Other unlikely support is beginning to come from those concerned that the dam’s water level may fall too low to allow enough flows for downstream water rights holders Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico. Looking at dams, like Glen Canyon, through a climate change lens also highlights other problems. Climate amplified storms are testing dams throughout the country, and many will not live up to the pressure. To climate-proof communities, some municipalities are beginning to remove dams. In other places researchers are showing that reservoirs formed by dams aren’t emissions-free. Reservoirs, including those that generate hydropower, can produce greenhouse gas emissions like methane, some significantly.
Chapter 7: Fishway or the Highway
Atlantic salmon are on the brink. Centuries ago 300,000 to 500,000 Atlantic salmon filled the Northeast’s major rivers. Today the last wild populations in the United States are found in only eight rivers in central and eastern Maine. Since 2000, they’ve been listed as endangered. Their recovery now hinges on what happens in a few Maine rivers and at just a handful of dams. Of particular concern right now are four dams along 18 miles of the Kennebec River that block
Atlantic salmon from reaching their best spawning and rearing habitat in the Sandy River. Salmon now are captured at the lowermost dam and trucked dozens of miles away – a time consuming and inefficient system. But the relicensing of one of the four dams currently underway has thrown the Kennebec’s dams into the spotlight with calls growing for removing some or all of the four lower dams. A blueprint for how that could happen sits nearby. The Penobscot River Restoration Project, completed in 2016, was a sweeping agreement that removed two dams, created an engineered bypass of a third decommissioned dam, and upgraded fish passage at another. In total, it enabled improved access for fish to more than 2,000 miles, without losing hydropower production. Could something similar happen on the Kennebec?
Chapter 8: A Roadmap for the Snake River
About 40 percent of the electricity used in the Pacific Northwest comes from hydropower at hundreds of dams in the Columbia Basin. But those dams have come at a steep cost. All four of the Snake River’s salmon and steelhead stocks that still remain are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The loss of salmon impacts Native people’s health and culture, as well as the economy and other wild species, like orcas. For decades advocates have made a strong case for removing just four of them on the Lower Snake River, which were built between 1957 and 1975, long after it was clear that dams had deadly impacts for salmon. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to mitigate harms to fish from the dams, and decades of lawsuits have created little meaningful change. Political and legal stalemates to address the problem hit a meaningful breakthrough in 2023 when the Nez Perce, Yakama, Warm Springs, and Umatilla tribes, along with the states of Oregon and Washington, agreed to the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative, which detailed a road map for how to wean the region off its four dams by replacing the services they provide. In December of 2023 the agreement was officially backed by the Biden Administration with a Memorandum of Understanding to work together on next steps, and a commitment of $500 million over the next decade to help support habitat restoration, build new clean energy projects, and other infrastructure improvements for fish passage. But the Trump administration threatens to undo this work at a time that’s critical to the future of these fish and the people who depend on them.
Chapter 9: The New Old Klamath River
The world’s largest dam removal project was decades in the making. When the removal of four dams along a thirty-mile-stretch of the Klamath River in Oregon and California was completed in 2024, it was thanks to a 20-year campaign from the region’s tribes the Shasta, Karuk, Hupa, Yurok and Klamath Tribes along with nonprofit partners. The effort first gained traction after a fish kill in 2004 resulted in the loss of some 35,000 to 70,000 adult salmon. Tribes and other supporters saw an opportunity to bring awareness to the dams’ harmful impacts when they came up for relicensing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The case for removal was strong: Dam construction contributed to the decimation of the third-largest runs of salmon on the West Coast of the continental U.S. They also changed the temperature and timing of
flows, and created water quality problems, including toxic algae and dangerous parasites. The dams provided no water for irrigation or drinking, weren’t operated for flood control, and made up just 2 percent of PacifiCorp’s portfolio. Their removal would reconnect more than 400 miles of habitat for imperiled fish and improve water quality. Years of activism, science, and coalition building paid off in 2016 when an agreement was signed for PacifiCorp to surrender the hydropower licenses for the four lowermost dams and transfer their ownership to a newlycreated entity, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, to oversee dam removal. Draining of the reservoirs and deconstruction of the dams began in the summer of 2023 and finished just over a year later.
Chapter 10: Fix It
The decommissioning and deconstruction of the four Klamath dams officially ended on October 2, 2024, but the restoration of wildlands and wildlife was already underway. By the end of the year, revegetation crews had spread 50 tons of native seed and planted 118,000 trees, shrubs, and bunch grass plugs, 3,000 narrow milkweed plugs, and 49,000 acorns on the 2,200 acres of land that were formerly submerged by the reservoirs. And as soon as the last barriers came down, fall-run fish were on their way back. By October Chinook had cruised past where Iron Gate Dam once towered and began reclaiming long-lost spawning territory in four previously inaccessible creeks. Hundreds even ventured over the Oregon border and many made into a creek above the former J.C. Boyle Dam, the most upstream dam removed a distance of some 230 miles from the ocean. Far exceeding expectations, in just three weeks beginning in midOctober, California Trout deduced from their sonar that more than 6,800 Chinook and steelhead made it to the former reservoir reach. Coho followed soon after. With the removal of these dams and the return of a natural stream flow, plus hundreds of miles of tributary habitat, it gives them a much better chance of survival, but long-term recovery of salmon and steelhead populations will take decades. Other changes have been quicker, though, like improvements in water quality. The much-watched dam removal effort has been hailed around the world, but the United States’ dam removal movement inspired action in Europe years before. The continent has the most fragmented rivers on the planet, but already leaders there have helped remove 8,000 river barriers and counting.