The Story Behind The Largest Dam Removal In U.S. History

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hi, I’m Flora Lichtman. And you’re listening to Science Friday. Today in the show, we are taking you behind the scenes on the biggest dam removal project in US history and what’s happened since.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: I thought, oh, my gosh, my nation is still at war with the US. And we’ve got to do something about this.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: The Klamath River runs from Southern Oregon to California. And right now, it is the site of a monumental restoration experiment. The river used to be a top salmon run until a series of dams were installed around 100 years ago. And salmon populations tanked.

This is the prologue to a really remarkable story about a coalition that fought to restore the river. Led by members of the Yurok and Karuk nations, who’ve lived along the river for millennia, a group of lawyers, biologists, and activists successfully lobbied for the removal of dams. The fourth dam was removed last year.

It was the biggest dam removal project in US history. Here to tell us the story and what’s happened since are Amy Bowers Cordalis, legal counsel for the Yurok Nation and author of the upcoming book, The Water Remembers, which chronicles this effort to get the dams removed, and Barry McCovey, Jr, director of the Yurok tribe’s fisheries department. Amy, Barry, I want to welcome you both to Science Friday.

BARRY MCCOVEY, JR: Thanks for having us.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: Yeah, thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, Amy, take me back to 2002. It sounds like this was a turning point for you.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: It was. I was on a different career path. And I was in college. And I was home working for the Yurok tribe’s fisheries department, had an internship.

And towards the end of September, tragedy struck. And the largest fish kill in American history occurred on the Lower Klamath River within the Yurok reservation. It’s estimated somewhere between 30,000 to 70,000 adult salmon died from a fish disease. And it was caused by basically bad water management at the call of the then Vice President, Dick Cheney.

And I just remember being in a boat observing dead fish all around me. Their bodies layered the banks of the river three to four layers deep. It smelled like a war zone. It looked like a war zone– and thinking, I’m witnessing the end of my people. And I’ve got to do something to stop it.

And then my next thought was, I’m going to go to law school to try to prevent this from ever happening. And so that’s what I did. But Indigenous peoples up and down the basin, as well as others, were really motivated, catalyzed by the fish kill to help preserve the river and fight for the river.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Barry, was this true for you, too, that you were catalyzed by this experience?

BARRY MCCOVEY, JR: Yeah, definitely. I was working on the Lower Klamath River at the time as a fisheries technician for the tribal fisheries department. And unfortunately, I was one of the people who had to be out there surveying and counting the dead fish. And so, yeah, like Amy, it kind of guided my career path after that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, it sounds like this was a really profound moment for both of you. Amy, you reoriented your life path around it. Why was it so important to you, personally?

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: Because my entire family for generations had fought for Yurok sovereignty and for the health of the Klamath River. In the creation story, we are taught that Yurok Country was made for Yurok people. And it’s our duty to live in balance with the natural world and to be a steward of the iconic salmon runs, the elk herds, the eulachon, the steelhead, the acorns, all the abundance of the Lower Klamath Basin.

But with that comes a corresponding duty to take care of it and to live in balance with it. And so every generation of my family, as well as almost every single family on of Indigenous peoples from the Basin, have in some way fought to preserve all the abundance of the Klamath. And since colonization, that’s been extremely difficult. But what I witnessed in 2002 was yet another act of ecocide against the Yurok people, where the salmon, the river, which we are so dependent upon for our livelihood, was really attacked by water diversions that led to the fish kill.

And because of the fish kill, that was a direct threat to our existence. And so seeing that, I thought, oh, my gosh, my nation is still at war with the US. And we’ve got to do something about this.

And so it really launched me in a whole other generation into the Yurok Nation’s fight to preserve our way of life. And the book, The Water Remembers, chronicles my family’s previous generations of their fight between a failed treaty, a Supreme Court case, the salmon wars, then into the fish kill, and talks about how all those generations fought for just our right to be on the River and how that helped lead to dam removal and one of the world’s largest river restoration projects.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to talk about the role of the dams. Barry, what role do the dams play in this? How do they affect salmon populations and the ecosystem on the Klamath?

BARRY MCCOVEY, JR: I think the biggest impact that dams have on salmon populations is it’s a blockage to migration. So salmon migrate from the ocean to the river and spawn. And then their juveniles go back out to the ocean, and grow to adulthood, and back to the river. They need to migrate upstream to the spawning grounds.

And when dams are put in place, access to that spawning habitat is blocked. And that’s what happened on the Klamath. Hundreds of miles of spawning habitat that had been used for millions of years was blocked from access when those dams were built in the early 1900s. And so fish populations crashed basically overnight.

There’s also changes in water quality and water temperatures. So when you put a dam in, it creates a reservoir. And reservoirs are known to have poor water quality. They have higher temperatures and lower oxygen levels. They’re breeding grounds for toxic algae.

And so when that water is released out of that dam, it is now the river. And so instead of having a free-flowing river with good water quality, you now have a river which originates out of a stagnant reservoir. And so that creates, again, water temperature and water quality problems. And that’s very hard on fish and other aquatic organisms.

FLORA LICHTMAN: One of the remarkable things about this story is that you work for decades, and then you succeed. And Amy, your book gives a play-by-play of this, the protests, and negotiations with the government and the power companies. Is there a moment or a scene that kind of stands out to you in that journey that epitomizes some takeaway or some turning point in this?

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: Oh, man.

[LAUGHING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s a big question.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: There were so many moments. Yeah, I think one of the moments was in 2020. FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, issued an order that was inconsistent with the settlement agreement for dam removal. And PacifiCorp, the owner of the dams, threatened to pull out of the deal because they were worried about liability issues.

And the Yurok Tribal Leadership at the time called up Berkshire Hathaway top executives– these are Warren Buffett’s top executives– and invited them to the reservation. And we took them to a place called Blue Creek, which is one of the most important tributaries on the Lower Klamath.

It’s a salmon sanctuary. It has spiritual qualities for the Yurok people. And we took the executives who came in from Iowa and Ohio and took them to our most special place and basically told them, we will never stop fighting for dam removal. And it’s in your interest to take this deal. And–

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FLORA LICHTMAN: What did they say?

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: Well, we also handed them a term sheet and said, here’s how we think we can make it happen. And they didn’t say much on the river there. But what we wanted to do was let the river speak for itself.

And so we wanted them to come there and to hear the river and to help them listen to it. And to their credit, they left on a– I think it was a Saturday. And I’ll never forget the call that I got from one of the executives the following Monday saying, let’s get these dams out. And you have basically a week of my time. And the only reason I’ll be pulled away is if the president or a congressperson calls me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: Yeah. And from that point on, we went into intense briefings, negotiations. And I really think that was a turning point. To their credit, those executives heard the river. And they heard the Indigenous peoples from the river.

And in the end, there’s this great quote from Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world, who said, “We’re really happy to be able to work with our tribal partners and to help heal the river.” So it was a big moment.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Mm. What financial incentives were you up against in trying to get the dams removed? I mean, where were the power– these were hydroelectric dams. Where were the power companies in all of this?

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: So the power companies– the economics of that was these dams provided a very minimal percentage of PacifiCorp Power’s energy portfolio. And there were already other sources of power that could fill what the Klamath– also, these four dams were built between 1911 to 1964. And they were old, dilapidated, not in compliance with federal law, and required a significant amount of money to just update them to comply with safety standards, existing law. A big one was they were built without any fish ladders.

And so, essentially, PacifiCorp looked at these dams as legacy assets. Because they weren’t producing very much power. And they cost a lot of money to just operate and were not compliant with existing law.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So they could be persuaded to take them down.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: With some lawyering up and strategic movement, they could be persuaded. And they were persuaded. And at that point, there was an economic analysis completed.

And it demonstrated that removing the dams was cheaper than installing fish ladders to comply with existing law and renew the license. So that was the aha moment, where all of a sudden there was an economic interest towards dam removal. And that triggered discussions which led to a $500– well, actually, initially, a $450 million settlement agreement to remove the dams.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Don’t go away. Because after the break, we’re going to hear what the river looks like today.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: The river is fiercer than I have ever known it in my lifetime.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Barry, the dams were removed. The fourth one came down last year. What changes have you noticed already?

BARRY MCCOVEY, JR: Well, I think the biggest change was, a week after the final dam was removed, we saw Chinook salmon migrate past the former dam site. And then over the next few weeks or months, we saw hundreds and hundreds of fish, if not thousands of fish, migrate past there. So quickly, those fish started to reinhabit some of the areas that had been blocked off for all that time.

And that was a really, really amazing to see. I was lucky enough to experience that firsthand and see fish spawning in streams that they hadn’t spawned in 60 or 100 years. That was a major kind of catharsis moment in all of this for me, personally.

But other than that, I think, for myself, being out on the river as a fisherman sometimes, and with my kids and family, and talking to other people who are on the river a lot, the lower river where we’re at, it just feels different. It has a little bit of a different feel to it now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How so?

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: The river is fiercer than I have ever known it in my lifetime. It is stronger. And you can just feel its vibrancy and its resiliency in ways that has never been present. Both Barry and I grew up fishing and just being on that river.

And it always kind of had, like, this smell. The water was dark. And it was mossy. You couldn’t see the river bottom.

And now it’s just healthier. The water is cleaner. You can see the bottom of the river. There isn’t that algae and moss present. It’s colder. It smells sweet.

And now we, as the current generation of Yuroks, are beginning to feel and experience the river that our ancestors knew. It’s live. It’s vibrant. It gives us life. And it’s remarkable how wonderful it is to just be on the river now that it’s starting to become more and more strong and healthy.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you have questions, things that you’re tracking about how the ecology will respond?

BARRY MCCOVEY, JR: Yeah, there’s a huge undertaking to track this. It’s the largest river restoration project probably in history. And so there’s hundreds of people working on this, from government agencies, to state agencies, to NGOs, and tribes, and universities. So we’re tracking how fish are recolonizing the newly-accessible habitat.

We’re looking at how aquatic invertebrates, or the little bugs that live on the bottom of the river, are recolonizing the habitat. We’re looking at water quality. We’re looking at sediment.

So all of these things are being studied in depth. One of the hopes that we have in all of this is that we can learn as much as we can from Klamath River Dam removal, and we can apply that to other dam removals as we move forward.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In the minute or two I have left, I’d love to hear your take homes from this experience.

BARRY MCCOVEY, JR: I think the big take home in all of this is that this was a decades-long fight that many, many people were involved in and that, out there in the world, if people are looking at dam removals or other major ecosystem restoration-type projects, and they think that they can’t get it done or it seems impossible, I think if you just look to the Klamath River Dam removal story, you’ll see that anything is possible if you really, really want it to happen and you work hard enough. And then the other thing I would leave everyone with is the scars are still fresh. Dam removal just happened a year ago. And the river is still healing.

So there’s decades of work to do to restore the river ecosystem up there. And the Yurok Tribe, and all of our allies, and all the other tribes are going to be there working for as long as it takes to provide that holistic ecosystem restoration to the Klamath River.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Amy?

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: I titled my book, The Water Remembers, because the Earth really does remember what it was like to be healthy. And when humans interact with the Earth as a relative, not just a resource, and work to restore it using nature-based solutions like dam removal, like restoration, then the Earth remembers how to heal itself and will gradually start rebuilding and moving towards more ecosystem resiliency and heal itself. And the thing that is so cool about it, too, is there is a movement of people who are working to restore ecosystems and also making money off of it.

And so I think it’s really important that the world know there is a movement here. And people are fixing the world. They’re renewing the world. And it can be done.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Amy Bowers Cordalis is the author of the upcoming book, The Water Remembers, My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life, out October 28. And Barry McCovey, Jr. is the director of the Yurok Tribe’s fisheries department. Thank you, both, so much for talking to me today.

BARRY MCCOVEY, JR: Thank you.

AMY BOWERS CORDALIS: Thank you. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

FLORA LICHTMAN: If you want to read an excerpt from the book and preorder it can head to sciencefriday.com/damremoval.

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Today’s episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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