The Klamath Riverkeeper (a Kennedy Greenie group) and the tribes have trumped up this bogus PR to try and force PacifiCorps to remove the dams on the Klamath. The spring Chinook run that used to go above the dams was extirpated many decades ago. The Klamath tribe lives under some fantasy that dam removal will bring salmon up to the Upper Basin. That train left the station long ago. The stocks at the dam are hatchery stocks and I doubt they would have the stamina to go another 100 miles up river.
The Karuk and Yurok tribe want spawning areas for spring chinook because the stock fills a seasonal food niche. As I said, that run no longer exists on the Klamath and there are only a handfull in the Salmon River - not enough to try to reseed.
Simply pulling down the dams isn’t going to do much with the accumulation of sediment behind them that will mobilize down the river to silt in spawning beds for years and most probably extirpate remaining salmon runs in the Klamath.
They are now using the bogus excuse that toxic algae is being cause by the dams. Siskiyou County’s Health Department has determined that there is currently insufficient scientific information that the algae is toxic to humans.
The Riverkeeper claims the dams have killed the Klamath Chinook runs to the point that they have become so depressed that the fishing season has been closed for 700 miles alkong the coast. Actually, it was two parasitic diseases that have attacked juvenile fish and have cause mass mortality in the Klamath - parvacapsula and Ceratomyxa Shasta. There is insufficient scientific information to tie the dams with increased incidence of the diseases.
With the new FERC relicensing of the dams, PacifiCorp will have to put in fish ladders as a condition of the license. They did not at the last licensing as they built a mitigation hatchery operated by the Department of Fish and Game to compensate for the impact of the dams on runs. This is what primarily stocks the Klamath chinook fishery for commercial and tribal fisheries. I guess the hatcheries will not be required upon relicensing. If you think current impacts have been bad, wait and see the impact that will have on fisheries.
This mostly a PR stunt to gather publicity for their march to the stockholders meeting of PacifiCorp.