As river rises, so does momentum for settlement to remove four Klamath dams
Erica Terence
Eureka Times-Standard
02/25/2010
The river rose last night. Three inches of rain in 36 hours, a neighbor reported. Hopefully, somewhere in the high country that translates into the beginnings of an ample snowpack, which will later deliver enough cold, oxygenated water back into the Klamath all year long for fisheries to survive. Between climate change and a century of dams on the Klamath, even a good snowpack is a drop in the bucket, though.
The river rose last night.
Now it dances, muddy and wild, over and around boulders between steep mountainsides crawling in mist, down to the Klamath, out to the sea. On its way there, some of the water spills around a river bar and backs into the eddies at the mouth of the creek near my house. This creates the slack-water environment along the edges where coho salmon thrive when they are young.
But will there be any coho salmon by 2020, when politicians and power company executives promise that four destructive Klamath River hydroelectric dams will be torn down? And couldn't we take those dams out a whole lot sooner? These are common questions, and good ones. These questions have good answers.
Frankly, it would be hard to create a more ambitious timeline for removal than the one found in the dam removal settlement without bypassing bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. These antiquated dams were constructed without environmental review. It was a mistake that has cost our river plenty, and it would be imprudent to decommission them now without taking the time to do it right.
Also, collecting the money for removal takes time. The reality is that we probably can't take the dams out much before 2020, making settlement likely the quickest and surest way to get the job done -- much quicker than taking our chances at FERC (where the favored alternative is trapping fish and trucking them around the dams), getting mired indefinitely in court, or causing the settlement to collapse and starting over, for instance.
For the past nine years, our coalition has been building the case for removing the dams instead of relicensing them. We've been building this case in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) administrative record, at clean water hearings, in the courts and on the streets of Scotland, Omaha, Portland and Salt Lake City. That work has not been in vain. The dam removal process laid out in a recent settlement will rely on the record we have built.
But how can coho, spring chinook salmon and other struggling fisheries survive if farmers in the upper Klamath basin get guaranteed water supplies? What if we have another fish kill like the one we had in 2002 due to lethally low flows? More common questions with good answers.
The dam removal agreement is integrally linked to a river restoration agreement that sets a water allocation for some of the upper basin farmers based on water balancing models, radically rearranging the way water will be managed and shared in the basin.
The idea that farmers get a fixed amount of water while fish get what's left has offended some environmentalists. But a wide range of scientists have projected that what's left in the river will afford more good flow years than fish have seen in a long, long time. In the years when flows drop to dangerously low levels, an emergency drought plan will kick in, as will federal flow requirements provided in the Endangered Species Act.
Besides, look at the legacy of the dams. Fish dying from overheated water, liver poisoning from toxic algae proliferating behind the dams, people and cultures dying from lack of access to salmon. Then look at the benefits of Klamath dam removal: cleaner water, healthier rivers, and yes, stronger and more reliable fishing and farming economies.
