Posted on 05/28/2011 8:45:39 AM PDT by matt1234
The Elwha River on Washington's Olympic Peninsula once teemed with legendary salmon runs before two towering concrete dams built nearly a century ago cut off fish access to upstream habitat, diminished their runs and altered the ecosystem.
On June 1, nearly two decades after Congress called for full restoration of the river and its fish runs, federal workers will turn off the generators at the 1913 dam powerhouse and set in motion the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.
Contractors will begin dismantling the dams this fall, a $324.7 million project that will take about three years and eventually will allow the 45-mile Elwha River to run free as it courses from the Olympic Mountains through old-growth forests into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
"We're going to let this river be wild again," said Amy Kober, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group American Rivers. "The generators may be powering down, but the river is about to power up."
The 105-foot Elwha Dam also came on line in 1913, followed 14 years later by the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam eight miles upstream. For years, they provided electricity to a local pulp and paper mill and the growing city of Port Angeles, Wash., about 80 miles west of Seattle. Electricity from the dams _ enough to power about 1,700 homes _ currently feeds the regional power grid.
A Washington state law required fish passage facilities, but none was built. So all five native species of Pacific salmon and other anadromous fish that mature in the ocean and return to rivers to spawn were confined to the lower five miles of the river. A hatchery was built but lasted only until 1922.
(Excerpt) Read more at mynorthwest.com ...
Salmon is supposedly endangered, but you can buy it in grocery stores 365 days a year here in the Northwest.
Just can’t keep the environazis happy.
If the last of the salmon that had the instinct to swim up this river to spawn, died over 90 years ago, what fish are going to appreciate this?
Why did they not follow the law and build the fish ladders?????
Insanity
They return to the place of their birth, new egg’s will return to the river, but why they did not do both is strange.
I live in the middle of a cornfield in Indiana, and I'm pretty sure that I could find fresh salmon within 10 miles of me 365 days a year too.
Mike
“Why did they not follow the law and build the fish ladders?????”
Raise the damn things in tanks and dam all the rivers!
The spawn of the ones that will now spawn upriver of the dam they are about to remove.
Don't worry, the administration will conduct a 50 billion dollar study to determine the viability of turning fish oil into fuel.
Well, the liberal view is that dams are bad, dams are bad for the environment, dams don’t generate power in a clean green manner, etc. So dams have to go.
Sadly, this is what happens when liberals are in charge of making policy and making decisions which impact society.
So stupid....drive around New England...the United States was founded and built on hydropower whether to turn simple water wheels or turbo generators. Appeasing the unappeasable is not a sustainable strategy.
The myth is that salmon always return to their birth place to spawn, and because of that "religious" belief, there is never any real investigation of facts or allowance for any alternate scenario.
Idiots,Leading Imbeciles there is no salmon shortage,there is a lack of domestic drilling that needs addressed NOW!
Go soak your worms in the ocean!
Power is not needed. Marxism and islam need darkness.
What's left to allow us to charge our electric cars? Wind/solar? Lol.
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