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<P><A
href="http://crosscut.com/2009/11/03/science-environment/19322/">http://crosscut.com/2009/11/03/science-environment/19322/</A></P>
<H1>How taking out dams splits environmental groups</H1>
<P class=story-description></P>
<P>The issues are maddeningly complex and politically explosive. Here's a close
look at the bedeviled Klamath River basin, where a seeming agreement is dividing
the greens.</P>
<H3 class=byline>By <A href="">Daniel Jack Chasan</A> </H3>
<H4 class=story-date><A href="">November 03, 2009</A>.</H4>
<P class=story-body></P>
<P><B>The mighty are falling.</B> Right now, they're toppling one after another
— those dams and dikes that have altered the natural flow of Northwestern waters
for the past century. </P>
<P>Consider: On October 9, the 500-foot-long earthen Savage Rapids Dam, which
had blocked the lower Rogue River since 1921 <A href="">bit the dust</A>. A week
before, <A href="">contractors breached the last of the dikes</A> that had kept
Puget Sound tides from most of the Nisqually River estuary since the turn of the
20th century.</P>
<P>Next year, <A href="">PacifiCorp will take down</A> its 125-foot concrete
Condit Dam, which has blocked southwest Washington's White Salmon River just
north of the Columbia Gorge since 1913. The Elwha dams, which have kept salmon
from the watershed that forms 20 percent of Olympic National Park since long
before the park was created, will start coming down in 2011. And 25 government
agencies, state governments, tribes, and interest groups have agreed with
PacifiCorp on a process that may lead to removal of four dams that have blocked
the Klamath River for most of the past century.</P>
<P>These are not minor projects. The Nisqually project is the biggest estuary
restoration in the Northwest. The Condit project will be the biggest dam removal
in the United States, and the Elwa dam removal will be even bigger. And the
Klamath? “When the Klamath dams come down it will be the biggest dam removal
project the world has ever seen,” said Steve Rothert of American Rivers.
Rothert, whose group was at the negotiating table, said that when the dams come
down, “we will be able to watch on a grand scale as a river comes back to
life.”</P>
<P>Need more? Some environmental groups also hope that the Klamath agreement
points the way toward a decision to breach the lower Snake River dams.</P>
<P><B>As you can easily imagine, the factors</B> in such massive alterations of
the landscape cut in many directions. That has meant environmental groups are
lined up on opposing sides of some of the disputes. </P>
<P>Take the Klamath River, for starters. Virtually no one claims that taking out
the Klamath dams would be a bad idea. But will the Klamath agreement hold up?
That remains to be seen. And would the benefits of dam removal outweigh the
environmental costs imposed on the Klamath Basin by the agreement? Some
environmental groups say they won't. They argue that if you're fixated on the
welfare of salmon and the principle of dam removal, then you may not look too
closely at the price tag. If price is a consideration, though, you may decide
that the rewards are too uncertain and the known costs are too high.</P>
<P>PacifiCorp owns the Klamath dams, the first of which went up in 1918, the
last in 1962. The company itself, which operates in Washington, Oregon,
California, and Utah, is owned by MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, which in
turn is largely owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. It had been owned
by Glasgow-based Scottish Power. But representatives of the Hoopa Valley, Yurok,
Karuk and Klamath tribes demonstrated against the dams' effect on Klamath River
salmon outside the company's annual meeting in 2004, and the next year, Scottish
Power unloaded its American subsidiary.</P>
<P>Federal licenses to operate the dams expired in 2006, and more than a decade
ago, PacifiCorp started the relicensing process. NOAA Fisheries and the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service insisted that the company install fish ladders. The
California Energy Commission, the Interior Department, and FERC concluded that
if fish ladders were the price of relicensing, PacifiCorp and its customers
would save money if the utility just took the dams down.</P>
<P>The Hoopa Valley tribe, which occupies a reservation along the Klamath's
largest tributary, the Trinity River, northeast of Eureka, would love to see the
Klamath dams come down. But the Hoopas don't like the proposed agreement.
Seattle attorney Tom Schlosser, who represents the tribe, explains that “it's
not a dam-removal agreement. It's a planning process.” </P>
<P>Dam removal is discussed as a done deal, but that's not what the agreement
says. For openers, members of negotiating groups have yet to ratify it. If the
agreement goes forward, it requires the Secretary of the Interior to decide in
2012 whether or not the benefits of dam removal would outweigh the costs. If he
decides they would, dam removal could start in 2020, but there are many other
contingencies. The states of Oregon and California can back out. The whole
agreement is linked to a complex settlement of disputes over water in the
Klamath Basin, upstream from the dams. Such settlements would require
Congressional blessing — and a Congressional appropriation of $985 million.
Schlosser doubts all this is going to happen.</P>
<P>Without the agreement, FERC could tell PacifiCorp to take down the dams. With
the agreement in place, however, FERC will effectively be unable to do that. The
utility “has gotten the parties to agree that it will take an act of Congress to
remove those dams,” Schlosser says. “They've gotten themselves thrown into the
briar patch.”</P>
<P>American Rivers' Steve Rothert acknowledges that the agreement is “not a
guarantee.” He says “American Rivers would prefer that dam removal was certain
and sooner.” However, he says, “we are confident . . . that removal will be
determined to be in the public interest and will happen.” The biggest hurdle, he
notes, was getting all the participants to agree. With that accomplished, “there
are no real show-stoppers to date.”</P>
<P><B>Assuming the dams will eventually come out, PacifiCorp can keep operating
them,</B> with no significant operating changes, for more than a decade. Critics
say the utility is getting a long free pass. They also point out that the
agreement does not help fish that try to spawn in the Klamath's tributary Shasta
and Scott rivers, which are virtually sucked dry to irrigate farms in central
California. “The Scott and the Shasta rivers are basically de-watered,” says
WaterWatch of Oregon's executive director John De Voe. “This deal won't do a
damn thing to address those problems.”</P>
<P>The deal also locks in allocations of water and money that critics say will
prevent rational water management in the Klamath Basin for another 50 years.
Oregon Wild conservation director Steve Pedery says it will “cement Bush
priorities in the basin.” (The Bush administration's approach to the basin had
less to do with helping farmers grow potatoes than with <A href="">helping Karl
Rove grow votes</A>.)</P>
<P>The Klamath Basin made national headlines in 2001, when <A href="">the Bureau
of Reclamation had refused to let water flow</A> to its Klamath irrigation
project. The Bureau was under court order to protect two endangered species of
bottom-dwelling fish called suckers, which inhabit Upper Klamath Lake and
several smaller local water bodies, as well as a threatened population of coho
salmon that spawns in California tributaries of the Klamath River. The farmers
who raised potatoes, alfalfa, and other crops on the 220,000 acres of the
federal irrigation project had already borrowed money to plant this year’s
crops. They were left high and dry. That May, a “bucket brigade” drew an
estimated 12,000 people to Klamath Falls. Protesters chainsawed the locks off
the headgates and let water flow into the irrigation canals. They also laid pipe
around the headgates. In August, a caravan of sympathizers from towns all over
the west arrived in Klamath Falls bearing food for the local farmers.</P>
<P>The following March, the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior flew to
Klamath Falls, ceremonially opened the headgate, and let water flow once again.
That fall,, thousands of chinook salmon died in the mouth of the Klamath River,
waiting for enough water to move upstream. They were crowded tightly together.
The water got warm. Diseases spread. More than 30,000 mature fish perished.
Seattle attorney Tom Schlosser, who represents the Hoopa tribe, calls it “ the
largest adult salmon die-off in recorded history.” The California Department of
Fish and Game laid the blame for the massive fish kill squarely on the diversion
of irrigation water.</P>
<P><B>Under the proposed settlement, farmers in the irrigation district would
get water,</B> no questions asked, for the next half century. The proposed
agreement also “calls for federal appropriations of $985 million and confers
many benefits on Klamath Project irrigaters,” writes Schlosser, “including $41
million in power subsidies; $92.5 million to implement their own water plan that
they develop without public oversight; [and] preferential Columbia River
hydro-system power rates.”</P>
<P>Water flowing to the irrigation project won't help fish negotiate the river.
Critics argue that the proposed Klamath dam agreement therefore wouldn't
guarantee an adequate flow at key times of the year. Schlosser has written that
the basin agreement “guarantees irrigation diversions of water for the Klamath
Irrigation District Project in Oregon. Those diversions — 330,000 to 385,000
acre-feet per year-— would trump the in-stream flow needs of fish and other
aquatic organisms. Fish would get whatever water flow remains.” </P>
<P>The Hoopas won a long legal battle with the big Westlands Irrigation District
to get more water left in the Trinity, which had been de-watered just as the
Scott and Shasta have been. They worry that low flows will make it harder for
adult fish to swim upstream to the mouth of the Trinity and for smolts to
survive the journey downstream. De Voe says modeling shows that if the
irrigaters get their guarantee, then in 40 percent of water-year types, there
will actually be less water in the river than there is now. “We have a hard time
rationalizing <I>less </I>water in the river,” he says. “I've been describing
this thing as 'faith-based conservation,'”</P>
<P>Rothert counters that “at one point, . . . scientists had expressed some
concerns about flows,” but their concerns have been answered. “I'm afraid that
some of he other conservation groups have not kept up with the science,” he
says. They may be “holding on to ghosts.”</P>
<P><B>Another vexing problem lies with birds. The basin's national wildlife
refuges, which provide vital</B> feeding and resting stops for the millions of
birds that follow the Pacific Flyway north and south, get some water, but their
water rights remain junior, so in a pinch, potatoes will get water before birds
do. On the other hand, Rothert says, “for more than 100 years, the refuges have
been a neglected stepchild,” entitled only to leftovers from the irrigation
district. Now, for the first time, they would be guaranteed water in
perpetuity.</P>
<P>Critics concede that. They just say the refuges still won't get <I>enough</I>
water. They also point out that farmers who currently cultivate some 22,000
acres in the refuges retain the right to do so for another 50 years. Crops take
up so much acreage, says Pedery, that if you look at a satellite photograph of
the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, “you can't find the refuge.”</P>
<P>“If you look at a map of the Pacific Flyway,” Pedery says, you see that “it's
shaped like an hourglass, and the thinnest part of the hourglass is the Klamath
Basin.” An estimated 90 percent of the birds that use the flyway stop there. And
the largest collection of wintering eagles outside Alaska shows up every year to
feast on them. As land has been developed in northern California, the migratory
birds' alternatives have disappeared. Given the importance of the Basin and its
refuges, Pedery says, and in the face of both climate change and increasing
development in California, how can you lock in a 50-year commitment to provide a
fixed amount of water to irrigation? “From a science point of view,” he
suggests, “that's the Achilles heel of the settlement.”</P>
<P><B>Oregon Wild and Water Watch were forced out of the negotiations a couple
of years ago.</B> All the participants were told that the price of staying in
was agreeing to everything already on the table, which included parts of the
Klamath Basin deal that they hadn't discussed. Basically, Pedery says, they were
told, “if you want to stay in the process, you have to support the Bush
priorities.” Other folks "felt the precedent of dam removal was so important
that the details of the deal didn't matter,” Pedery says. His group did not. On
the surface all was amicable. In private, says Pedery, “my staff was told at
some point: 'we're going to kick you out, and no one will care.'” He says it was
all “quite a shock to us.”</P>
<P>If the agreement goes forward, expect more litigation. The Hoopas have
already asked FERC to impose conditions on the year-to-year operating licenses
it grants PacifiCorp. Turned down, they have filed an appeal in D.C. Circuit
Court. The appeal was stayed as a price of being in on the negotiations. Now,
the Hoopas must decide whether or not to go on with it. </P>
<P>Whatever they decide, this issue will wind up in court, and environmental
groups will presumably line up on both sides.</P>
<DIV class=author-bios>
<P>Daniel Jack Chasan is an author, attorney, and writer of many articles about
Northwest environmental issues. You can reach him in care of <A
href="">editor@crosscut.com</A>.</P></DIV>
<H4>View this story online at: <A
href="">http://crosscut.com/2009/11/03/science-environment/19322/</A></H4>
<H4>© 2009 Crosscut Public Media. All rights reserved.</H4>Printed on November
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