The Klamath Dams Come Down

For four decades, beginning in the nineteen eighties, members of the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes asked a straightforward question: why are these dams still here?

The four dams on the Klamath River, Iron Gate, Copco One, Copco Two, and JC Boyle, were built between nineteen eighteen and nineteen sixty-two. They were not built with tribal consultation. There was no federal assessment of what blocking a salmon river would do to communities whose food systems, ceremonies, and economic lives depended on salmon runs that had once numbered into the hundreds of thousands per year.

What the dams did to the river was systematic. Salmon cannot pass around a dam. They cannot spawn in water blocked by a concrete wall. The runs collapsed. Yurok families who had fished the Klamath for thousands of years watched the river go quiet. Karuk ceremonial practices built around salmon abundance became ceremonies of mourning. The fish were not hypothetically important. They were food, culture, and continuity.

Beginning in the nineteen eighties, tribal advocates began building the legal and political case for removal. It took thirty years of negotiation across administrations that ranged from indifferent to hostile. The Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement was signed in twenty sixteen, and federal regulators approved the dam removal in twenty twenty-two. Demolition began in twenty twenty-three. By October of twenty twenty-four the last dam had come down.

The Klamath River is now free-flowing from above where Copco Lake used to be all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Approximately four hundred miles of salmon habitat, blocked for over a century, opened at once. Tribal fisheries programs documented salmon in previously inaccessible spawning grounds within weeks of the final removal.

This is the largest dam removal in United States history. It happened because four decades of tribal advocacy refused to stop.