Posted by Snow in 
Dam-cam Oregon: In Grant’s Pass, Oregon, the dam came tumbling down. On purpose. And the people threw up their hands and cheered…And if the fish could cheer they would throw up their fins in glee.
Activists fighting their hardest to save the fish beating themselves against the dam wall finally got a break. A break in the concrete.
The tortured saga of the Oregon Rogue River dam is a curious footnote from a state renowned for its sustainability and eco-friendly living. The death of thousands of fish, which slammed themselves into the concrete wall of the dam in a futile effort to head upstream, is finally over.
In the Oregon of the Pacific Northwest, where activists bit deep, the Marmot Dam on the Sandy River near Portland was demolished in 2007. An agreement reached last month will remove 4 dams on Klamath River. This will be possibly the world’s biggest river restoration project. Dams on Washington’s Elwha River are slated for 2012 removal.
One of four dams being dismantled on the Rogue River, Savage Rapids (known locally as a major fish killer) and close by projects could be brought down by next year, returning a 157-mile stretch of the river to its natural state.
Oregon activists have been shining the light on this dam for a while. These moves save fish and relative micro eoclogies, as the migrating salmon and steelhead met a brick wall (in this case concrete) trying to swim upstream.
Savage was providing cheap, needed water to farmers and homeowners in the Grants Pass Irrigation District, who owned the water rights since 1918. Nowhere does the divide between capitalist structure of managed municipal services and history of anti-sustainable practices become so well illustrated.
Mill closures in rural southern Oregon have cut back logging to protect the endangered spotted owl. The coho salmon, one of several species of salmon and steelhead trout that migrate up the Rogue River, is one of interrupted traffic fish species.
Environmental activists, governmental acknowledgement of the problem, and a new population that wants green rivers finally won the day. Activists uses the pretext legally that killing salmon protected by the Endangered Species Act should shut down the dam. The district countersued.
Hamilton described the damage to fish: “You could see the fish try to come up here and try to leap over a 40-foot dam. They’d hit the spillway and fall back down.” In other cases, fish would struggle to climb the dam’s rudimentary fish ladder — meant to help fish migrate past a barrier — but would fall out and die. Young fish migrating out to sea would get trapped in the water pumps’ screens and perish.
The Bureau of Reclamation concluded that it would be cheaper to remove the aging facility and build electrically powered pumps in the river to get the Grants Pass district the water it needed.
In 2001, a consent decree was signed, ending all of the legal fights. In it, everybody got a piece of what they wanted. The dam would go, but WaterWatch and others would help the district get federal money to do the work and build a new pumping plant. The federal authorization came in 2003, followed by $36 million in federal appropriations and $3 million from the state.
Work began in 2006, leading up to the moments Friday when water began rushing past the old dam and through the river’s old stream bed.
Shepherd, of the irrigation district, said the agency had been faced with huge costs for improving the old dam, the loss of much of its water rights, a lawsuit from the federal government and no money to fight any of it. Irrigation district residents voted in 2000, and the majority favored dam removal.
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