28-03-2025
Blue Creek
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News.
Anita Hofschneider and Jake BittleIllustrations by Jackie FawnGrist
PART IV — Blue Creek
Amy Cordalis was on maternity leave, but she spent her days on phone calls and in Zoom meetings. The deal to remove the four Klamath River dams, which had inspired her life's work for nearly two decades, was falling apart. Again.
It was late summer 2020, just months after the COVID-19 pandemic forced massive shutdowns across the globe. Millions of people were out of work and more than 100,000 people in the United States alone had died from the novel coronavirus. On the Yurok Tribe's reservation in northern California, the nation had closed all government offices and schools and barred nonessential visitors from entry. A record-setting wildfire season heightened the community's challenges, as thick wildfire smoke turned the sky orange and made every hour feel like dusk. Swaths of forest in the Klamath Basin burned.
Cordalis' days were a blur of breastfeeding, interrupted sleep, and troubleshooting her newborn's cries. But when she learned that the dams' owner, PacifiCorp, was threatening to pull out of the agreement to transfer its dams to a state-backed entity for demolition, she knew she needed to return to her role as the tribe's lawyer.
For four years, Cordalis and other tribal attorneys had been working on finalizing PacifiCorp's dam removal plan with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But the agency's makeup had changed after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. The new commissioners decided that PacifiCorp, and the states that the Klamath ran through, needed to put up more money to fund dam removal on top of the $450 million they had already pledged. The commission also contended the company needed to keep its name on the dam licenses — a requirement PacifiCorp had long rejected, fearing it would subject the utility to potential lawsuits if anything went wrong during removal.
'Here we go again,' Cordalis thought.
Without PacifiCorp, the tribes would have to restart the relicensing process they'd been pursuing in the early 2000s.
The process had gone on so long that many of the people at PacifiCorp and in the federal government who had negotiated the original 2016 deal were no longer around. That left Richard Whitman and Chuck Bonham, the lead environmental officials for Oregon and California, to try to hold together the collapsing dam removal settlement. The two bureaucrats raced to come up with a new legal arrangement that would satisfy both FERC and PacifiCorp, even offering more money from their two states for dam removal if the company would match it. But PacifiCorp refused to give any more than the $200 million it had already promised. California Governor Gavin Newsom even wrote an open letter to Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway, and urged him not to pull out of the deal, but the company's position did not change.
In a last-ditch effort at diplomacy, leaders of the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, and Klamath Tribes emailed Buffett to invite him to the Yurok reservation to talk. Buffett declined, but he agreed to send a cadre of his top executives, including Greg Abel, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy; Bill Fehrman, the president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy; Stefan Bird, the CEO of PacifiCorp's power plant unit; and Scott Bolton, a PacifiCorp vice president. The Yurok Tribal Council passed a resolution to open the COVID locked-down reservation just for the executives.
Cordalis and the others came up with a plan for the meeting: They would take the executives up to Blue Creek — the southernmost cold-water tributary on the Klamath, the first stop for salmon heading upstream, and one of the most precious places on the river. There, they would persuade them to re-sign the deal. It would've been easier to meet at the reservation's hotel, but they felt like they needed to do more to win over company officials. The executives needed to see the kind of ecosystem that the dams had destroyed.
The executives agreed to go up the river.
Chook Chook Hillman, a Karuk Tribe citizen, knew Berkshire Hathaway well. He had been 23 years old when he confronted Warren Buffett at the 2008 Berkshire shareholders' meeting in Omaha. Company representatives had come to his house in California and asked him to stay away from the annual gatherings while PacifiCorp hashed out the details of the dam settlement.
Chook Chook and other activists had toned down their Omaha protests slightly after that. But they remained committed to their goal, forming a group called the Klamath Justice Coalition. 'Direct action is the logical, consistent method of anarchism,' they wrote on their Facebook page, quoting the Lithuanian-born author and anarchist Emma Goldman, who embraced confronting injustice with uncompromising force.
While tribal officials negotiated with federal bureaucrats in conference rooms, Chook Chook and other activists trained youth in nonviolent direct action and spoke at public hearings about Klamath water issues. In 2014, several members even flew down to Brazil to show solidarity with Indigenous peoples of the Amazon fighting against the construction of a dam.
By 2020, Chook Chook was 35 with a family of his own, and had spent countless hours bringing his kids to meetings and protests over the years. He was not about to let the dam removal deal fall apart. Tribal leadership had not invited him and his fellow Klamath Justice activists to the meeting on the river, a move that Chook Chook saw as an attempt to appease Berkshire's executives. But he knew when and where the meeting on the river would take place, and that was information enough. They decided to make their presence known, invitation or not.
'They're not going to meet with us as people, then we've got to do what we got to do,' he said.
The executives' planned tour of the river immediately went awry. Just a quarter-mile into their trip to Blue Creek, the boat carrying Cordalis and some of the masked-up Berkshire Hathaway executives broke down, right in front of Cordalis' family fishing hole. Another boat carrying PacifiCorp executives Bird and Bolton as well as Yurok biologist Mike Belchik ran aground in shallow waters and started overheating. Both groups had to hop in other Yurok tribe boats in order to continue up the river.
After another mile and a half, they were forced to stop again: The river was blockaded by protestors from the Klamath Justice Coalition who had draped a rope across it and stood in their boats holding signs saying, 'Undam the Klamath.' Balanced defiantly on their boats, the activists put themselves face-to-face with Abel, Fehrman, and the other Berkshire and PacifiCorp executives.
Chook Chook's son approached the executives first. The 11-year-old handed them a white flag. Chook Chook reminded them that his son had been just a week old when PacifiCorp executives first visited and promised to remove the dams.
'We've kept up our end of the bargain, we've given you 11 years to do it,' Chook Chook said. 'I don't know what you guys are going to decide at your meeting, but what needs to happen, has to happen. We don't have any more time.'
Activists handed Fehrman a jug filled with foul-smelling river water. 'Take the lid off and smell it,' said Annelia Hillman, a Yurok Tribe citizen and Chook Chook's wife at the time. The Berkshire executive opened the bottle and sniffed the algae-tainted water.
'Our fish are drinking that,' said Dania Rose Colegrove from the Hoopa Valley Tribe. 'They have to swim in that.'
'We understand that's a challenge,' one of the executives replied. Sammy Gensaw III, one of the Yurok youth activists, implored the executives to understand the stakes.
'This isn't just about the Klamath River. What goes down in the Klamath Basin will be echoed throughout generations,' Gensaw said. 'The rest of history will look at the decisions that we make here today.'
Gensaw's younger brother, Jon Luke Gensaw, spoke next. 'If this doesn't end, you're going to see more of us,' he said, surrounded by hundreds of people from all of the Klamath's tribes. 'I take my mask off because I want you to remember my face, because you'll see me again.'
Frankie Myers, the vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, who was on the boat with the executives, reminded the younger activists that the tribal leaders shared their goals, and that they had a schedule to keep with the company. Myers' father, Dickie, had been one of the original dam removal campaigners who had traveled to Scotland more than a decade earlier. Chook Chook and the others felt they had made their message clear, and decided to let the executives through.
'We're sorry we had to do this, but you know, this is what we do,' Colegrove said as they parted. 'We didn't get invited to the meeting, so we invited ourselves. You have to hear the people — it's just how it is.'
The executives and tribal leaders finally made their way to Blue Creek. Myers urged them not to abandon the deal, and Cordalis presented an offer from the states and tribes to provide additional insurance and funding. Abel and the other PacifiCorp executives agreed to take a term sheet from the tribal campaigners, and responded to their entreaties politely, but they did not commit to meeting FERC's new demands.
It was a beautiful day: Salmon were swimming in the cool waters, and a bald eagle flew over Abel as he defended the company's position. Tribal leaders could not have picked a more serene place to make their case for what was at stake, but PacifiCorp didn't concede. After lunch, the group drove their boats back to the reservation and thanked the executives for coming. At the Yurok Tribe's debriefing meeting, the disappointment was so profound that some broke down in tears.
But a few days later, Cordalis got a call from Bill Fehrman, the Berkshire Hathaway Energy executive who had gone to Blue Creek. The voice on the other end of the line said something that stopped her in her tracks.
'Let's talk, we need to get the dams out,' Fehrman said, according to Cordalis' recollection.
A few months later, PacifiCorp and the two states announced that they had come to an agreement: The company and the states would each provide an additional $15 million, helping meet FERC's demand for backup cash, and California and Oregon would add their names to the dam licenses, resolving the company's demands about liability. Those two moves were enough to appease FERC once and for all.
For Cordalis, for Leaf Hillman, and for Jeff Mitchell, the fight was over at last. The dams were coming down.
In January of 2024, almost a quarter-century after the dam removal campaign began in earnest, construction crews began draining the reservoir behind Iron Gate Dam, the southernmost dam on the Klamath River. The official dam removal had begun the previous year with the dismantling of Copco 2, which was by far the smallest of the four dams, but the emptying of Iron Gate marked the real beginning of the end.
Belchik arrived early to watch the moment with Cordalis, who had wanted to get there at sunrise to pray. As Belchik waited for the drawdown to proceed, he noticed the group of PacifiCorp executives standing nearby. He thought they looked a little forlorn. Belchik approached one of them and started a conversation.
The executive revealed to Belchik what had happened after the trip to Blue Creek, which many campaigners had seen as the final blow for dam removal. After the executives boarded their company jet and left the river behind, Greg Abel, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, had turned to his employees and said that they needed to figure out how to get the dams off of the river.
Belchik had never understood until that moment why the company had made such an abrupt about-face, but now it made sense to him. 'Blue Creek changes people,' he said. At the start of the dam removal campaign, Ronnie Pierce had berated PacifiCorp executives for not knowing where the waterway was, and 20 years later, the company's leaders had fallen under its spell.
In a statement, a representative for PacifiCorp said the company 'remained steadfast in its goals to come to a resolution agreeable to all parties and reach the ultimate successful outcome.'
The dam removal process took the better part of last year. The first step was for engineers to drain all the reservoirs behind the Klamath dams, sending millions of tons of long-stagnant sediment downstream toward the Pacific. As crews opened these dams one by one, the river grew cloudy and brown before clearing up again. Demolition teams then used 800 pounds of dynamite to blast apart Copco 1, hauling away the wreckage with bulldozers. They carved apart the earthen mass of J.C. Boyle, the highest dam on the river and the closest to the Klamath Tribes, dismantling it one scoop of dirt at a time. They started to break apart Iron Gate, the downstream dam closest to the Yurok reservation and the last barrier to salmon passage.
Only then, in the fall of 2024, did tribal leaders get to watch the Klamath flow uninterrupted once more. The water tumbled downstream, from Upper Klamath Lake, where Jeff Mitchell had first joined his tribal government in 1975 and where the C'waam and Koptu suckerfish swam through placid water, to the forested mountainsides of the Yurok Tribe, where Cordalis had watched fish die in 2002 along the warm, weak waters of the lower river. From there, the Klamath wound to the vastness of the Pacific, where the salmon were waiting to come home.
This is Part IV of a five part series. This story was first published in Grist.
