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Working with partners to identify and assess the impacts of Klamath River dams on fish, aquatic habitat, and water quality, and to develop measures as part of the FERC relicensing process to offset or eliminate these impacts
Headwaters Heritage Initiative
KLAMATH RIVER HYDROELECTRIC DAM RELICENSING
Draft Settlement Plan Released
National Center Press Release - January 15, 2008
Draft Settlement Agreement, Summary & Group Press Release
The Klamath Settlement Group today released the most recent draft of a proposed settlement agreement that partially addresses issues related to salmon restoration in the Klamath Basin. The purpose of releasing the proposed agreement is to allow negotiating parties that require public input for their decision making process (i.e. counties) to obtain that input without jeopardizing confidentiality.
The proposed settlement agreement resolves a number of issues that are important to our goal of recovering native fish populations in the Klamath River Basin. The agreement involves a number of terms related to:
- water management on farms and National Wildlife Refuges and
- programs to reintroduce and restore salmon, steelhead, and other migratory fishes to areas in the Upper Klamath Basin that have been blocked from fish passage for 90 years.
Background
The Klamath River Basin of southern Oregon and northern California historically was home to one of the largest runs of salmon and steelhead in the lower 48 states. Decades of development have contributed to the decline of these salmon runs, which now return at only 10% of their former numbers.
Among the threats are four power producing dams that bisect the Klamath Basin – effectively dividing the basin in two and ensuring that no salmon reach hundreds of miles of streams they historically occupied. The National Center’s vision is to recover salmon and steelhead populations in the Klamath River system in terms of both abundance and distribution throughout the basin.
PacifiCorp’s Klamath hydroelectric facility consists of a total of 7 dams and 6 powerhouses that produce enough electricity to supply 70,000 homes during a year. The first dam on the Klamath River was completed in 1918, and salmon, steelhead, and Pacific lamprey have been stuck in the lower half of the Klamath River Basin ever since.
It is impossible to consider reestablishing the Klamath River system as one of the most productive salmon streams along the west coast without reconnecting salmon to the hundreds of miles of historically occupied, but now blocked, habitat upstream of the PacifiCorp's dams. For this reason, the National Center is involved in the Klamath Hydroelectric Project’s relicensing proceeding.
The relicensing process requires examining the impacts of hydroelectric projects on a variety of resources. We are working with other conservation organizations, agencies, tribes, local governments, and PacifiCorp to identify and assess the impacts to fish, aquatic habitat, and water quality and develop measures to offset or eliminate these impacts from occurring in the future.
The National Center’s emphasis throughout the process has been: (1) to provide access through the dammed river reaches for migrating fishes and (2) to ensure river flows to protect fish from harmful water quality conditions and provide high quality habitat conditions.
Given the fact that these dams clearly prevent fish migrations, the difficulty of constructing engineered fish passageways to allow migratory fish access at most of the dams, and the poor water and habitat quality at various places within the project area, the National Center has recommended the dams and powerhouses be removed from the Klamath River.
Photo by Kevin Schafer.
