Un-Dam the Klamath

Un-Dam the Klamath (#UnDamtheKlamath) is a social movement to remove the dams on the Klamath River primarily because the dams block salmon and steelhead from reaching more than 300 miles of spawning and rearing habitat in the upper basin. Copco #1, Copco #2, Iron Gate (all in California) and J.C. Boyle (in Oregon) are the four aging hydroelectric dams on the mainstem Klamath River that are being advocated for removal. The movement has been ongoing since 2000 and has gained national attention.

It is reported that over 40 organizations, irrigation districts, and tribes support taking the dams out. The movement also argues that the dams should be removed because they create toxic algal blooms, dwindle salmon numbers and create illness in the fish, threaten tribal subsistence and increase health risks for tribal members, and harm the West Coast fishing industry. Seven species of fish are threatened by the dams, including three in critical condition, which are the spring-run Chinook salmon of Upper Klamath-Trinity Rivers, coho salmon of Southern Oregon/Northern California Coast, and the summer steelhead of the Klamath Mountains Province.

Opposition groups have included some landowners around the current reservoirs and some local ranchers and farmers and corporate parties like PacifiCorp owned by Warren Buffett. PacifiCorp intially agreed to dam removal in 2009, yet after a decade of negotiations pulled out of the agreement when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stated that they take responsibility and pay for the removal, rather than simply walk away. Support groups cite environmental racism and classism as a reason as to why the dams have yet to be removed. The dam removal has also been cited as economically beneficial. Removal of the Klamath dams would be the largest dam removal project in the world, restoring access to native fish species’ historical cold-water habitat.

Background

Indigenous displacement from ancestral lands, particularly among the Hupa, Karuk, Klamath tribes, and Yurok, and the destruction to Indigenous worldviews through the forced removal of children to Indian boarding schools have been cited as important background to the current status of the dams. The dams themselves damaged Indigenous lifeways and culture in the region. By the 1870s, the Indigenous population on the Klamath had declined by 75 percent. Ron Reed of the mid-Klamath Karuk Tribe recalls that his family could still fish and feed everyone as recently as the 1960s, when the final dam, Iron Gate, was created. In the 1980s, this changed as subsitence became increasingly difficult. Because of excessive logging, acorns, game, and dozens of other foods were destroyed and depleted.

Diana Hartel argues that this led to a decline in Indigenous fisheries, meaning that "Native families increasingly filled their bellies with store-bought and government commodity foods--cheap starches, fats and sugar. Chronic unemployment, despair and addictions rose in the gap left by the vanishing life in the river." Hartel documents how settler presence and the dams have been destructive to Indigenous health through the "collapse of First Nations fisheries [which] had brought deepening poverty and with it soaring rates of diabetes." Hartel argues that becuse of the ways in which settlers are "disconnected from life rhythms millions of years old... we can wreak havoc on everything around us."

History

The remaining water left in the river, whatever the Project is willing to release from Iron Gate Dam, is so little in volume, so hot and so laced with pesticides and nitrates from agricultural waste water that it is often fatal for salmon as much as 100 miles (160 km) downriver. Hundreds of thousands of salmon have been killed in recent years as a result, and Klamath River coho salmon driven nearly to extinction.

—Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (2008)

Relicensing

In 2005, PacifiCorp applied to the federal government to relicense its four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath for up to 50 years. Environmentalists opposed the relicensing, arguing that the dams should be removed to reopen the upper Klamath to salmon.

Early appeals to Warren Buffet by movement groups to stop the relicense were denied. In one instance, after traveling to Buffett's headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, few were allowed in to address Buffett. One of them was Merv George Jr. (Hupa), who would later become the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest Supervisor, along with wife, Wendy. Wendy spoke to an image of Buffett through theater-sized conference screens and stated: "Sir, I have heard you are kind. The dams are killing the fish and destroying my people's way of life." Buffet asked if she had finished, and then, as described by Diana Hartel, "explained utility company politics as if to a child." Forbes Magazine reportedly "wondered how he could be so heartless."

At a California State Water Resources Control Board meeting in October 2008, it was noted that "Coho, chinook, steelhead, Pacific lamprey and green sturgeon could disappear from the watershed forever" if the dams were to stay up. Hartel admits that opposition groups refused to listen to Indigenous peoples and movement groups, instead displaying that they were "proud of their place in the West and sadly ignorant of the plight of the tribes on the river." In a reflection published in 2011, Hartel, who is related to people within the opposition movement, states that "their arguments had a lot to do with settler pride of place, how we took this wild river and made it useful--building cheap hydropower, irrigating onions, growing potatoes for Frito-Lay, watering livestock."

The process of re-licensing the dams by PacifiCorp was terminated in 2009, after it determined that "the dams were too expensive to fix."

Negotiations

On February 19th, 2010, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, PacifiCorp, the governors of Oregon and California and the Settlement representatives all signed the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement.

On April 4, 2013, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its final environmental impact statement on the plan, recommending the removal of all four dams and $1 billion in other environmental restoration to aid native salmon runs on the Klamath. Ron Wyden, the senior U.S. senator from Oregon, introduced the Klamath Basin Water Recovery and Economic Restoration Act of 2014, which was cosponsored by his fellow Oregon senator Jeff Merkley and by Nevada senator Dean Heller.

On February 8, 2017, a federal district court judge ruled in favor of the movement stakeholders to remove the dams. The judge agreed to plans designed by the Tribes' scientists to reduce outbreaks of a deadly fish disease that had infected 90% of juvenile salmon in 2014 and 2015.

In April 2020, the California Water Board approved two key permits for removing the four large aging hydropower dams on the Klamath River. The board came to this conclusion "based on evidence that dam removal would improve drinking water quality by reducing algal blooms, and would restore habitat for endangered salmon and other organisms that rely on free-flowing rivers." However, even with this approval, the project still required approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

The Klamath River Renewal Cooperation (KRRC) had applied for complete license transfer of the four dams to KRRC's jurisdiction. Construction costs for dam removal and remediation were estimated at around 450 million. KRRC would also fund and replace the City of Yreka's water supply pipeline that crosses the Klamath River underneath Iron Gate Reservoir. However, on July 17th, 2020 FERC stated that PacifiCorp would have to stay on the license during the removal process, rather than just walk away (as previously agreed to by both KRRC and PacifiCorp), "and take responsibility for cost overruns." As a result, PacifiCorp withdrew from the agreement and the dam removal process slowed once again.

On October 22nd, the movement was covered in a video story for Vice News. In the video, it was reported that "after a decade of negotiations, the [Yurok] tribe is starting to wonder if it will ever really happen." Salmon runs were reportedly the lowest they had ever been and Yurok tribal members explained that the salmon could not be sustained much longer.