KLAMATH, Calif. (AP) — The second-largest river in California has sustained Native American tribes with plentiful salmon for millennia, provided upstream farmers with irrigation water for generations and served as a haven for retirees who built dream homes along its banks.
With so many competing demands, the Klamath River has come to symbolize a larger struggle over the increasingly precious water resources of the U.S. West, and who has the best claim to them.
Now, plans to demolish four hydroelectric dams on the river's lower reaches to save salmon — the largest such demolition project in U.S. history — have placed those competing interests in stark relief. Each group with a stake — tribes, farmers, ranchers, homeowners and conservationists — sees its identity in the Klamath and ties its future to the dams in deeply personal terms.
"We are saving salmon country, and we're doing it through reclaiming the West," said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok tribal attorney fighting for dam removal. "We are bringing the salmon home."
The project, estimated at nearly $450 million, would reshape the Klamath River and empty giant reservoirs. It could revive plummeting salmon populations by reopening hundreds of miles of habitat that has been blocked for more than a century, bringing relief to a half-dozen tribes spread across hundreds of miles in Southern Oregon and Northern California.
The proposal fits into a trend toward dam demolition in the U.S. that's been accelerating as these infrastructure projects age and become less economically viable. The removals are popular with environmentalists who are fighting for the return of native fish species to rivers long blocked by concrete.
More than 1,700 dams have been dismantled around the United States since 2012, according to American Rivers, and the Klamath River project would be the largest by far if it proceeds.
Backers of the dam removal say the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could vote this spring on whether to transfer the dams’ hydroelectric licenses from the current operator, PacifiCorp, to a nonprofit formed to oversee the demolition. Drawdown of the reservoirs behind the dams could begin as early as 2022, according the nonprofit, the Klamath River Renewal Corp.
Opponents, including a group of residents who live around a meandering lake formed by the oldest dam, have vowed to fight the project. Without the dam to create the reservoir, they say, their bucolic waterfront properties will become mudflats. Many say their homes have already lost half their value.
"If we get halfway through and they blow a hole in the dam just to let the water out — to say, 'Yeah, we done this' — they can walk away from it. And we have no recourse whatsoever," said Herman Spannus, whose great-grandfather ran a ranch in the area in 1856.
The structures at the center of the debate are the four southernmost dams in a string of six constructed in Southern Oregon and far Northern California beginning in 1918.
They were built solely for power generation. They are not used for irrigation, they are not managed for flood control, and none has fish ladders: concrete chutes fish can pass through.
Two dams to the north are not targeted for demolition. Those dams have fish passages and are part of a massive irrigation system that straddles the Oregon-California border and provides water to more than 300 square miles of alfalfa, potatoes, barley and other crops.