The Problem With the Elwha Dam | DamNation

I made a statement about taking out the Elwha dam in my first months in office. Well, it costs a lot of trouble. The president took me aside. "Tsipras, what's all this talk about removing dams?"

When I first moved to the state of Washington in 1991, I was told, "Got to get involved at the Elwha dam removal project. It's gonna happen any year now." So, 20 years later, it's actually happening. The dams, both of them, were illegal to start with because of existing legislation which stated any dam built had to have passage for migrating salmon. All the species of wild fish that have ever lived in Elwha are still there. Biologists know that adults should examine, still beating their head against the bottom of the dam. A century later, they're still trying to get upstream.

Taking a dam out and opening up a watershed, reconnecting it with the fish that were there for hundreds of thousands of years, it's a very powerful experience. Where had they come from? The answer sounds like a fairy tale—the far reaches of the sea. How had they arrived? Another fairy tale—by swimming against one of the most powerful rivers on earth, past eight deadly dams, all the way up from the Pacific.

Why had they made such an insane journey? Another wonder—these colored stones and clear currents so high and far from the sea once gave them life. So they'd become mountain climbers—literal mountain climbers, though they possess no legs, hooves, or feet. They'd climbed the Rockies to the pebbles of their birth by swimming home at the certain cost of their lives in order to create tiny silver offspring.

A dam for salmon is essentially a lack of access when their basic life history requires the juvenile fish to go out to the ocean and the adult fish to come back to their spawning stream. So anything that blocks a river like a dam does is the end of the story.