Extinction Is Forever, Dams Are Not

California is at a crossroads for managing our rivers. We have dammed and diverted most of them, and the full environmental bill is now coming due.

All of our wild salmon are at risk of extinction, and provisions of the federal Endangered Species Act threaten to cloud water management in the state. We not only can improve the way we manage our rivers, we must do a better job if we are going to avoid serious environmental problems in our aquatic ecosystems.

How many dams does California really need? It has at least 1,395 of them, and resource managers agree that if we could get a real environmental benefit in exchange for removing a couple, we would come out ahead. Dams pinch off the arteries of fish habitat, blocking access to critical spawning grounds in the foothills of the Coast Range and the Sierra. With wild salmon populations continuing their ominous decline, the next few years will be critical.

When we started building these dams, fish were abundant, so no one really thought through the implications for aquatic habitat. Our state is still arid, but now that we recognize the fragility of our environment, we have the opportunity to rethink how we manage our rivers. As the state continues its breakneck growth, we are going to have to learn to live within environmental limits.

Dams don’t last forever. Once they have exceeded their life span of 50 to 100 years, risk of the concrete deteriorating increases dramatically. Eventually we will be faced with the need to rebuild every dam in the state, but by then we may not have any wild salmon left.

Big dams supply a huge proportion of our state water supply, so no one is recommending we dismantle Shasta or Oroville dams. But some smaller dams may be obsolete or abandoned. When Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt went to Redding and took a sledgehammer to the first of five dams on Battle Creek in 1998, no one mourned their loss. Removing these dams made everyone a winner.

Take Daguerre Dam, for example. Built in 1906 to trap mining debris washing down the Yuba River, the dam’s reservoir now overflows with sediment. Because it no longer serves any purpose, the Army Corps of Engineers has largely forgotten it. To be fair to the Corps, this dam was a hand-me-down, built by an agency that no longer exists. However, the Daguerre’s fish ladder doesn’t work anymore, blocking 40% of fish trying to pass it en route to their spawning grounds. Fish make their way up the malfunctioning ladder, swim out of it and flop onto dry land, doomed to die.

How many of the dams in California are like this? No one knows, and the process under the state-federal umbrella group CalFed only addresses the issue of dam management on a few of our state’s rivers. That’s why the bill (SB 1540) by state Sen. Byron Sher (D-Stanford) makes so much sense. It would direct the state to inventory California dams to identify which ones are abandoned, obsolete or poorly functioning. Clearly, everyone would be better off if the Daguerre were removed, but we are missing an unknown number of other opportunities for restoring salmon habitat because we don’t have the information on all our state’s dams.

The bill has passed the state Senate but faces an uncertain future in the Assembly. SB 1540 would inject solid, scientific information about our state’s dams into the discussion of watershed management. If we choose to ignore the environmental costs of unneeded dams, we will lose California’s irreplaceable wild salmon species. We eventually will have to decide which dams to rebuild anyway. Doesn’t it make more sense to figure out which species we want to save and manage our dams--and rivers--accordingly?