By The Time Klamath River Dams Come Down, Will The Wild Salmon Fishery Still Exist?
EDIT
Finally, after two decades of paperwork, the dams are scheduled for demolition in 2023. Now it’s a race between the opaque machinations of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, in the East, and C. shasta on the West Coast. Before the California Oregon Power Company (COPCO) Dam split the Klamath Basin in 1918, anadromous chinook and coho salmon and species like Pacific lamprey could reach the upper tributaries to spawn and die, enriching the ecosystem with omega fatty acids and other marine-derived nutrients. The nutrient-rich sediments ultimately returned to the ocean. Later, COPCO built a companion dam, COPCO 2, and then the John C. Boyle Dam and the Iron Gate Dam, the lowest on the Klamath River. COPCO evolved into PacifiCorp, and both PacifiCorp and the dams are now owned by Warren Buffet’s company, Berkshire Hathaway. Two other dams on the upper Klamath, the Keno and the Link River, are not slated for removal, in part because they have fish ladders and provide irrigation for farms.
The four lower dams confine the salmon to the basin’s lower half and keep sediment in the upper half. “If you look at the river below Iron Gate Dam, it is sediment-starved,” said Mike Belchik, the Yurok Tribe’s senior water policy analyst. The result is an “armored bed condition,” perfect for annelid worm colonies. “It turns out that these worms are secondary hosts for this fish disease.” The four dams provide no irrigation and are unconnected to the upper Klamath’s irrigation crisis. They only produce hydroelectric power. But new wind farms more than offset the amount of power the dams currently generate, enough to power 70,000 homes, so their removal will not affect the grid.
EDIT
The Yurok Reservation is a food desert, without any kind of supermarket, McCovey said, so “to be able to go into your backyard and catch one of the finest protein sources that exists in the world is pretty special.” The tribe needs 11,000 fish, minimum, to feed its people. This year, they’ll get only about 6,500. “We’re keeping the fish on life support,” said McCovey. “One of the main things we can do is get those dams out and open up 400 more miles of spawning habitat.”
McCovey believes there will still be fish in 2023. “Salmon are extremely resilient. They’ve been through a lot, and they’re a lot stronger than we think.” The current juvenile run is over, but with temperatures rising and the dams still in place, the salmon remain under threat. Belchik agreed that they won’t disappear overnight. “If you start getting below too low a number of returning fish, individual tributaries will start winking out. It’s not that we’ll lose every salmon in the entire basin all at once.” But the situation is dire. “If we have one more event, then we’re really screwed here.”
EDIT
https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.9/indigenous-affairs-dams-will-klamath-salmon-outlast-the-dam-removal-process
= new reply since forum marked as read
