Copco Lake, post dam removal. (Photo: Ray Haupt)
Klamath Dams Down: Will Ranches Survive?
Dam removal proponents claimed the project would help salmon, but steelhead trout are dead, and salmon spawning beds were destroyed
By California Globe, February 23, 2024 2:55 am
This is the second article in a series about the Klamath Dam Removal project in Siskiyou County.
By Theodora Johnson
The largest, most devastating dam removal experiment in modern history has reached the point of no return. As of January 23, 2024—despite opposition by a majority of local residents—the four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River have been officially breached.
Ironically, dam removal proponents claimed the project would help salmon, but now the Klamath River is being polluted with millions of cubic yards of decomposed algae, organic deposition, chemicals, and fine silt that has built up behind the dams. Dead steelhead trout and other species are floating to the banks. Any salmon spawning beds in the Klamath River were undoubtedly destroyed. At press time, conditions in the Klamath River were not likely survivable for the salmon juveniles that were beginning to emerge from
the tributary rivers and creeks on their way to the ocean.
There’s no way of knowing the survival rate of those juveniles until it’s time for them to return to their natal spawning grounds as adults (fall of 2025 for coho salmon; later for Chinook salmon). But there is cause for great concern: by one estimate 26 million cubic yards of sediment is stored behind the dams.1 No one knows how much of it will slough off into the river, or how long the river will remain in its turbid state, or how much of the sediment will settle on the river-bottom.
If 10 million cubic yards of sediment were to settle in the river, we’d see the equivalent of six lanes of freeway piled eight feet deep for nearly 100 miles. There are 192 river miles below the lowest dam, Iron Gate. In total, the river is approximately 250 miles long.
Since the dams were breached, suspended sediment levels in the Klamath River have varied from 16,000 to 2,000 milligrams per liter over a stretch of at least 60 miles, according to U.S. Geological Survey measurements.2 These suspended sediment levels could be four to 30 times what juvenile salmon can survive, according to a 2001 research report by the University of Washington.3
Coho salmon (a “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Acts) juveniles will begin entering the Klamath in early March. Both coho and Chinook juveniles will continue to out- migrate to the ocean via the Klamath River until early June (timing varies depending on species and tributary).4 We can only hope water quality in the Klamath will have improved by then.
But of even greater concern is the “food web,” the millions of organisms in the river that all species rely upon for life. How much of it has been (and will be) destroyed in the Klamath? When will it recover? There may be no food web to support adult salmon returns for many years.
Meanwhile, the small family ranchers and farmers who live along the Scott and Shasta rivers—major tributaries to the mid- Klamath—have reason to be wary of what’s next for them, too.
Don’t misunderstand; the Klamath dams didn’t provide any flood protection or irrigation for farming in the Scott or Shasta valleys. But with the Klamath River transformed to a mudslide, it would be no surprise if government agencies started calling for agriculture in the tributary watersheds to give up water
to help flush out sediment and recover salmon and steelhead populations harmed by dam removal.
All it would take is a new special emergency declaration by the governor, and voilà—the state would have authority to revoke privately held water rights in the name of saving fish. It’s been done before.
The current and impending fish die-off—made possible in part by the State Water Resources Control Board and the California Department of Fish & Wildlife—is especially hard to stomach because these same agencies have been severely decreasing local farmers’ water for the past two-and-a-half years, all in the name of “saving” the same fish.
This has been made possible by Governor Newsom’s “emergency drought” proclamation of May 2021. As a result, the State Water Board, on the recommendation of the Department of Fish & Wildlife, slapped the Scott and Shasta valleys with unprecedented “emergency” regulations restricting both groundwater and surface water. They even limit how much livestock are allowed to drink. The stated reason: To increase streamflow to protect the Chinook salmon, steelhead, and ESA- listed coho salmon.
And the regulations continue into 2024—even though Siskiyou County is officially no longer in drought, and the agencies have produced no proof that the curtailments have done anything to actually help fish.
In 2022, Scott Valley farmers were forced to give up 30% of their irrigation water, allegedly to increase streamflow in the river, thereby (allegedly) helping salmon spawn in the fall/winter of 2022-23. The irrigation cuts, while causing no observable increase in streamflow, did cause extreme hardship in Scott Valley. Similar cuts forced several ranches out of business in Shasta Valley.
And now the progeny of the ’22-‘23 salmon spawners, for which farmers have sacrificed so much, may not survive conditions in the Klamath. Who will be held accountable when some or all of those salmon don’t return as adults? Will agriculture again take the blame, and again take cuts due to yet another “emergency”?
Decades before the curtailments, Scott and Shasta valley farmers installed fish screens, voluntarily conserved water, and fenced riparian areas. Whether or not these efforts contributed, the Scott River watershed’s coho population has become one of the largest natural runs in the state over the past 20 years.
Now, agriculture’s efforts have been thrown to the wind by the agencies’ irresponsible dam removal methods. Instead of dredging out sediment from behind the dams in advance (a costly endeavor), the agencies decided to “flush” it out via the Klamath River—the salmon’s lifeline.
In the interest of protecting agriculture from future scapegoating, we have some questions we want answered by the state agencies, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (the entity created to remove the dams) and the governor. Publicly. Press releases would be great.
A few of those are:
• What are the effects of the added sediment on aquatic life, particularly coho and Chinook salmon? This should be monitored and reported up and down the Klamath, for as long as high turbidity and excess sediment deposits on the riverbed persist.
• What is the plan to reintroduce salmonids, if brood stocks are destroyed?
• How/where will you get the “flushing flows” needed to flush the remaining fine sediment deposited in the river channel? The Scott River watershed has no reservoirs; our only stored water is the natural snowpack and underground aquifer.
• What chemical constituents are being found in the water samples, and how are those affecting the ecosystem and river communities? How are you monitoring this over space and time?
When a government gives itself license to harm species and habitat that average citizens would be fined or jailed for harming, that government must be held accountable.
Theodora Johnson is a rancher and founding member of the grassroots communication group, Scott Valley Agriculture Water Alliance, formed in April, 2022. She recommends contacting the Berkeley-based dam removal entity, Klamath River Restoration Corporation, with your questions and concerns. (510) 560-5079 or ren@klamathrenewal.org.Siskiyou County, which was opposed to dam removal, also has helpful info at https:// www.co.siskiyou.ca.us/naturalresources/page/ klamath-dam-decommissioning-project
Special to the Globe with permission of The CATTLE Mag, RB9Publishing.com which originally published Theodora Johnson’s article.
*******
1Gathard Engineering Consulting. Klamath River Dam and Sediment Investigation. Technical Report. November 2006.
2 U.S. Geological Survey. National Water Information System: Web Interface. February 19, 2024.
3 Bash, Jeff et al. Effects of Turbidity and Suspended Solids on Salmonids. Final Research Report. University of Washington. 2001.
4 California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Scott and Shasta River Juvenile Salmonid Outmigration Monitoring In-Season Update. June 17, 2022.
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“….the Berkeley-based dam removal entity, Klamath River Restoration Corporation….”
This tells us all we need to know about the kind of left-wing radicals behind the Klamath dam removal project; an environmental and economic disaster in the making. Lets ship them all to China and they can organize a dam removal project on the Yangtze River starting with the Three Gorges Dam.
It should be okay in a few hundred years.
For all environmental torture that ran the other industries out of the state, how did anyone hoodwink the Indians into “taking to long view” and blowing up their fishing, farming, and tourist industry in one great homage to “the way it used to be”!
Yes, indeed Chuckiechan. I suspect that there is a casino project or two or three, somewhere downriver in the future. Follow the money.
The current frenzy to embrace “tribal wisdom” as a blueprint for guiding government policy is categorically insane. In the first place, there is no current tribal wisdom, particularly in California. For good or bad native cultures were so rapidly overrun by Europeans, any real knowledge was lost. The native groups had no written language. All knowledge was transferred by word of mouth and hands’ on learning. That process ended completely more than a century ago. One of the ironies is that the most accurate knowledge of how native cultures lived comes from the written accounts of Europeans who first encountered the tribes. Individuals today who claim to be Native American descendants could no more live on the land using tribal knowledge than grabbing a random group of people off some metropolitan sidewalk, strip them naked and drop them off in the wilderness. The calculated embrace of tribal wisdom by politicians is nothing more than a smokescreen to create a facade of competence and caring. It’s complete BS.
As a person of aboriginal ancestry, I agree with every word of your comment.
Read “An American Genocide” by Benjamin Madley. Might be eye opener.
Nah, winners win and losers don’t. Ask any of the tribes slaughtered by the Apaches.
Tourism, sawmills, fishing, ranching, farming, and other businesses that support the Klamath Falls area are failing because of the destructive policies of Hair-gel Hitler Newsom, mannish lesbo Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and the rest of the criminal Democrat mafia who all need to be held accountable. There will be hardly anyone left to throw their money away at the Tribe’s Kla-Mo-Ya Casino? The tribes will remain subservient dependent slaves on reservations controlled by the BIA?
Newsom, in order to ‘save the fish’ has killed off all the fish, and in the process reduced California’s ability to produce agricultural products to feed the nation and the world, reduced the ability to store much needed water for dryer times, and reduced the much needed electrical output as he demands we move to an all-electric economic model. The guy is truly an incompetent and stupid individual. But he wants to replace another incompetent and stupid individual as president.
Why is it that all the left has to put forward are incompetent and stupid individuals?
“Why is it that all the left has to put forward are incompetent and stupid individuals?”
The reason @RobL, is that leftists generally don’t have the brain capacity or diligence to do honest work. They can only get ahead expediently and credentialed by cheating. Here is ANOTHER example: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/31/sherri-charleston-plagiarism-allegations/. A more important question is “Why are administrators like those at Harvard, so stupid as to promote such stupid individuals?”
It isn’t incompetence. Hair Gel is doing exactly what he was (s)elected to do. He’s an alumni of the World Economic Forum’s young leaders programs. Destruction of infrastructure is part of The Great Reset agenda. “You will own nothing….”
Pacificorp didn’t want to spend hundreds of million dollars to upgrade their dams to retain their FERC licenses. That would of made power generation uneconomical. No one else stepped up obtain the needed licenses, so the dams had to go. Follow the money.
Here is another good example of why many of us in California support the movement in Oregon to make eastern Oregon part of Idaho:
https://www.co.siskiyou.ca.us/sites/default/files/fileattachments/natural_resources/page/7821/nr-20170214_cs_national_monument_trumpleter.pdf
There must be a reason why our governor cannot simply leave-our-lakes-alone. Perhaps an otherwise unapparent primordial fear causes him loss of all rational objectivity. Lots of available water seems to really trigger the progressive mind. What is it, anyway? Are they all non swimmers?
Liberals screw up EVERYTHING they touch. There are no exceptions.
So there are a few things here to point out.
The dams were at the end of their service life. Regardless of anything else, they would’ve needed removal or replacement, although it has to be acknowledged that this isn’t the reason given here. As mentioned above, there is an economic justification here to abandon this, except you don’t just abandon a dam for a multitude of reasons.
There have been other dam removals in and around the Western US. It isn’t unprecedented, and there are several reasons why dams are removed. While the given reason of restoration of salmon habitat may be specious, it’s not the only reason nor anywhere near the only occurrence of this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_California for a list of dozens of dam removals in the last few decades.
When dams are removed, due to the way sediments build up over time because of dam structures, it is expected that these sediments will flow out. It’s impractical to remove them ahead of time. Yes, they can have contaminants, but all rivers do. The thing is, over time the conditions should correct themselves barring other factors not specified which indeed can materially affect the interim and final outcomes of dam removals.
And now the punchline…
The main issue here appears to be that there was poor communication and interaction regarding local impacts. It can’t be overstated how critical this is to the dam removal process, and this is the main failure here. It is true that public policy regarding the environment and balancing out interests is horrifically bad in California, particularly when they collide with historical senior water rights over various sources (e.g. San Francisco’s essentially exclusive use of the amazingly tasty and clean Hetch Hetchy water in the Bay Area). But the real culprit here is almost assuredly the poor advance project planning and poor communication with rural residents regarding these changes. Public comment periods are a requirement for such projects, and state workers in charge of permits and oversight of projects simply don’t have the time or resources to reach out to everyone in rural areas.
Those people who suddenly lost well water were almost assuredly using wells that weren’t very deep, and that has a compound issue of water quality as deeper wells typically have cleaner water due to added natural filtration. Regardless, now that they’ve been left high and dry, as have fishermen and other users of dammed water and the residents near these fish kills, there should have been additional attention paid to with better communication and forewarning, and plans to deal with the economic and personal displacements. Again, given limited resources and the state politics, especially in state agencies, it’s hardly surprising that this happened in a way but this is the real failure here.
I would’ve liked to have seen comments from a CA-certified hydrogeologist as these were conspicuously missing here, and despite the fact that geology is still a very male dominated profession that typically leans conservative. With all due respect to the writer of the article and the county supervisor with his years of forestry work, forestry views knowledge of water in general terms and there are many nuances not covered in this article.
Sue Berkeley for 600 billion dollars put the UC system out of business sue newsom also. The courtroom fish story needs to end permanently before these loons go after our major hydroelectric facilities. Environmentalist activist political groups can be stopped by bankrupting them. The actual EPA needs to apply boot to butt with federal authority and filling affected courtroom events with subject matter experts and US federal attorneys. If tribes also need sued, well, maybe it’s time. Time to put a stop to it, at any rate. These people are dangerous.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
(insert standing ovation with thunderous applause here!)
“We had to kill the fish, to save the fish.”
Hi: I recently wrote an article on this whole thing about the results of the Klamath dam thing from a normal citizen viewpoint, since I live in Scott Valley now, and before that for 50 years in Crescent City. so i see the whole salmon story from dam removal to a black plume spreading its black death to all the innocent creatures in the entire system. I wrote the 4-page article, but I felt that it was too long for facebook, so I posted a short synopsis, and invited everyone to read on my blog at http://www.angelclough.com. i thought it was strange that i not only got no readers of the article, but i got no “likes” on facebook either. then i was informed yesterday that i was being accused of being a scam artist and a subversive political person who was deliberately flouting all the rules of facebook, and would be restricted to only posts that would follow their rules. WHAT???? ME??? instead of private citizen who cares about the place where i live?? well, i have rude-ley divorced myself from them. my article is too long to attach here, but if you want to read it, just go the blog on my website and the article is on the top of the list and is titled THE WORST DISASTER IN THE US (ever)
What’s going on with Klamath River is tragic. I hope it recovers. CDFW and KRRC are outright lying to people concerning the approximately 900k baby salmon that supposedly died of the “Benz” going through Iron Gate Diversion Tunnel. It wasn’t the “Benz” that killed the baby salmon but toxic sediments. Look at “Mud Mountain Dam” on White River in Washington State. Same type of diversion tunnel there and baby salmon are not dying of “Benz” passing underneath Mud Mountain Dam. Your being lied too. Follow the work of “William Simpson II.” His articles are spot on.
“She recommends contacting the Berkeley-based dam removal entity,…” Ha Ha! Officials in Berkeley. Ha Ha. I’m laughing because back in 2002 I contacted a fire station warning them that numerous pot smokers were frequently endangering the dry Redwood Forest. I witnessed these stoners myself. I WAS LAUGHED AT AND RIDICULED BY THE FIRE FIGHTERS. This is the end result of loosening drug laws. Stoned fire fighters. Stoned dam engineers. Stoned airplane engineers. Stoned legislators. Stone doctors.