Thursday August 1, 2024
KDRV —
Work has started on the John C. Boyle dam, the last of four dams in the Klamath River set to be removed.
According to a news release from the Klamath Tribes, they breached the dam yesterday. Work has already started on the Copco 1, Copco 2 and Iron Gate dams, meaning the project is set to be complete by November.
“The $450 million project strives to restore the river and its ecosystem to its pre-dam condition with a focus on returning salmon, Chinook and coho,” the release said. “If the reintroduction of salmon is successful, then it will provide once again as ancestral food source to the tribal communities that relied on the annual fish returns for the river as one of their first foods.”
Revegetation work along the river halted this summer, but will resume in the fall. The work to revegetate the banks of the river will involve more than 17 billion seeds of native plants that officials collected to prepare for the multi-year seeding project.