Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Tamara Dean: Welcome to the Terrain.org podcast Conversations with authors, artists, scientists and others who share Terrain.org's passion for place and focus on climate, community and justice. I'm podcast editor Tamara Dean.
In this episode I talk with Tara Lohan, longtime environmental journalist and author of Undammed Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life. Published by Island Press in 2025, Undammed describes how we've attempted to control the path and flow of nearly every major river in the US it highlights dam removal projects across the country and reveals how people and ecosystems are transformed by returning rivers to their free flowing state.
I began our conversation by asking Tara to describe how she started writing about dam removal.
[00:01:02] Tara Lohan: Yeah, I have been an environmental journalist for about 20 years and I have found myself over most of that time writing about water issues and a lot about how water overlaps with pretty much everything else. So that has included energy and biodiversity and climate change.
For a while I was covering what I would call the extreme energy beat, which was fracking, mountain removal, coal mining and tar sands mining and the ways in which we were trying to get harder and harder to reach fossil fuels and what that meant for communities and what that meant for water and people's health. And so I traveled across the country and I met a lot of people who were finding that their rural communities were becoming rapidly industrialized. They were finding water pollution problems and air pollution problems and health problems. And it was really eye opening for me and also a little bit soul crushing. I reported on that issue for a long time and felt like not a lot was changing.
At the same time I was writing about how climate change was getting worse and biodiversity loss was increasing cumulatively. It started to really have an impact on me.
I don't know if folks have ever experienced not wanting to read the news, but I felt like I didn't want to write the news anymore.
But along the way I had been intermittently writing about data removals by accident at first because they were a way that all these issues were overlapping water and energy and environmental justice. But the more I wrote them, the more I really enjoyed writing them because I think that they were a good news story and readers liked reading them. Probably I think for the same reason it was nice to get a dose of good news.
But the deeper I dug into the issue, the more I realized that it was more than just good news that was happening. It was a really deep shift that was happening at the ecological level and at the social level, and I wanted to understand more about what that was and what it meant for us.
[00:02:56] Tamara: Yes, so you wrote Undammed Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life, which covers not just the mechanics of dam removal, but also the repercussions on ecosystems and human communities as well. And it's fascinating. But before we get into those topics, I want to ask you about your comment. In the book's introduction. You mentioned that writing about dam removals was kind of a lifeline for you and. And an antidote to crisis fatigue. Tell me more about that.
[00:03:26] Tara: Yeah, I think it was just this overwhelming sense of everything about the environment was starting to feel really bad. You know, certainly there were bright spots. We have more solar panels and we have electric cars and things like that, but we weren't really making a dent in the way that we needed to. And I was thinking about how when I was beginning reporting in the early 2000s, we were talking about ways in which we could. What we could do about climate change. And then I felt like 10 or 15 years later, we were talking about, I use we very broadly about whether or not climate change exists. And so we weren't even making significant progress in the areas. And in some senses we were moving backwards. And so it felt really discouraging. And I think seeing just a lot of development around, seeing more fracking and mountaintop removal, mining and logging and stuff, and just the impact that it was having ecologically. And I think that the impact that it has on people, I mean, I think people understand that to be in nature is this really amazing way to benefit our health and that the less nature we have around us, that really impacts how we're able to be in the world. And so being able to write about dam removals, I started to see that we could undo harm in really significant ways. And there was meaningful change that was happening, and it was happening at the ecological level and it was happening for communities and, and that gave me a lot of hope and led me to more reporting and, yeah, uncovering more good stories.
[00:04:52] Tamara: Tara, give us a high level overview of the dam infrastructure in the United States, including, you know, how many dams we have, which ones are still functional and useful today and how many are not being used. And also tell us a little bit more about how dam removal came to be and how many dams have been removed.
[00:05:13] Tara: Yeah, so dams have been being built very, very quickly after European colonists got to North America. Certainly dams have been built all over Europe, and they were built to generate power.
So they powered mills that ground grain and produce lumber and all sorts of things like that.
I was researching the Kennebec river and the Edwards Dam for this book. And when the Edwards Dam was built in Maine on the Kennebec river in I think it was like the 1840s, there was already something like 65,000 water powered mills. So dams essentially across the East. So there were a lot of dams very quickly. And that ramped up during the Industrial Revolution. And then in the 1900s, dams started getting much bigger as we started building more dams in the West. And certainly folks know Hoover Dam built in the 1930s is quite large.
I think after World War II, things really got going. From 1950 to about 1979, there was about 1700 dams built a year.
So it's an extraordinary number of dams. If you look in the national inventory of dams, which is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, they'll say that there's 92,000 dams in the country. But those are dams that are generally over 25ft tall.
More research has been done recently by the Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership and some federal agencies that have looked at dams of all different sizes across the US and they've actually found more than 500,000 dams.
So many of those are small dams, and I do write about those in the book because they do have important implications for public safety and for ecology and wildlife as well.
But the dam removal movement, I think, really got going around the year 2000.
So American rivers keeps a database of dam removals that goes back to 1912. And they have about probably close to 2,300 dam removals that are in there now. But around 2,000 of those have really been the last 25 years.
That was when the Edwards Dam was removed in Maine on the Kennebec River. And that was the first big main stem dam that came down. It was a hydroelectric dam and it was regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is called FERC for short. It was the first time that this agency had actually recommended that a hydro dam be removed to help fish passage and to help the environment, because the dam was really doing more harm than good. It produced a very insignificant amount of power and it blocked 11 native species of sea run fish there. That was a really big deal. And it helped give a lot of weight to this idea that dam removal was something that should be considered. And it wasn't this far off notion and some crazy concept. It was really quite necessary in some cases to begin reevaluating this infrastructure that we've had on the landscape in some places for hundreds of years.
[00:07:59] Tamara: And as you write, dam removal can be very controversial because these dams, although they might not be functional anymore, they might not power a mill, for example. They are part of a community's heritage and imagination and self image. But that history of a river, whether dammed or free flowing, can cut both ways. It can be an argument for or against dam removal. Can you talk a little bit about how dams figure into a community? Self image or imagination?
[00:08:31] Tara: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways I saw this a lot. In the east coast, especially where we have dams that have been around for a lot longer. There were towns that were founded as mill towns and dams helped make that possible. In many cases, the mill building, some are still standing, but often mills burned down. So the buildings might be gone, but the dam has been left in the river. And often they don't serve a purpose anymore. There's not a specific number that I can point to, but there's at least tens of thousands of dams that folks call deadbeat dams, which serve no function anymore.
But they may be places where people have fishing holes or places where swim because they form a lake or a pond. And so there's this cultural connection, but also there's this idea that it's sort of a monument for the town and they attached history to that.
And that's one way to look at it. I have some problems with that view. Part of it is because it takes a very narrow view of history, a very short view of history.
The dams may have been there for a couple hundred years, perhaps at the most, but that river was free flowing and those fish populations abundant for thousands of years. And native people lived along those rivers in many places for thousands of years with those free flowing rivers. And so I think that's a longer view of history. In some senses, dams have upended the really historical significance of areas. So that's part of it.
There have been towns like Plymouth, Massachusetts, I write about in the book. You know, Plymouth is where the pilgrims came ashore. They have, you know, a million tourists a year that come there to understand and visit in colonial history.
But Plymouth is a place that has taken down 13 dams. They took down five dams along town Brook, which is this small stream that's only a mile and a half long and it runs through the historic part of Plymouth. And they found that these dams, which were all deadbeat dams, were making things worse for their community and causing flooding and blocking runs of native fish populations like river herring. And that it didn't impede them from keeping the historical character of their town by removing these dilapidated structures.
And where there's a dam site there, they have plaques, they have photos, they list you know, the purposes that the dam served and its historical importance to the town. But they didn't feel like they needed to keep the structure in the river in order to recognize that history. And I think that's a good way of looking at things.
[00:10:53] Tamara: Yeah. And it seems like even dam removal skeptics have been turned around by what's happened after the dam is removed. These public spaces that become community gathering areas and, as you say, opportunities for recreational activities.
And seeing the river flowing free again has its own magic, which seems a bit contagious, according to your stories. And while reading your book, it struck me how thoughtlessly dams were constructed from the earliest days.
And even after we understood how they would impact a fish's ability to spawn and how they would devastate cultural sites, flooding burial grounds and villages, the construction continued.
So it surprised me that dam builders and owners, even if they're required to provide things like fish passage, just weren't doing it. They weren't abiding by the law. And why do you think that they could so thoughtlessly build and keep operating these dams?
[00:11:50] Tara: Yeah, you know, I don't know. In most cases, it varies. There are some dams. Some dams were built before we had modern environmental laws, and so they weren't required to have fish passage. Or in some cases, there were state laws. And Washington passed a law in the late 1800s to require fish passage, but it just simply wasn't enforced. And there wasn't enough groundswell of support for environmental issues or folks that were listening to tribal members that were saying, hey, this is going to be a really big problem.
In some cases, dams that we built were so big that they couldn't have fish passage. They said, okay, you don't have to, which makes no sense at all. We built this enormous structure that blocks fish passes, and then we say it's too big to even try to put something up.
Sometimes they tried to build fish passage and it washed out. They had old fish ladders, and then they never rebuilt them because people just didn't pressure or they just really weren't that successful. A lot of these fish passages don't work very well for the species that maybe they were intended for, like salmon. And they certainly don't work well for other species that we know are also in the river, like, you know, eels and lamprey that move very differently.
So I think that's part of it. I mean, it was astounding to me when I was researching the loss of Atlantic salmon on the east coast and then reading about the building of dams on The Columbia and Snake rivers in the 1960s and 1970s, and that were sort of replicating the mistakes that have been made on the east coast, which they had replicated the same thing that had happened in Europe, the loss of fish runs there.
When they were building dams in the late 1800s and early 1900s on the Pacific coast, they were starting to send salmon back to the east coast because they didn't have it anymore.
So certainly folks knew about the implications of what it meant for fish. But some resources were prioritized over others, and some people were prioritized over others.
[00:13:39] Tamara: Yeah, definitely. And in your book, you also mentioned legislation. So what impact did the Clean Water act have on dam removals?
[00:13:47] Tara: I think it had a lot, not necessarily directly. You know, people don't often sue over Clean Water act stuff, although water quality is an important part of, you know, implications with dam removals and stuff, because reservoirs can impede water quality. They can heat up the water behind a dam and cause toxic algae blooms, or they can collect toxic sediments. But mostly what I found was that it was just this precursor to dam removal and the restoration of rivers. So I saw this especially in New England and in the Midwest, too, a bit, where for a long time, rivers were used as open sewers. Before we had the Clean Water act, there was municipal waste, industrial waste, and all sorts of things.
Folks I talked to in Maine on the Kennebec said that if you fell into the Kennebec, it was not hyperbole. You were taken to the hospital.
People built buildings along the water with no windows facing the river because it wasn't something that you appreciated. It was actually a liability.
And the Clean Water Act, which was passed in 1972, started putting money into water treatment systems and better regulations to control pollution. And that did a lot to clean up our rivers, which was a really important first step. And then people began fishing again and then realizing that there was this life in the river and it was a place that they might like to recreate. And I think that opened the door to people then advocating for more and deeper kinds of river restoration.
And that happened certainly in many rivers in Maine. And Maine has been really at the forefront of a lot of dam removals.
But I saw it especially actually on the Cuyahoga river in Ohio, which is one of my favorite stories. The Cuyahoga river is, you know, famously caught fire in 1969 because it was so polluted. And they did a lot to clean up that river with the Clean Water Act. But by the 1990s, late 1980s, they realized that they still weren't meeting some of their water quality goals. And the problem was actually these dam pools, the area that was behind the dams. And they had a series of dams. I think mostly all of them were deadbeat dams on the river. And they decided that the best way to try to improve water quality was to begin removing some of these dams. And they ended up, through a very long process. With the first dam, it took seven years to come to an agreement with the community there that worked for everyone. And they actually left the structure, which was deemed historical, but they bypassed the dam, and so the river freely ran past there. And then they removed four more dams. And it really allowed the river to regain its ecological health. It was a place that had no discernible life in it in 1969. And now there's dozens of species of fish. They're bringing back endangered lake sturgeon. And it's been a place that people now go and recreate. And it's a real testament to river restoration. And it was something that, you know, started with the Clean Water act, but really required dam removal in order to fully achieve those benefits.
[00:16:42] Tamara: Yeah. And that reminds me again of all the repercussions through parts of the ecosystem that occur when a dam is removed. Can you give our listeners a few other examples of where you got to witness animal life and soil and air quality improving after a dam removal?
[00:16:59] Tara: The Elwha river is a great story. It is. The Elwha runs through Olympic national park and Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. And two dams were removed there. They were very large dams. They came down between 2011 and 2014, and it was this wonderful rewilding project, in part because the landscape was pretty undeveloped, because a lot of it was in the national park. And it created a great opportunity to see what happens when you take down a dam. These two dams had reservoirs behind them that were quite large, and they had corralled a lot of sediment. And so the dam removals actually took three years to slowly release the sediment downstream. So it didn't overwhelm the environment, but it really showed what happens when a river is able to flow naturally again.
Dams can block the flow of water, but they also block the movement of sediment, which is really important that sand and cobble and gravel washes downstream and actually created this big estuary at the mouth of the river.
The movement of sediment downstream for coastal rivers helps to replenish ocean beaches. It creates sandbars and banks along the river that are useful habitat for fish and other aquatic animals in this area. There's also five native species of Pacific salmon as well as other sea run fish. And these fish are born in the river and they go out to the ocean and they spend a number of years there getting bigger and eating things there. When they come back to the rivers, they bring with them marine derived nutrients, phosphorus and nitrogen that come from the oceans. And if they're able to swim up, so then they bring all these nutrients upstream with them. The first dam on the Elwha river was actually at mile five.
For 100 years, fish were blocked really pretty much from the mouth of the river from getting upstream. All those nutrients were blocked from getting up there as well. Salmon, they feed something like over 100 different species with their bodies. When they spawn and die, they break down and then that helps to feed the whole ecosystem. Trees benefit from that and all the different plants on the riverbanks and it feeds the soil.
They say that you can see the greening from space in areas where there's a lot of huge runs of Pacific salmon and stuff, because the nutrient impact is like a shot of vitamins. It's quite extraordinary when the trees grow along the river banks because the salmon are there and they're helping to fertilize them, then that shades the creek and that helps cool the water. And salmon like cool water, so it's mutually beneficial.
They've studied birds in this area. American dippers are a small bird there, and they've realized that when dippers have access to salmon eggs, that they do much better. They have better breeding success than when they don't. And so that has been another repercussion that they've seen there. Bears that had stopped coming down to the river to hunt for fish are now coming back to the river again in the fall.
And so they've just seen the way in which the whole ecosystem there is changing, and it's had a wonderful impact on life there. There are larger species too, that depend on salmon.
So in parts of the Pacific Northwest, like the Puget Sound southern, resident killer whales, also known as orcas, which are few in number these days, really rely on chinook salmon, particularly as a food source. And with the building of dams in that area, including the Columbia and Snake rivers, there's been a real loss of chinook salmon, and that's partially leading to the endangerment of these whales. So Pacific salmon feed a lot of animals in the world and the ecosystem and of course, people as well.
[00:20:36] Tamara: Yeah, thanks for that. I love getting the larger scale picture of how dam removals affect ecosystems, but you also Write about groups that are nudging along the restoration behind the dam removals. What's involved in that restoration, how does it begin, and who's doing Takes a
[00:20:53] Tara: lot of different forms. On the Elwha river, the effort was led initially and all throughout the process by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. And in many places, tribes have been at the forefront of leading dam removal efforts and also stewarding that landscape during and after dam removal and continuing with restoration. On the Elwha river, there were two large reservoirs that were unearthed after the water was receded. And so there was years that was spent before that collecting seed and propagating native seeds so that that could be replanted and restored. And it's actually this beautiful riparian forest now.
So, you know, that work, as a lot of work, starts before dam removal in terms of understanding what the ecosystem needs and planning for it. Obviously, on the Elwha, it was a lot of planning to figure out how to move sediment naturally and safely downstream.
The same thing has happened in other places, like. Like on the Klamath river in California, where four large dams came down in the last couple of years. And so that was a lot of planning ahead of time. Tribes were very involved with that. There's been a number of environmental groups that have worked on this issue. American Rivers, from the very beginning, has been at the forefront of leading this work, as well as groups like Trout Unlimited and Caltrout, Lenox Salmon Federation and others that have helped guide this work. They have helped create technical working groups so that communities and smaller watershed groups and municipalities, municipalities could have the tools and resources they need to understand and evaluate how a dam removal would happen. And certainly a lot of federal agencies like NOAA have been involved in this work as well.
[00:22:33] Tamara: It really does take a lot of people and organizations to make this succeed. And I wonder if you can think of a case when a dam has been removed and there's been great regret about removing it.
[00:22:45] Tara: No, I don't think so. I did look, and I really tried to find, like, there was some.
On the Kennebec river in Maine, the Edwards Dam was removed in 1999. That was this really big deal. And, like, a thousand people came out and celebrated it. And then several years later, as part of a settlement that happened with that, another dam was removed upstream on a major tributary on the Sebasticook. And folks there did not want that dam to come down. And it was not celebrated, but it was. The dam owner decided they needed it to come down, too. And so it was removed. And there was a community group that was very against the dam removal there. They wanted to keep that lake like environment that they enjoyed for recreating. And I tried, you know, this was. This happened years ago. I tried to figure out if any of those people were still around, if that group was still around. And I couldn't find any. And I've tried with other dam removal projects to, you know, figure out if there is great regret afterwards. I haven't found that in any significant way.
Actually, one of the. One of the people that I interviewed for the book is. Is this woman, Louise, who works in the state of Virginia with the state agency there. And she's worked on a lot of dam removal and river restoration projects. And I asked her about what was some of the most meaningful projects she worked on. And she talked about one dam removal that was in. It was a small deadbeat dam where a young teenager had actually drowned at the dam. And it was in disrepair, it was liable to fail. The town couldn't afford to maintain it.
But there was a military school in the town and they wanted to keep the dam because they used the impoundment basically as a training exercise. They jumped off something into the water and the water was deep enough only because that lake like environment was there. So there was a person who led the media voice for the school and was really against the dam removal project. And eventually the dam removal did happen.
And Louise had visited the site a year or so later and was paddling upstream to try to look at some restoration work that was happening. And she saw this guy who had been the leading face of the opposition, and he was coming towards her in a boat with his kid. And she said she braced for this really uncomfortable encounter with this man. And as he passed by, he just said, you know, everything looks really beautiful. You did a good job.
I was wrong. And so I think that a lot of times people need to see it, to believe it, which is understandable.
A lot of times we don't understand what it looks like to have a dam removed. And what that means. Some people think that if you take a dam down, the water stops flowing.
And so there's a lot more public education, I think, that needs to be done to help folks understand a little bit better about what dam removals mean and what they can achieve. And some people need to see it in their communities, I think, to appreciate that.
[00:25:26] Tamara: Yeah, that's an excellent point. And you had the opportunity to be present when some of these dams went down. Right.
Can you describe the moment for Our listeners of watching the concrete fall or the rocks come away and the water of the river rushing free again. What does that feel like?
[00:25:44] Tara: I got to go to one small dam removal when I was in Virginia with Louise and it was on Rock Island Creek. It was a small dam, it was on public land and everyone wanted it to be removed. So it wasn't controversial in any way, but the entire dam removal happened in just a single day. And there was, was, you know, I got there and there was this wall in the river and then at the end of the day, it was gone. And so throughout the day, there was an excavator that chipped away at all the rock and the water rushed over, you know, more and more. A beaver actually came out and watched several times to see what was going on. It was quite loud. And then the excavator, you know, changed from this hydraulic ram to a bucket and moved all the rocks out and then repositioned them around the river and on the banks to make sure everything was stable. And then at the end of the day, there's this free flowing river and there's dozens of species in the water that are going to appreciate that. And it was just incredibly eye opening because if you, if you walked up there a day later, you would, I think you would have no idea that there had been a dam there that had actually been there for a couple hundred years.
So it was this amazingly quick transformation that had taken place. And at the same time, over the course of about a year, a year and a half, I got to watch parts of the Klamath Dam removal removals happening. And so that was close to where I live. It's in southern Oregon and Northern California. And this was now the largest dam removal project that has taken place. And so it was four dams. And the first thing that they did that was significant was that they breached the dams to let the water drain out of them. And this is a process that involves having all the reservoirs reduced basically in a great amount as the water drains out. And so you're left with this landscape that looks pretty bad initially. It's very, very muddy. And you can see in some places there's the stumps of where the trees used to be before it was flooded. And it's a bit of an eyesore. If people are not in favor of dam removal, this is one of the parts that they like to point to as being really terrible. But I found it strangely wonderful.
There's a road that goes around one of the reservoirs, kind of up high on the Klamath Irongate Reservoir, and you can get a good view down and see what the river is doing. And I also had a drone, so I flew my drone overhead, and it was incredible to just watch a reservoir becoming a river again, and to watch this river finding its course through the mud and, you know, its journey downstream. And it was really, really beautiful to watch what was happening there. And immediately they began, you know, reseeding the landscape around, and that mud changed to wildflowers and stuff. But even in that moment of what might look kind of bad if you're looking at the mud, I thought was really beautiful. And there are a couple other opportunities to watch. I saw the last coffer dams being breached, and so when they take down these big dams, they form small dams around them, and so it directs the water away from the site where they're working so they can have all their infrastructure there. So the big infrastructure of the dam is removed. Iron gate Dam was 200ft tall, and it was basically a pile of dirt and rocks. And so they hauled all that away and put it back in the hole, actually, where it came from initially.
And what was left at the end was this small earthen coffer dam. And about 100 or so people, maybe less, gathered on the day that they were breaching that dam.
And it was folks from a lot of the tribes that were there. And people spoke about the generations of work that it has taken in the effort of removing these dams and what it means for the people that have made their lives along this river for thousands of years and what it means for the people that live there now.
And then they just had this excavator that started scraping away, and it wasn't this big, huge gush of water. It was a slow trickle. But as soon as you could see the water come through this embankment, people started cheering and crying.
And I stood there with, like, a handful of other people for a couple hours, just watching the whole thing come undone. And then a couple months later, I got to go past that area in a raft. I was out with some folks that were researching the fish that were returning, and we just coasted through there, and there's a small little riff they call coffer Dam Rapid where that. Where that dam had been. And we just had this little bump in the water, and then it was just this free passage that went through there, and it was really extraordinary. Wow.
[00:29:50] Tamara: And I wonder if you can capture some of what the tribes were talking about when they referenced what it meant culturally to have the river running free again.
[00:29:58] Tara: Yeah. So there's a number of tribes that live along the Klamath river both downstream and upstream of where the four dams were. And they had built lives there that are intertwined with a free flowing and healthy river and with the fish, especially the salmon, that have made their home there. And so the loss of salmon, as I was told, was a loss of culture and of religion in many cases, but also also a loss of economics and of health.
There are areas along this river where you don't have a grocery store for a long, long drive.
And these are resources that people depended on that are incredibly healthy. And so that was huge. And I think the loss of all these things affects the sovereignty of tribes.
Leif Hillman, who's from the Karuk tribe, told me that their fight for dam removal had to end in the dams being removed, because for them, it was cultural survival, that they would not have lasted, that it was that important to them that these dams be removed. And they were suffering impacts from water quality as well. There were toxic algae blooms that were happening in the reservoirs, and when the water was released downstream to generate hydropower, that water was coming downstream as well.
There were a lot of impacts to that.
I think as a non native person, it can be really difficult to fully understand what that means.
And I'm grateful for the work that the tribes have done for decades advocating for this, and I think helping people really understand a little bit more clearly what dams have done to communities and to indigenous communities and what dam removal really enables.
[00:31:34] Tamara: Thanks, Tara. Also, earlier you referenced the beaver showing up at a dam removal in Virginia, and it was striking to me in all your stories how quickly species returned. You know, the fish hadn't forgotten how to get to their original spawning grounds. They were just blocked from doing it. And then as soon as those dams went down, they returned. Can you speak a little bit to that?
[00:31:59] Tara: Yeah. So on the Klamath River, folks saw they were not sure how long it would take for fish to get upstream. The dams are a couple hundred miles from the ocean and within what they call the reservoir reach, which is, you know, where these reservoirs had been formed by the dams. There are a number of different tributaries, and the reason why it's important for fish to get there is because these tributaries provide really good habitat for fish. They're clear, they're cold, they have gravel where you can put eggs, and they'll hatch with more success than in the main stem of a river. And so hoping that fish get to these places is really important. And no one knew exactly how long it was going to take. And it happened really pretty much instantaneously. The fall run of fish that were coming in, salmon and steelhead, went immediately right past the dams, like literally within weeks. And then they were upstream and the reservoir reached. They saw them in the tributaries and they were spawning.
And it was really astounding for people to see that. I think there was about 5,000 or 6,000 salmon that passed through the fish. The cameras that they had right where the lowermost dam was at Iron Gate Dam. And then a year later, now this past fall, they've seen fish get beyond that. There's two small dams upstream, and then above that is Upper Klamath Lake. And past that are another set of tributaries that have very amazing quality of habitat for salmon. And so they saw fish this year get all the way through that area, too, which was a very heartening sign.
It'll take longer to understand, you know, and recover fish populations, but certainly the fact that fish are able to get to these places is reassuring and that they're able to find better habitat and probably able to reproduce more quickly.
Along a number of rivers. In Maine, where dam removal is more like a decade or two out, it's been really incredible to watch the return of species there.
One of those that's been incredibly successful are river herring. And in Maine, there's two species of river herring and Massachusetts as well, blueback herring and alewives. And these fish have come back with this wild abundance over a thousand percent in the years following the removal of the Edwards Dam and that other dam I mentioned on the Sebasticook river. And it's just opened up an amazing amount of habitat. And river herring are actually fish that are pretty good at getting up fish ladders when they're well constructed. And so they've also been going through areas where dams have been removed and then getting through a couple of fish elevators or fish ladders and getting to the. They spawn in ponds and lakes, and so they're able to get to the habitat that they need. And it's been this incredible resurgence. And river herring are much like salmon in that they're a keystone species. Every everything eats them. They're much smaller. They're only about a foot long or less. And so there's eagles in the treetops. The fish are returning by the millions as they're migrating. I got to go and watch some of that and saw one stream that was just, you know, bank to bank with this silver, shimmering fish coming up. And people are now having these festivals, town festivals, where they're celebrating river herring and alewives and all the opportunity that brings economically, but also ecologically to folks. It's been really quite extraordinary to watch.
And other fish in the Kennebec have responded very well, associated with sturgeon or another fish that are very, very long lived. And so they're, they're realizing now that sturgeon have more of their habitat that's available to them and they're doing better. And sturgeon are, you know, they can be 8ft long, they're enormous fish, and they leap out of the water. And so people are now crowding along the banks in some areas during their time when they're moving upstream and watching these fish leap out of the water. And it's been a real, real about face, quite literally in an area where folks had turned their backs on the river and, you know, built houses without windows facing the river. And now people are really getting to celebrate the return of these fish and what it means for their economy and also just for their appreciation and connection to nature.
[00:35:57] Tamara: Yeah, and I like all these arguments for dam removal, but still, some people might say, well, they're a source of hydropower and so they contribute to clean energy possibilities.
But reading your book Undammed, I learned that not only are very few dams contributing to hydropower in the US, maybe only 3%, but also, they're sources of greenhouse gases. How can that be?
[00:36:22] Tara: Yeah, I think a lot of people, like you said, they think, oh, well, this is a clean energy source, and so we should keep those dams in order to try to meet our climate goals. And I think that's important to consider.
But we do only have a small percentage, 3% of dams or hydropower dams in this country out of all the dams that we have. And I just saw numbers recently that only like less than 3% of dam removals have been hydropower dams. So it's similar.
So most of the dams that are being removed, that are hydropower dams have also negligible amounts of energy, like the Edwards Dam and the Kennebec. And so that's not a big source of energy there. But then, as you mentioned, there are greenhouse gas emissions that come from the reservoirs formed by dams. And there's been 30 years of research from researchers all over the world that have found this. And it comes from the organic material that is in the reservoir, and it breaks down. They initially started researching this in places like Brazil and other places that were really tropical, where there's a lot more organic material. And so it was initially thought this is just a problem for the tropics but researchers that have been sitting in the US have found that may not be to the same degree as the tropics, but there are emissions that are happening, greenhouse gas emissions, mostly methane, which is more potent greenhouse gas over the short term.
And that's being studied more extensively now in the US I think we still don't have a full understanding of how much greenhouse gas emissions may be coming from our reservoirs.
Part of it is that it's very varied. And so reservoir emissions can happen at different times of the year under different conditions. If a reservoir is drawn down or if there's a freezing and water turns over, if water is released through a turbine, all these different things affect the way water is bubbling or moving or diffusing. And so you could be measuring greenhouse gas emissions 10 months of the year and not find much, but it could happen in one month or a couple of weeks. And so it's more difficult to measure, it's more varied.
And so I think that complicates things a good bit. So we're still learning a lot about that, but I think understanding that it may not be a free pass for hydropower, we have to think deeply about what this means.
There was a study that the federal government was doing a number of different agencies, EPA and some other folks studying 100 different reservations ours across the US to better understand greenhouse gas emissions. And I have been eagerly awaiting the results of that. And I don't know if they're coming. It was supposed to have been completed, I think the end of 2024, and nothing has been released yet. So we'll see if that comes to light. I hope so, because I think a lot of wonderful researchers have been studying this at the federal level and looking at stuff. There's an EPA scientist who has looked at reservoirs in Ohio, where there's a lot of of agriculture that happens around there. And so a lot of runoff contains nutrients. And he's found pretty significant emissions of greenhouse gases there in part because of that. So areas that are more developed or have more agricultural runoff may also be areas of consideration too, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
[00:39:27] Tamara: Speaking of greenhouse gases, how is climate change affecting the decisions or debates around dam removal?
[00:39:34] Tara: I think the most obvious way that I've been seeing it is that we have climate-amplified storms that are happening now. And so we're seeing these big surges and rainstorms and they're creating huge runoff events. And in many areas there were dams that weren't really built to withstand this kind of flooding. Or an influx of water of that scale and that quickly and. Or sometimes those dams just aren't in great shape anymore, and so they're not able to withstand that. And so they are causing, you know, they're catching debris as it's coming down, and they're causing more flooding and more problems for communities. That was happened in Vermont for a couple of years, and last year, Vermont removed nine dams because they're realizing that it's increasing their climate resilience.
You know, in some places, dams are used for flood control, and that can be very effective and very useful when we have these big, big storm events. But in other cases, dams are not built for flood control, and then in that case, they can make things worse. So it's important to know what kind of dams are in communities and what shape they're in.
There's also dams like Oroville Dam in California, which is a huge structure. I think it's the tallest dam in the country. And that very nearly failed in 2017 when there was a strange runoff event. The weather was unseasonably warm in the winter, and it means melted snowpack and rain came on top of snow. And they had unexpectedly, a lot more runoff than they thought they were going to have. And they started releasing it out of this very large dam that's in Northern California, not too far from Sacramento. And the spillway, the concrete spillway, began to erode because they were releasing the water with such force.
And then as that was eroding, they. They had an emergency spillway which is just an earthen spillway. And so they started releasing water from that, and that was eroding very, very quickly. And they were worried it was going to undercut the dam and the entire dam was going to fail. And so they evacuated 200,000 people that lived downstream, and they evacuated a fish hatchery.
And the dam did not end up failing, but it was a billion dollars of damages and a lot of damage to the river downstream, the Feather River. And I think it was awakened up call for folks that it's not just old rickety dams that can be impacted by climate-amplified storms. We can also have really big and sturdy dams. If we don't get the management right, that can be impacted. And so, you know, Oroville is not a dam that's going to be removed. But I think it's something that, you know, dam managers began to think about much more closely after that event happened.
[00:42:09] Tamara: Yes, and it also raises the issue that you talk about in the book, which is that oftentimes maintaining A dam so that it's safe and doesn't put lives at risk is more expensive than simply removing it.
[00:42:21] Tara: Yeah, that's often the case. So a lot of times folks have found that it's cheaper and safer to remove dams. I also found while researching the book, which I didn't know very much about, is that dams don't have to fail to be unsafe. There is a class of dams called low head dams, which are usually just maybe five or six feet tall. And water continually flows over the top of these dams and it can create this recirculating current just downstream. And people get trapped in these currents, even if they're wearing a life jacket, and they can drown. And it's really incredibly unsafe. A lot of times, you know, young folks are swimming in reservoirs or playing near dams, or people are boating or floating over these areas, and it can become quite dangerous. Some 1400 people at least have drowned at low head dams in the country.
So that's another impact of, of some dams. And the reason why, you know, taking down dams that we don't need on the landscape anymore is important to do.
[00:43:13] Tamara: And what do you think is the future of dam removal, given our current situation, you know, politically and socially and environmentally?
[00:43:22] Tara: Yeah, I think that this is a movement that will keep going in part because it works so well. I think every damn rubble that happens, you know, it could creates momentum for another dam removal. I saw this on the Cuyahoga, the first dam removal that happened there. It took seven years of getting it right, working with the community to figure out what they were going to do. And after that, the next four happened very quickly because there was this precedent for what happens, and people saw the benefits of it. And I think that just. It's kind of like a domino effect.
And I think what you mentioned about climate change is another reason that I think we're going to continue to have more dam removals and they're going to continue to be necessary. But I do think that we have some speed bumps right now in Washington. Certainly under. In the Biden administration, there was a lot of funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure act and the Inflation Reduction act that went to support fish passage programs. And a lot of that was dam removal and dam removals, you know, specifically.
So a flood of money have been helping to, to move this stuff along. Some of these dam removals take only $50,000 and some of them take $500 million. And so having the right amount of funding is necessary and being able to maintain consistent funding flows. The projects take years, sometimes decades to come to fruition.
So in that sense, it'll outlast an administration.
But I think having support from people, more public education, I think is necessary, and having folks understand what dam removals mean, you know, and what they entail and what the benefits are, and also having, you know, dedicated funding streams and better resources. A lot of dams are managed at the state level, and so there are big discrepancies in the amount of funds that different states have to monitor dam safety and to advocate and work for and help enable dam removals. Pennsylvania is actually the leading state for. For dam removals, which some people might be surprised about, but they have a really wonderful program for helping to streamline the permitting of removing small and unneeded dams, and that has really helped them get more dams off their landscape that they don't need to have there. So I think there's a lot that can be done at the state level, too.
[00:45:31] Tamara: Thanks. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you want to make sure people understand about dam removal, its past or present or future?
[00:45:40] Tara: I think the one thing I think about that occurs to me is that I think when we think about our environmental problems, our climate problems, we talk a lot about what we have to build to fix things and what kind of technological improvements are necessary or helping to get us places. And I think this is one of those cases where it actually means not building something new, but being willing to part with what we don't need anymore and these dams that are on our land landscape. And it's not about, you know, constructing something, it's about deconstructing something. And I think that's an important component of creating a more resilient future and creating healthier ecosystems and healthier communities.
[00:46:17] Tamara: Yes. And as you mentioned before, it is hard for people to imagine something removed from the landscape and making it better. But I think the stories in Undammed help us do that, help us imagine those futures. So thank you very much, Tara. It's been a real pleasure talking with you.
[00:46:35] Tara: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:46:38] Tamara: Thank you for listening to the terrain.org podcast. Today's episode featured a conversation with Tara Lohan, longtime environmental journalist and author of Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life, published by island Press in 2025.
You can find a transcript of this conversation and previous podcast episodes online at Terrain.org the music is liftoff by Nature Connection. I'm Terrain.org's podcast editor, Tamara Dean.
