WILDBOY CREEK, Washougal — Kwoneesum Dam once had a purpose. It created a lake for girls attending a summer camp to swim, canoe and sail. But just two decades after the dam was built in the mid-1960s, the camp closed, and the land was sold to a timber company.
Ever since, it has obstructed this tributary of the Washougal River west of Vancouver, blocking 6.5 miles of habitat for coho salmon and summer steelhead — fish that have nourished citizens of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and other Native nations in the region for generations.
Kwoneesum is just one example of the dams that have outlived their usefulness. These aging structures, dubbed “deadbeat dams'' by some working toward their removal, choke off habitat, and threaten homes in some instances. It's a problem gaining more recognition across the country.
“Most dams are built for a community need. Big ones serve a state or a region,” said Cowlitz Indian Tribe spiritual leader Tanna Engdahl, as sunlight filtered through her woven cedar basket hat while she faced a crowd at the Kwoneesum Dam site last month. “I call this a vanity lake — created for a very small segment of the population. And its use is long past its privileged date.”
Many of the smaller old dams blocking watersheds throughout the Pacific Northwest were built for hydropower but no longer churn out electricity because they became too costly to operate. Others were used for irrigation or drinking water — or for recreation or aesthetics.
Removal is often expensive and difficult. Typically, it’s unclear or debated who is responsible for restoring the rivers and ecosystems damaged by the dams.
Larger dam removals are even more difficult. For example, breaching the four Lower Snake River dams in the Columbia Basin is off the table as Native nations, states and the federal government work to develop clean energy alternatives as part of a historic agreement reached late last year.
These smaller projects are rising in importance. Impounded rivers are warming, growing toxic algae and locking up some of the last best habitats for salmon. While each presents unique challenges, there is more federal funding available than ever before for these projects — and momentum is building to take action.
Since 1912, 2,119 dams have been demolished in the U.S., according to data provided by American Rivers. Of those, more than 150 dams were in the Pacific Northwest, including 39 in Washington.
“The culture and the awareness of especially fisheries issues in the Northwest is greater than anywhere else in the country,” said Brian Graber, senior director of river restoration at American Rivers. “That means the [ability of] people to get together to do projects in the Northwest, it's stronger than elsewhere.”
Just this year, fish passage projects like dam removals across Washington state received $75 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. Nearly $40 million of it will go to nine projects led by tribal nations.
This builds on the nearly $40 million awarded for Washington projects — including Kwoneesum — in the first round of funding in 2022, and one more round of funding for federal fish passage barrier removal projects is coming under the infrastructure law.
As Engdahl looked around the land near the Kwoneesum Dam, she told a story of what its removal means for the Cowlitz people.
“It's going to be years before the growing Earth can come back from the depth of violations against it,” Engdahl said. “But that doesn't stop us from enjoying the victory of reparations.”
Leaning on Native nations
Native nations are at the forefront of the effort to address these lingering dams.
The area near the Kwoneesum Dam and its reservoir holds ancestral and historical significance to the Cowlitz tribe.
So in 2017, the tribe called on the Columbia Land Trust to buy the property, which it did in 2020, and now the tribe is leading the dam removal this summer.
The work when completed will immediately provide fish, including coho salmon and summer steelhead, with more space to rear and spawn.
“I don’t know how to explain what it means to us because it means centuries,” Engdahl said. “To bring it back in my lifetime? I'm here to see it return to what it should be so there's no words to explain that.”
In fact, Native nations across the Pacific Northwest have led the largest dam removals on the continent.
Condit Dam came down in 2011. The Lower Elwha Klallam people saw through the removal of two dams on the Elwha River near Port Angeles. And the Native nations of the Klamath fought for decades for the river to be freed this year from its Oregon headwaters to the sea in Northern California. These rivers are roaring back to life.
Though Kwoneesum Dam is small compared to these, Cowlitz and Columbia Land Trust leaders believe the removal will benefit species throughout the Washougal River and beyond.
Building partnerships with state and federal agencies and private and nonprofit organizations is the key to addressing dam removals or other fish passage issues, said Jason Gobin, Tulalip Tribes executive director of natural and cultural resources. The tribes, he said, have taken the lead to bring all of these people together who might not otherwise be in the same room.
In Snohomish County, the Tulalip Tribes — descendants of the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skykomish and other allied bands — secured $2 million in funding to rescue the Pilchuck River from an aging drinking water diversion dam. Removal was finished in 2020.
Just two years later, nearly 200 Chinook salmon returned above the old dam site to spawn a new generation in the gravel substrates of the river. That’s up from just 50 — the worst year on record — returning in 2019. The tribes expect it will take more than a decade to restore an abundant run, but it’s a start.
“It's just so tangible — people see it. All you have to do is remove a dam,” said Brett Shattuck, senior scientist for the Tulalip Tribes, “those fish come back immediately.”
The tribes have replicated this work across the region, using laser-assisted mapping technology to pinpoint the best available habitat and any existing barriers like dams and culverts.
Tulalip has restored an estimated 100 stream miles through this work, with funding possible for another 150 miles.
“We want to make sure that there are salmon for our people and for all of Washington as we go forward. The salmon has been instrumental and an important cultural species to the tribes; it was our sustenance that allowed our people to survive in this environment,” Gobin said.
“But salmon isn't always the biggest dollar maker for a developer, or the state, or the county. We would be in a much more dire situation without the tribes being involved.”
Competing values
Cost is often the biggest barrier to dam removal. But sometimes, for these dams serving little or no purpose, debate can stymie restoration efforts.
On the mighty Skagit River, settlers built a series of dams to power Seattle and other cities around Puget Sound more than 100 miles away. Salmon and steelhead were severed from these pristine reaches of the river.
The dam on Newhalem Creek is believed to be the first.
It powered the company town for people who constructed Seattle City Light’s Gorge, Diablo and Ross dams, impounding the river as it flows south from British Columbia. But the tiny dam on Newhalem Creek hasn’t been fully operational since 2010 when it was damaged by a landslide.
A federal license to operate the project expires in just a couple of years, and City Light has decided it’s not worth saving.
As the Upper Skagit Tribe’s creation story goes, the transformer Docubuth came to the Upper Skagit River to make the conditions right for Upper Skagit people, where life began.
Upper Skagit leaders would like to see the canyon restored to a natural condition, returned to the Indigenous landscape it once was — before the river was dried up and diverted through a pipe for power generation, said Scott Schuyler, the tribe’s natural and cultural resources policy representative. Removing the Newhalem Creek dam would be the first step in healing the place from Seattle City Light’s scars on the landscape.
But Seattle City Light, which has agreed to remove the dam, contends the powerhouse and other pieces could offer historical value to visitors and would like to keep it.
“One hundred years ago, there was this effort to electrify Seattle and the Newhalem facility did make that possible,” said Chris Townsend, director of Natural Resources and Hydro Licensing for Seattle City Light.
City Light is working with tribes and other interested parties to determine what comes next.
Schuyler said he and others are concerned that a partial removal might set a precedent of other organizations not feeling the need to restore the environment back to the way they found it.
“There are costs associated with removal, but from our perspective, if you can build it, you can remove it,” Schuyler said. “It is man-made, and nothing lasts forever that we build.”
Who steps in to help small utilities
Many of these dams are owned by rural public utilities with few resources for removal. They can become a burden for both the utilities and their ratepayers.
For nearly half a century, the Mill Pond dam on a tributary of the Pend Oreille River in the northeast corner of Washington sat idle. It left behind a 64-acre pond, blocking the passage of threatened species of trout, heating stream temperatures and starving the downstream gorge of sediment.
Dam removal was the only clear option to address these impacts, but it was controversial. After Pend Oreille PUD realized reviving the dam wasn’t in the cards, a federal commission agreed to allow the more than-9,000 customer utility to abandon its dam and the struggling creek it impounded.
American Whitewater, a nonprofit that advocates to protect and restore rivers and streams in the U.S. and launched the “Deadbeat Dam Law Project” earlier this year, was concerned about the precedent it would set and successfully appealed the decision. The Kalispel Tribe and federal and state agencies would later map out a path for removal, with responsibility landing on Seattle City Light, which saw an opportunity in the project.
In this case, Seattle City Light, which operates its largest hydroelectric project on the Pend Oreille River, inherited the $16 million dam removal as part of work to offset its impacts on endangered bull trout in the river system.
In 2019, the creek began flowing freely for the first time in a century, reconnecting nearly 50 stream miles. In many places, it found its historical channel.
It’s what Thomas O’Keefe of American Whitewater calls a win-win, for the utility and the river.
But this approach doesn’t work on every impounded stream.
The Enloe dam on the Similkameen River was built in the 1920s and hasn’t produced electricity in over half a century.
It was constructed to light up nearby mining camps and today holds back an estimated half a million cubic yards of sediment, maybe including contaminants from a century of mining activity. While Okanogan PUD acknowledges there is interest in removing Enloe, there is no requirement to do so.
Taking out Enloe would open up an additional 1,520 miles of habitat for endangered steelhead, most of which is on the Canadian side of the border.
The Similkameen runs from its western headwaters in Manning Park across the border to spill into the Okanogan River, which feeds the robust agricultural lands of the river valley along the way. Water from the tributaries has been diverted for agriculture, leading to reduced streamflows or, in extreme cases, dry creek beds.
Today, water temperatures in the mainstem Okanogan often exceed the lethal heat tolerance for steelhead and spring Chinook. Salmon often are relegated to the cooler tributaries.
Climate change models predict in 20 years much of the habitat currently used by salmon and steelhead will near or exceed the fish’s lethal tolerance.
Meanwhile, the reaches of the system in higher elevations are forecast to be cooler and much more habitable for fish and other critters amid a warming climate. But they’re locked behind Enloe.
With a boost from federal funding, project partners from Trout Unlimited, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and Similkameen First Nations have stepped in to evaluate options for removing the dam and the years of contaminated sediment held behind it.
“The major barriers are simply inertia. It's been here for 100 years so it's hard to instigate a sense of urgency,” O’Keefe said. “It's a very real factor on Enloe. The structure has been there for 100 years, and we've been talking about removing it since the ’70s. What's another five years?”
“Should every one of these take 20-plus years, like it did on the Elwha, like it did on Condit, like it has on Klamath?”
This coverage was supported by EcoFlight, a nonprofit using small aircraft to provide an aerial perspective with a mission to educate and advocate for wild lands, watersheds and culturally important landscapes.
Nika Bartoo-Smith: 503-915-6696 or nbartoosmith@underscore.news. Of Osage and Oneida Nations descent, Bartoo-Smith is a joint reporter at Underscore Native News + ICT based in Portland.
