October 6, 2024 was a quiet morning at Iron Gate. Dam removal had been completed just a few days before, but Caterpillars on river left still crawled. Beep, beep, beeping until the first quiet day on Sunday the 6th, when the birds awoke to silence and the sounds of a free flowing river.
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As early as the 1920s, the dam at Iron Gate was conceived as part of the Federal Power Commission’s requirement for the California Oregon Power Company (Copco) to develop and utilize all power resources of the Klamath. Water was to be used, and if not for electric generation, certainly for irrigation. If there was "extra" water it meant the possibility of diversion to the Sacramento Valley.

Complications from shifting water rights and priorities for irrigation under Oregon's 1931 Hydroelectric Act led Copco to shift resources to California where it had powerhouses in Wards Canyon and Fall Creek. Iron Gate was in a good position, but disagreements over irrigation water rights persisted and Copco postponed the building of Iron Gate indefinitely. Water politics are always complicated, and crossing state lines especially so. Physically building dams and removing them might take a year or two, but only after decades of paperwork.

Iron Gate was eventually built in 1960-1962. In addition to hydroelectric power generation, Iron Gate, with no fish ladder, put a hard stop to anadromous fish migration upstream of the dam. Iron Gate blocked hundreds of miles of spawning grounds necessary for the salmonid lifecycle.

Salmon are dependent on cool water, and the side streams of both upper and lower Klamath are necessary for spawning the next generation. The dams blocked access and their reservoirs stored summer heat, which not only made conditions uninhabitable above the dams, it influenced river health, creating dangerous conditions for salmon below.

As conditions for salmon worsened, not just on the Klamath but around the world, the commercial fishing industry as well as Tribal communities were seeing consequences first hand. As early as the 1980s commercial fishing interests suspected the Klamath River dams were to blame for declining fish stocks. Indigenous cultures downriver from the dams, the Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa with thousands of years of shared history, all agreed.

However, dam removal would not become a topic of popular conversation until 2002 when drought forced tough decisions for water allocation. The Klamath River basin rarely has enough water for everyone who wants it let alone for those with legal rights to use it. In 2001 while in drought it came down to enough water for one or the other. An effort to supply farming with their needs to complete harvest led to an exceptionally low flow for the Klamath River. Water quality plummeted and disease spread, killing over 34,000 salmon, mostly chinook, during their 2002 fall migration. This event turned the tide where most came to agree that whether for farms or for fish, something had to change.

The first big opportunity for change came as the dams came due for relicensing. Unlike the initial license to operate, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 coupled with the Federal Power Act triggered requirements to provide fish passage. As a result, PacifiCorp, the owner and operator, chose to decommission the aging infrastructure and agreed in 2016 to surrender their license to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, whose mission was to remove the dams and restore a free flowing river.

On October 2nd, 2024, the KRRC completed their mission “on time and on budget” (Mark Bransom, CEO, 10-5-2024, Yreka, California). Restoration of the exposed reservoir beds, headed by Resource Environmental Solutions (RES) has been in process for years, with another five years or more to manage regrowth: encouraging native plants while discouraging invasive ones.

According to John C. Boyle and others, the threat of water being diverted to the Sacramento Valley was only prevented by unanimous agreement among Klamath Basin water users that Klamath River water was for the Klamath Basin. Diversion to the Sacramento River would have been disastrous for the Basin. The perceived value added by Boyle's dams prevented diversion, thus saving Klamath River water for the Klamath Basin rather than for California's Central Valley hundreds of miles away.

The fact that Klamath water remains in the Basin is a fact that everyone in the Basin is thankful for. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do, whether it’s fish and farms or not, it’s about food and how to sustainably feed growing populations of people while preserving the natural world that makes it possible.

Sources:

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/1...

https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterr...

John C. Boyle, 50 Years on the Klamath, 1976.