Tuesday July 16, 2024
High Country News —
When the largest dam removal in U.S. history began on the Klamath River this year, it seemed as if the era of dam building was over in the West. Just a month later, however, the federal government finalized $216 million dollars in funding for a controversial dam project south of the Klamath, adding to the $1 billion in direct grants already pledged to the project known as Sites Reservoir. Rights for the water are being distributed this summer.
This would be California’s first major new reservoir in half a century. The project will require building two main dams on a pair of streams that typically only run during big winter rains. Most of the water would come from much farther away, however: Filling the reservoir means piping water from the Sacramento River uphill, away from the Central Valley. If it’s built, the reservoir will inundate Antelope Valley, 14,000 acres of hilly grassland in the California Coast Range, northwest of Sacramento.
Project boosters claim these will be the most environmentally focused dams in California’s history, with water earmarked for environmental purposes (a first, according to the Sites Authority) as well as minimum flow requirements for the Sacramento River. They also argue that the reservoir will actually work better with climate change, which is turning the snow that historically served as a natural reservoir into rainfall. The dams will be able to store the water from those winter rains so that it becomes available during drier spells — which, according to climate projections, will be longer and more frequent.