Damn Dams -- Unlimited dam removal

Started by Woolly Bugger, May 02, 2020, 06:57:09 AM

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Dougfish

They will never tear down the Martinsville dam on the Smiff.
Flood control? Power generation? Crazy amount of sediment.
The DuPont material in that sediment is epic. 
"Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here?
 Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change? "
Kelly's Heroes,1970

"I don't wanna go to hell,
But if I do,
It'll be 'cause of you..."
Strange Desire, The Black Keys, 2006

Woolly Bugger

#91
Quote from: Dougfish on August 07, 2023, 20:43:42 PMThey will never tear down the Martinsville dam on the Smiff.
Flood control? Power generation? Crazy amount of sediment.
The DuPont material in that sediment is epic. 

sadly true.... it would should be a superfund site.

https://www.epa.gov/hwcorrectiveactioncleanups/hazardous-waste-cleanup-martinsville-dupont-site-martinsville-virginia

Cleanup Status
 

EPA issued the Final Decision and Response to Comment (FDRTC) on November 16, 2012, for the Martinsville site.  The FDRTC incorporated the remedy detailed in the Statement of Basis, which restricts the Facility to industrial use through compliance with and maintenance of institutional controls, restriction on groundwater use, continued maintenance of existing soil capping over ash piles, and recovery of trichloroethylene (TCE) from groundwater.   Virginia DEQ (VA DEQ) issued a Corrective Action Permit in 2013 to implement the selected remedy.
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Onslow


Woolly Bugger

Dam repairs on North Umpqua River cause emergency lamprey salvage, concerns about steelhead

Planned repair work on Winchester Dam near Roseburg has led to emergency salvage efforts for Pacific lamprey. It's just the latest concern from environmentalists who are opposed to the dam on the North Umpqua River.
An estimated 50-60 staff from state and federal agencies and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians are attempting to salvage juvenile Pacific lamprey this week, after the reservoir behind Winchester Dam was drained to make way for repairs starting August 7. According to a spokesperson with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the emergency salvage effort involves removing juvenile lamprey from the shore and returning them to the North Umpqua River.

"We are definitely concerned about the juvenile Pacific lamprey in the substrates upstream of the reservoir. We are assisting with an emergency salvage," said Michelle Dennehy, a spokesperson with ODFW.

The 16-foot-high wood and cement Winchester Dam sits alongside Interstate 5 near Roseburg, Oregon. Below it, the highway crosses the river on a bridge. Upriver from the dam, long, manicured grass lawns stretch down to the banks of the reservoir.

Starting on Monday, excavators and backhoes began assembling a makeshift road through the river rocks with large "supersacks" of sand and gravel so they could work on a few areas of the dam's face where water has been seeping through the 133-year-old structure.



https://www.ijpr.org/environment-energy-and-transportation/2023-08-10/dam-repairs-on-north-umpqua-river-causes-emergency-lamprey-salvage-concerns-about-steelhead
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

As Colorado River shrinks, California farmers urge 'one-dam solution'

For years, environmentalists have argued that the Colorado River should be allowed to flow freely across the Utah-Arizona border, saying that letting water pass around Glen Canyon Dam — and draining the giant Lake Powell reservoir — would improve the shrinking river's health.

Now, as climate change increases the strains on the river, this controversial proposal is receiving support from some surprising new allies: influential farmers in California's Imperial Valley.

In a letter to the federal Bureau of Reclamation, growers Mike and James Abatti, who run some of the biggest farming operations in the Imperial Valley, urged the government to consider sacrificing the Colorado's second-largest reservoir and storing the water farther downstream in Lake Mead — the river's largest reservoir.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/as-colorado-river-shrinks-california-farmers-urge-one-dam-solution/ar-AA1ggkiq




ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

Dam's Removal Restores Spirit and Habitat
A grand river recovers its natural flow and original beauty.

The Klamath River, flowing through Oregon and California before emptying into the Pacific Ocean, will be mighty again. The river's Iron Gate Dam is scheduled for removal, and once it is gone, the river will be home to spawning fish, riverbank shrubs, and wildlife once again. And for many Native American people, this dam removal is akin to a sacred act.

This removal project includes the demolition of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River, according to AP, and is the largest project of its kind in the US. The removal is now underway with expected completion by the end of 2024.

This is a huge undertaking as it will open up 400 miles of river. In comparison, the 65 dams that were removed last year opened up a total of 430 miles of river. The Klamath River project will also empty three reservoirs, reintroducing sunlight to soil that has been submerged for a century.

https://www.goodnet.org/articles/dams-removal-restores-spirit-habitat
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

What happened to Washington's wildlife after the largest dam removal in US history
Sometimes the best thing we can do to restore nature is just get out of the way.

The man made flood that miraculously saved our heroes at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou were an actual occurrence in the 19th and 20th century — and a fairly common one at that — as river valleys across the American West were dammed up and drowned out at the altar of economic progress and electrification. Such was the case with Washington State's Elwha river in the 1910s. Its dam provided the economic impetus to develop the Olympic Peninsula but also blocked off nearly 40 miles of river from the open ocean, preventing native salmon species from making their annual spawning trek. However, after decades of legal wrangling by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the biggest dams on the river today are the kind made by beavers.

In this week's Hitting the Books selection, Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World, University of Vermont conservation biologist Joe Roman recounts how quickly nature can recover when a 108-foot tall migration barrier is removed from the local ecosystem. This excerpt discusses the naturalists and biologists who strive to understand how nutrients flow through the Pacific Northwest's food web, and the myriad ways it's impacted by migratory salmon. The book as a whole takes a fascinating look at how the most basic of biological functions (yup, poopin!) of even just a few species can potentially impact life in every corner of the planet

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https://amzn.to/3QVpwaf

https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-eat-poop-die-joe-roman-hatchette-books-153032502.html :;!

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

PG&E Moves Forward with Eel River Dam Removal
UTILITY'S PLANS HAVE DEMOLITION STARTING AS SOON AS 2028

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It now looks like two iconic North Coast rivers will flow dam free by the end of the decade.

Just weeks after the first of four dams was removed from the Klamath River as a part of what will be the largest dam removal effort in the nation's history, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. filed a 94-page surrender application to federal regulators, formalizing its plan to tear down its two dams on the Eel River that have blocked fish passage and reduced flows for more than a century.

In the filing, PG&E said deconstruction work could begin on the dams as early as 2028, pending environmental review and regulatory approval.

News of the filing was immediately celebrated by environmental and fishing groups.

"Dam removal will make the Eel the longest free-flowing river in California and will open up hundreds of miles of prime habitat unavailable to native salmon and steelhead for over 100 years," Trout Unlimited California Director Brian Johnson said in a news release. "This is the most important thing we can do for our salmon and steelhead on the Eel River, and these fisheries cannot afford to wait."

https://m.northcoastjournal.com/news/pgande-moves-forward-with-eel-river-dam-removal-28241444
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

NATURE, UNDAMMED
The largest-ever dam removal is underway, a milestone in the nation's reckoning over its past attempts to bend nature to human will


It was a small moment, with little fanfare, in one of the most remote patches of northern California. Just the rat-a-tat of three Caterpillar excavators gnawing through concrete signaled the beginning of the largest dam removal project in the history of the country, and perhaps the world.

There was no ribbon cutting or ceremonial dynamite detonation. But the demolition on that June day arrived only after decades of argument and activism.

The Klamath River dams, built between the early 1900s and 1960s, fundamentally reshaped one of the West's most important watersheds. They electrified this hard-to-reach part of the country for the first time, powering the nation's vision of a Manifest Destiny.


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https://wapo.st/48l5agB

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/klamath-river-dam-removal/
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

Court Rules "Temporary" Structure at Electron Dam Site Violates Endangered Species Act
Victory — Ruling will mean a free-flowing Puyallup River for fish for the first time in more than 100 years

— A portion of Washington's Electron Dam must be removed from the Puyallup River following a historic district court ruling today. The decision will allow water to flow naturally along the river for the first time in nearly 100 years. The Puyallup Tribe brought suit against Electron Hydro LLC after the company unlawfully discharged toxic tire crumb rubber in the river and then hastily constructed a "temporary" rock dam and sheet pile wall in 2020. The court found that the structure harms steelhead trout, Chinook salmon, and bull trout, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

https://earthjustice.org/press/2024/court-rules-temporary-structure-at-electron-dam-site-violates-endangered-species-act

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

trout-r-us

Damn Imigrants!!!!!





"On a spring day more than 300 years ago, the people of the Lenape tribe gathered in their homeland along the Brandywine Creek in Delaware.

Hundreds of fish had just begun to make their way from the Atlantic Ocean, up the Delaware River and into the Brandywine to spawn in the creek's upstream headwaters in Pennsylvania.

After a long, lean winter for the Lenape, these fish — now known as the American Shad — were greeted as relatives and the first source of fresh food for the Lenapes every year. But when Samuel Kirk built a dam in 1720 near where the Brandywine Creek meets the Christina River — which bridges the Brandywine with the Delaware River in the city of Wilmington — the shad could no longer swim to their ancestral spawning grounds upstream.

The Lenape, in turn, largely lost the springtime food source they'd relied on for thousands of years, according to Dennis Coker, the principal chief of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware. And what wildlife remained in the area, Coker added, the Europeans hunted competitively, with a "voracious appetite."

"It's very much akin to killing all of the buffalo for Plains Indians," Coker said, "with the intention of starving them."

The Lenape asked the settlers to remove the dam in the mid-1730s, according to Coker. Their "request fell on deaf ears," he said. And after the Europeans brought the smallpox virus that wiped out around 90 percent of the indigenous population, Coker said the Lenape started to leave the Brandywine."

https://delawarecurrents.org/2024/02/19/delaware-river-mill-dams/
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
― Heraclitus

Woolly Bugger

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

joe friday


A great topic!

From reading different posts, it seems like selective removal is the key, on a case-by-case basis.

I don't know if it's been studied, but the old Hardin Mill Dam on the south fork of the Catawba River (Gaston County) is one of those dams that no longer generates power.  What would the river be like if it were removed, I wonder.

Onslow

Quote from: joe friday on March 09, 2024, 13:26:22 PMA great topic!

From reading different posts, it seems like selective removal is the key, on a case-by-case basis.

I don't know if it's been studied, but the old Hardin Mill Dam on the south fork of the Catawba River (Gaston County) is one of those dams that no longer generates power.  What would the river be like if it were removed, I wonder.

I may be able to dig up a publication authored by the USGS in the 1880s or 90s.  The USGS surveyed every stream in NC that had gradient, described the rapids, measured the height of rapids, measured drainage size, calculated mean flow.

Best I remember SF Catawba is a slate belt river.  The areas of gradient are rather extreme and short.  Very similar to what one will find in SC on the Piedmont streams. The SF Catawba is very atypical in NC. The Catawba is also a bit extreme, but more incremental than the Yadkin.