Dams Power Down İn The Largest US Dam Removal

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.

The fish are particularly important to members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, whose ancestors have occupied the Elwha Valley for generations and whose members recall stories of 100-pound Chinook salmon so plentiful you could walk across the river on their backs.

"We have never been happy that the salmon runs in the river were cut off," said Robert Elofson, Elwha River restoration director for the tribe, which along with environmental groups fought in the 1980s to tear down the dams. The tribe's land now includes about 1,000 acres on and near the Elwha River. "It's hard to have any pride when your main river of your tribe has been blocked and the salmon runs almost totally destroyed."