Wednesday March 29, 2023
Hakai Magazine —
Last fall, following a 20-year campaign led by tribal organizers, the US federal government ordered the removal of four dams on the Klamath River, which flows from Oregon to California. For almost a century, these dams have prevented the river’s salmon from swimming upstream to spawn.
The dams will be gone by next year, but now the salmon, including endangered coho, are facing a renewed threat from farther upstream. The US Bureau of Reclamation (referred to as Reclamation), which controls another set of dams on the Klamath, announced last week that it will cut flows on the river to historic lows, drying out the river and likely killing salmon farther downstream.
“The bureau’s proposal will kill salmon, and there’s no question about it,” says Amy Cordalis, general counsel for and citizen of the Yurok Tribe. “These are some of the lowest flows the Klamath River has ever seen.” Cordalis says that the last time the river faced such low flows was in 2002, when the Klamath saw the largest fish kill in US history. That eliminated a generation of salmon, leading to economic devastation for the West Coast fishing industry.