Elwha Dam: The Largest Dam Removal in History

Five miles from the mouth of the Elwha River, on the southern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, there is a stretch of river that runs free today for the first time in over a century. The dam that blocked this spot for one hundred years is gone, taken down in what became the largest dam removal project in the history of North America.

The Elwha Dam was built in nineteen thirteen, one hundred and eight feet tall, to generate hydroelectric power for the timber mills of Port Angeles. No fish ladder was installed. The builders simply did not consider the salmon. Within a few years, five species of Pacific salmon and steelhead that had spawned as far as seventy miles upstream were blocked from more than ninety percent of their historic habitat. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, whose people had lived along this river for thousands of years and whose creation site lay near the river's mouth, lost the fishery that had sustained their culture and their economy.

For decades the tribe fought to have the dams removed. In nineteen eighty-six, when the federal license for the upper dam came up for renewal, tribal leaders filed to intervene and called for both dams to come down. The campaign took more than thirty years. Congress authorized the removal in nineteen ninety-two, and on September seventeenth, twenty eleven, ceremonies were held at the river and the demolition began.

By August of twenty fourteen, the Elwha ran free to the Salish Sea. An estimated thirty four million cubic yards of sediment that had accumulated behind the two dams began moving again, rebuilding the river delta and the beaches downstream. Chinook, coho, pink salmon, steelhead, bull trout, and Pacific lamprey began pushing upstream into water their ancestors had not reached in a century.

In the fall of twenty twenty-three, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe held a ceremonial salmon fishery on the restored river. It was the first in living memory.