Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
August 30, 2024
“I witnessed the 2002 fish kill on the Klamath River,” said Thompson, who’s now 28 and a member of the Yurok Tribe. “It was devastating seeing thousands of dead bodies the same size as me in the river.”
That horrific event spurred Thompson and many other Yurok, Karuk, Hupa and Klamath Tribes people to lead a two-decade campaign to save the Klamath River from death. Their solution: Remove four dams that impeded the free flow of the river and had bred deadly algae that led to the 2002 fish die-off. On Tuesday, the final impediment was removed and the Klamath was again a free-flowing river. The coffer dams, which had diverted water from the last two outdated hydroelectric dams undergoing demolition, were breached, allowing the river to reclaim its ancient course and reopen up to 400 miles of salmon spawning and nursery habitats. River and salmon protectors cheered and cried tears of joy as the coffer dams at Iron Gate and Copco I were broken open and the waters flowed down the river’s ancient channel. It’s the beginning of the end of a more than 20-year battle to remove the dams and restore the river during the nation’s largest-ever dam removal project…
The Klamath River has been hammered by more than 100 years of mismanagement and injustices against tribal communities. Some of those included building dams on ancestral Shasta Nation lands, replumbing the Upper Klamath Basin for agriculture and channelizing a key tributary resulting in massive amounts of phosphorus flowing into the Upper Klamath Lake and eventually, the lower river. Salmon and other fish populations, deprived of hundreds of miles of quiet pools to lay their eggs and for the juvenile fish to survive and thrive, shrank by about 95%, which led to the federal government enacting protections for some salmon populations. And as the salmon’s numbers diminished, so did the spirit of the Native peoples who have called the Klamath home for uncounted centuries. Salmon is at the heart of the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Shasta, Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Paiute peoples. They measured their lives by the seasons of spring and fall salmon runs. Combined with other nourishing foods like acorn, berries and, along the coast, seaweed, the Klamath’s human inhabitants were only as healthy as the river that flowed through their homelands…
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued the final approval for the removal of the lower four Klamath River dams in November 2023, and removal started shortly afterward. Two other dams upriver from the four that were removed, the Link River Dam and the Keno Dam, have fish ladders installed…The removal of the final coffer dams means that salmon and other migratory fish now have an unimpeded aquatic highway to Upper Klamath Lake, the Sprague and the Williamson Rivers.