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 ...
Law was passed twenty years ago.. DUH????
You can certainly buy all the farm raised salmon you want in the grocery store, but it is nothing like a salmon that has been run to the ocean and back.
If you look into the back story of this project you will see that these particular antiquated dams have served their purpose and removing them is not an unreasonable thing to do at all.
We race to become a third world country.
WA Ping
But you don’t understand.
The goal of the enviro-weenies is to depopulate the USofA and turn it into their organic garden, complete with human fertilizer ... you, me, the elderly, the disabled, the unborn, the conservatives, the beautiful, the kind, the freepers.
It’s ‘da plan’ doncha see?
What is the carbon footprint of this damn removal?
I am OK with removing a dam if it is going to be replaced by a thorium nuclear power plant.
Remove the state of Washington from the Grid.
Disagree. It's a HUGE waste of taxpayer money and a poor precedent.
For every dammed salmon river, there are many, many undammed ones. The ecoNazies pretend that each dammed river is of primary importance, when in fact, it's of little importance.
We can bitch and moan all we want about environazis, but who gave them all that unbridled power and why is it not challenged?
Not to mention that the same trick will be tried on other American Dams. Who cares if it is clean power, the fish have to be saved (and mankind suffers) only to burn more fossil fuel. DOH!
???You mean so Grand Coulee and the Hanford nuclear plant can no longer feed power to the grid?
Same here in metro DC. Salmon from all over the world is plentiful here. If salmon are so endangered why are we allowed to eat them.
Why don't we just cut all power to the environazis.
That’s right. And worse yes, they hate and fear nuclear power, coal-fired power, oil-fired power, natural gas-fired power, and yet want EVERYONE to drive so-called eco-friendly electric vehicles.
They do like solar power and wind power, just not anywhere they happen to live, of course.
It’s like dealing with not-so-intelligent, spoiled children.
One more proof as to why global warming is BS
Great Idea. I think we should shut those down too.
Environmentalists are NOT about cleaner environs. The one constant in their never-ending march is the destruction of American Energy.
The $327.4 million dam removal project will be followed by a $2.5 billion wind farm to replace the dam’s electricity. /sarc
It’s called “job creation”.
Even T Boone Pickens gave up on the wind farms.
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