Elwha River Dam Removal Plan Gets Final Go-Ahead

[hatrack]

PORT ANGELES — "After years of negotiations, the biggest dam-removal project in history is about to begin, promising to restore one of Washington's legendary salmon rivers. Today, with Rep. Norm Dicks looking on, the City of Port Angeles, the National Park Service and the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe will sign an agreement allowing the $182 million Elwha Restoration Project to go forward.

Congress approved the dam removals in 1992. Following an environmental review process, the project stalled as negotiations dragged on over federally funded mitigation of the project's impact on local communities. "We've finally hammered out the details with the local parties," says Dicks. "This project is going to happen."

Starting in early 2008, the 108-foot-tall Elwha Dam and the 210-foot-tall Glines Canyon Dam will be dismantled in stages, reopening 70 miles of prime salmon and steelhead spawning habitat. The Elwha offers a unique opportunity to fully restore a river since nearly all of the river's watershed is preserved in Olympic National Park, free from human impacts. Taking out the two dams is expected to increase the amount of silt in the river — some 18 million cubic yards of dirt and gravel have been trapped behind the dams over the last 93 years. To mitigate the coming changes, the federal government will fund $70 million in civil works: Port Angeles gets a water-treatment plant; and the Lower Elwha Klallam Reservation, located at the mouth of the river, gets a sewer system, a raised flood-protection levee, and a fish hatchery."

EDIT

Yee-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! :yourock:

[govegan]

1. Yee-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! Too.

Thanks for the update. I don't as a rule check the ST, even online, but I was very glad to see this moving forward.

"This will be an enormously important precedent for dam removal," says Elizabeth Grossman, author of "Watershed: The Undamming of America."

"People will definitely look to the Elwha as evidence of whether this kind of project can really work."

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"Tribes consider themselves a part of the environment," Elofson says. "There's some shame that will be removed when the dams are gone, even though we couldn't have done much to stop them from being built in the first place."


At least this is one forward thinking environmental effort that AWOL chimpy boy and the neofascists couldn't derail.


I have been into the lumberyard and the carpenter's shop and the tannery and the lampblack factory and the turpentine clearing. But when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest uses of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most; it is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize.

It is as immortal as I am and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still. -- Thoreau

[MrSandman]

2. That is so cool...

There is significant population here who would like to dam the Greenbrier River(73 mi. and free flowing the entire way). I hope the days of damming are over.