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San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- General
- San Francisco Chronicle
California's massive dam removal hit a key milestone. Now, there's a problem
Last year, after the historic removal of four dams on the Klamath River, thousands of salmon rushed upstream into the long-blocked waters along the California-Oregon border, seeking out the cold, plentiful flows considered crucial to the fish's future. The return of salmon to their ancestral home was a fundamental goal of dam removal and a measure of the project's success. However, a problem emerged. The returning salmon only got so far. Eight miles upriver from the former dam sites lies a still-existing dam, the 41-foot-tall Keno Dam in southern Oregon. The dam has a fish ladder that's supposed to help with fish passage, but it didn't prove to work. While many proponents of dam removal say they're thrilled with just how far the salmon got, most of the 420 miles of waterways that salmon couldn't reach before the dam demolition still appear largely unreachable. This stands to keep the fish from spreading and reproducing in the high numbers anticipated with the project. Other migratory fish, including steelhead trout and Pacific lamprey, may face similar straits. The shortcoming has opened a new chapter in the decades-long effort to liberate the Klamath River, this one focused on Keno Dam. It has also left some people frustrated that the dam wasn't addressed sooner, when the other dams were dealt with. 'It's too bad that there wasn't enough forethought,' said William Ray Jr., chairman for the Klamath Tribes, who represents the native communities in the upper section of the Klamath Basin where salmon haven't been able to get to. 'The fish could have gone a lot farther, and that was the whole point. … The job just wasn't done, far from it.' The $500 million dam-removal project, considered the largest in U.S. history, was overseen by the states of California and Oregon in partnership with tribes and environmental groups, which initiated the effort to restore the 250-mile Klamath River to its natural conditions. The former owner of the power-generating dams, PacifiCorp, agreed to dam removal to rid itself of the river's aging and increasingly costly hydroelectric operations. The Portland-based utility and state of California paid for the work. PacifiCorp also owned Keno Dam, but because the dam provides flood control, unlike the others, it was transferred to the federal government's Bureau of Reclamation for continued operation, as part of the dam-removal agreement. In recent months, federal, state and tribal officials have been evaluating Keno Dam to see what might be done to make sure it's passable for salmon. The possibilities range from rebuilding the old fish ladder to removing the dam. Making changes, though, will be complicated by the facility's role in regulating river flows, and it could be years, if not decades, before there's a permanent fix. 'Restoration is not a flip-of-the-switch and everything-is-fine endeavor,' said Philip Milburn, district manager at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which has been contracted by the federal government to evaluate options for Keno Dam. 'It took hundreds of years for the basin to get to the way it is now, and it's going to take time to modify it to suit fish.' Above Keno Dam, where migratory fish haven't been for more than a century because of the dams, 350 miles of rivers, lakes and creeks are believed to be key for the struggling salmon population. Salmon spend most of their short lives at sea but they need freshwater to spawn. With the warming climate, the cold-water springs, higher elevations and nutrient-rich waters of the upper Klamath Basin are particularly important for reproduction, scientists say. The revival of the basin's salmon would be a boon for the commercial fishing industry and culinary world as well as for the many tribes that see the fish as a spiritual force in their communities. 'We haven't had the fish for a long time,' said Ray Jr. 'It harms the culture and the health of our people. We're becoming impatient.' New fish, but an old dam The apparent problem at Keno Dam became clear late last year, following what many federal, state and tribal officials considered an immediate success with the dam-removal project. The number of salmon swimming in the newly opened-up waters of the Klamath River, downstream of Keno Dam, was generally more than what was anticipated so soon. Roughly 2,000 chinook salmon were counted after the last of the dams was razed in August in surveys recently released by a multi-jurisdictional team of scientists. Sonar reports suggest the number could have been thousands more. The fish were part of the river's fall run, its most populous run. The salmon journeyed from the mouth of the Klamath River in California's redwood-filled north to the sunny rolling hills of Siskiyou County – a total of 190 miles to the first of the former dam sites. Beyond going the distance, the ability of the salmon to enter a new stretch of river hinged on navigating cloudy waters whipped up temporarily with the dam demolition as well as resisting the urge to stay in familiar territory. Salmon are built to return to their place of birth, though they sometimes 'stray' when it's in their interest. 'A lot of people expected it would take years for the fish to show up in these numbers,' said Mike Belchik, senior fisheries biologist for Northern California's Yurok Tribe, one of the primary tribes supporting the dam removal. 'That was wrong.' Coho salmon, steelhead trout and Pacific lamprey also have been documented in the footprint of the old dams. The fall-run chinook, once they got above the former dam sites, spawned either in the Klamath's main stem or in a tributary, such as Jenny or Shovel creeks, according to the surveys. This spring, newly born salmon began migrating to sea. (The adults die after spawning.) 'I don't know if the fish ran out of room or not,' Belchik said. 'Some of the habitats seemed fully occupied. But we're pretty stoked that so many went up there.' More than 500 adults were estimated to have gone as far as Oregon, with an unknown number making it to Keno Dam. At least a few were observed in the dam's fish ladder, which is a series of more than 20 step pools designed to help fish bypass the dam, but none were documented to have reached the top. While a lack of monitoring could explain the complete absence of fish above the dam, the challenges at the dam are unmistakable. One issue is believed to be a component called the trash racks. The vertical bars at the intakes of the fish ladder, which keep logs from clogging the passageway, were too narrow for salmon, an obstruction that federal officials at the Bureau of Reclamation have since worked on. But the larger problem, according to Oregon wildlife officials, is that the fish ladder at Keno Dam dates to when the dam was built in 1967 and simply doesn't work well. The openings between the pools where fish pass are too small. The gates controlling the flow of water are faulty. The ladder is located too far from where fish approach. 'To provide fish passage that meets current state of Oregon and federal fish passage criteria, a new passage facility would be required,' wildlife officials wrote in an evaluation of the dam in 2023. The Bureau of Reclamation confirmed in a statement to the Chronicle that it was working on 'fish passage solutions' at the dam. The agency, however, declined a request for an interview about the details of the work and the timing. Fixing the dam for fish While the Bureau of Reclamation's acquisition of Keno Dam last summer meant that the agency wasn't able to address fish passage until recently, at least directly, state and tribal officials say there were other reasons the issue wasn't taken up sooner. One was uncertainty about whether the dam-removal project downriver would ever get done after years of delays. Another was skepticism that salmon would make it to Keno Dam even if the dams below came down. Furthermore, the focus on the removal of the four dams left little time and resources to figure out what to do with potential hurdles upstream. 'There just wasn't the capacity to do everything at once,' said Milburn, with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. 'Now we're tackling the things that were sidelined during the initial project.' With two new grants from the federal government, Oregon wildlife officials have been tasked with identifying both short-term and long-term fixes for Keno Dam. The state recently received the first $100,000 of a $4.5 million grant for immediate repairs, such as making sure the trash racks on the fish ladder don't block salmon. State officials have also convened a group of experts to study and recommend a permanent solution over the next three years, with the second $1.9 million grant. The recommendation will be forwarded to the Bureau of Reclamation for consideration. According to the terms of the grant, the state-convened experts will evaluate such possibilities as constructing a more effective fish ladder at Keno Dam as well as dismantling the dam entirely, which could prove even more effective for fish passage. Oregon officials say any proposal that involves dam removal must include dam replacement, presumably with one that's more fish friendly, or building a similarly purposed structure, possibly an artificial reef to replicate what was on the river historically, as has been informally discussed. Maintaining the flood-control features of the 723-foot-wide Keno Dam is necessary to protect the area's farms, communities and infrastructure. The dam is located 12 miles southwest of the city of Klamath Falls, Ore. 'There are so many benefits from having that dam in place right now that I can't see removing it unless there is a very, very deliberate effort to make sure we're not causing harm to the economy and local folks,' said Gene Souza, executive director of the Klamath Irrigation District, a water agency that delivers supplies to growers in the basin on both sides of the state line. Souza and others have also pointed to the potentially huge expense of demolishing the dam and building another. A new fish ladder could be pricey, too, requiring a specialized, durable and high-maintenance facility, though no cost estimates have been worked up yet for any of the options. While Keno Dam appears to be the biggest hang-up on the river, the challenges for salmon are not likely to end there. Upstream is one more dam, Link River Dam in Klamath Falls. This facility, long owned by the Bureau of Reclamation, regulates giant Upper Klamath Lake, where the Klamath River begins, and provides water supplies for the agriculturally vital Klamath Project. The dam has a fish ladder that has been upgraded, unlike the one at Keno Dam, but salmon passage is not assured. Beyond Link River Dam, Upper Klamath Lake has been experiencing bouts of algae and poor water quality in recent years that could make fish navigation difficult. Above the lake, the Williamson, Sprague, and Wood rivers offer ideal habitat, but in the century that salmon have been absent, unknown obstacles may have emerged with human development. Restoration work in many of the basin's waterways, including reviving wetlands and reconnecting creeks, has been ongoing to help existing fish and improve water conditions as well as to prepare for the anticipated salmon. 'The last thing we want is a bottleneck in the upper watershed,' said Rob Lusardi, assistant professor of wildlife, fish and conservation biology at UC Davis, who has studied salmon reintroduction strategies in the Klamath Basin. 'I'm not saying that's the case… (but) anywhere we can improve fish passage is a goal worth pursuing.'
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Backup plan
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News. Anita Hofschneider and Jake BittleI llustrations by Jackie FawnGrist PART III — The Backup Plan In February of 2010, Jeff Mitchell shook California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand before reporters at the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon, with the governor of Oregon and the secretary of the interior looking on. 'Hasta la vista, Klamath dams,' Schwarzenegger said as he leaned over to sign the agreement to demolish the four dams, settle rights to the river's water, and return land to the Klamath Tribes. Beneath the capitol dome, the former bodybuilder joked that, even for him, the deal had been 'a big lift' to get over the finish line. The mood in Salem that day was ecstatic. After years of protest and negotiation, the entire basin — the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, the region's conservative farmers, and environmentalists — had come together behind a plan to take the dams down, and they'd brought both the federal Department of the Interior and the dams' corporate owner over to their side. Because the deal hinged on millions in federal restoration funding, as well as a legal directive to let Interior take the lead on dam removal, the last remaining step was for Congress to pass a bill that authorized the demolition and allocate money to restore the river to its original undammed state. Later that year, the Republican Party scored a resounding victory in the 2010 midterm elections, riding a wave of backlash against the election of Barack Obama two years prior. Many of those elected to the congressional majority that emerged in the House of Representatives were partisans of the far-right Tea Party movement. They advocated a scorched-earth opposition to the Obama administration's entire agenda, rejecting bipartisan achievements like the Klamath deal, despite its origins in the Bush administration. 'I think there was a whole lot of just blocking of anything that could be a potential positive legacy for the Obama administration,' said Leaf Hillman, the former vice chairman of the Karuk Tribal Council. 'Congress was hell-bent on making sure he got nothing to be proud of.' Like many legal settlements, the Klamath deal had an expiration date at the end of 2012. If Congress didn't ratify the deal and the settlement lapsed, the parties had to start all over again to negotiate a new one. After the 2010 election, a few years suddenly didn't seem like much time at all. The Republican resurgence also elevated a man Mitchell knew well: Greg Walden, a longtime congressman for the Oregon side of the Klamath Basin and now an influential leader in the House Republican caucus. For years, Mitchell had known Walden as a fierce advocate for the state's agricultural interests and a critic of the Endangered Species Act. The two men had spoken about fish issues on the river, but Mitchell had never felt like Walden cared much about what he had to say. Still, Walden had expressed his support for the Klamath settlement when it came together in 2008, saying that the negotiators 'deserved a medal.''He kept saying, 'If you guys can develop an agreement, I'll do my job and I'll get it through Congress and get it funded,'' recalled Mitchell. Walden had been engaged on Klamath issues since the 2001 water crisis, and had secured funding for financial relief and infrastructure in the basin. He had even enabled the dismantling of a very small dam on a tributary in Chiloquin, Oregon. As a high-ranking Republican and the member representing Oregon's side of the basin, he seemed to be in an ideal position to advance a bill that would ratify the settlement. But despite urging from farmers, tribal leaders, and other elected officials, Walden failed to push for the settlement — a decision that many advocates saw as an attempt to block dam removal. Before long, he became public enemy number one for the settlement parties, who soon found themselves forced to extend the ratification deadline to the end of 2015. In the summer of 2013, after multiple years of stagnation in Congress, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden held a public hearing on the Klamath deal in an attempt to generate some forward momentum. Mitchell, Hillman, and Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe came to Washington to testify in support of the deal and urge legislators to pass it. 'We hope that you will work with us to make sure that [the settlement] gets passed,' said Fletcher in his impassioned remarks to the Senate natural resources committee. 'People have got to move off their entrenched positions.' Part of the reason for Walden's resistance to moving the agreement through the House was that the landmark Klamath agreement, which brought together dozens of parties, was still not inclusive enough for his tastes. The settlement, he said, had left a number of groups out, including local residents who lived around the dams. Most important to him were a small group of farmers and ranchers that worked land upstream of Upper Klamath Lake and had walked away from initial settlement talks. In an attempt to satisfy Walden, Oregon's governor deputized Richard Whitman, the state's lead environmental official, to work out a separate deal that would resolve a water conflict between these farmers and the Klamath Tribes. Over the next two years, with the other campaigners waiting in the background, Whitman dutifully managed to negotiate an irrigation settlement the holdouts could accept. Walden praised the settlement and suggested he would help push through the broader Klamath deal, including the dam removal, according to Whitman. Then he never did. 'Congressman Walden refused to move legislation notwithstanding that we had satisfied his conditions,' said Whitman. 'He never lived up to that commitment.' Walden said he did not recall making this commitment to Whitman and defended his engagement on the settlement. He said that even if he had backed the settlement, it would never have made it through Congress with a dam removal provision. There were a slew of dam supporters in charge of House committees at the time, and since 2013 Walden's counterpart on the California side of the basin had been the far-right Doug LaMalfa, a former rice farmer and stalwart supporter of western agriculture. LaMalfa was dead-set against the dam removal agreement, and his constituents were on his side — residents of Siskiyou County, California, which was home to three of the dams, had voted 4-to-1 against dam removal in a symbolic local referendum. 'It just hit a brick wall, and that brick wall was just the realities of control of Congress,' said Walden. 'I kept saying … 'I realize you want to blame me, but tell me the path.'' As the extended deadline got closer, Fletcher, Mitchell, Hillman and other dam removal advocates escalated their pressure campaign. They held a rally in Portland, boosted an anti-dam campaign in Brazil, and organized countless meetings between irrigators, tribal leaders, and elected officials. But nothing happened in Congress. When Senator Wyden introduced a Klamath bill in the Senate in early 2015, with just months to go until the settlement expired, it went nowhere, failing to secure even a hearing in the chamber's energy committee.'In my lifetime, I've seen moments where Congress could really do bipartisan stuff, and try to really solve problems,' said Chuck Bonham, who participated in Klamath negotiations first as a lawyer for the fish advocacy organization Trout Unlimited, and later as California's top fish and wildlife official. 'When the negotiations started, that was the prevailing theory. By the time we got there, that was impossible.' By the start of 2015, campaigners had been trying to pass the settlement for almost five years. Senior officials at the Department of the Interior, which had brought the deal together under the Bush administration, were desperate to get something through Congress before the uncertainty of the following year's election. That fall, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and longtime Interior lawyer John Bezdek decided to try a last-second gambit. They conveyed to Walden they would support a broader Klamath settlement bill without a dam removal provision. The bill would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the river and settle the water conflict between the Klamath Tribes and the farmers, and it would even preserve the Klamath Tribes' land restoration agreement — but it would allow the dam agreement to expire, leaving the basin with no guarantee that PacifiCorp's dams would come down. 'We couldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good,' Jewell said. Meeting with Bezdek in a side room in the U.S. Capitol, Walden again sounded an optimistic note. If the dam removal mandate disappeared, he thought the rest of the settlement could pass, despite hesitance from other Republicans. But it took him until the final month of 2015 to introduce a settlement bill, and that bill stood no chance of passing — it opened up thousands of acres of federal forest land to new logging operations, a carve out that Democrats and Indigenous nations dismissed as unacceptable. The bill went nowhere. Walden said he didn't remember the specific conversation with Bezdek, but said he thought his final bill had a chance of passing. 'This one got away,' he said. 'I couldn't figure out how to do it.' With the settlement's expiration imminent, the fragile coalition that had come together around the dams' removal began to fall apart. Leaders from the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes had put decades of work into the negotiations, and some tribal leaders, like Fletcher, had made removing the dams their life's work. Watching all that progress vanish due to Congress's inaction felt like an echo of previous betrayals. 'There was a sense of extreme frustration, because these agreements were very difficult to negotiate,' said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who came on as its lead counsel in 2014. Cordalis had decided to go to law school after witnessing the mass die-off of salmon on the river in 2002. Most of her work since then had led up to this moment, and now it was about to vanish. In September of 2015, the leadership of the Yurok Tribe announced that it was withdrawing from the Klamath deal, essentially dooming the watered-down agreement. In a press release, the tribe said that the 'benefits of the agreements have become unachievable.' The Karuk and Klamath tribes said they would follow suit by the end of the year if Congress didn't act. A few weeks after Yurok leadership announced they were pulling out of the deal, Yurok Tribe biologist Mike Belchik met up with Fletcher on a scorching day while the Yurok director was hitting golf balls. Belchik was frustrated with Fletcher for abandoning the deal, but Fletcher was adamant that the move was a strategic maneuver designed to bring everyone back to the table. 'The dam removal deal won't die,' he told Belchik. 'It's got too much life in it. It's going to happen.' Two weeks later, during a meeting on Klamath water issues on the Yurok reservation, Fletcher suffered a fatal heart attack. His sudden death at age 53 was a blow not only to the Yurok Tribe but to the entire Klamath Basin: The breakthrough deal to restore the river was no more, and the man who had done so much to bring it together was gone. 'It was just such a terrible shock, it was awful,' said Belchik, who had spent countless hours with Fletcher — driving to and from PacifiCorp meetings, playing poker and golf, and strategizing about how to bring the dams down. 'He really in a lot of ways gave his life to Klamath dam removal and to the river,' said Cordalis. With Fletcher gone and Congress having failed to pass the settlement into law, it seemed like there was just one strategy left for the Klamath, albeit one that negotiators had rejected a decade earlier. PacifiCorp's overriding priority was that some other entity — any other entity — take responsibility for demolition of its dams, allowing the company to avoid legal liability for the removal process. The Klamath settlement deal had come together around the appealing idea that the federal government would be that entity — having the Interior Department take the dams down had always made the most sense, given the federal government's sheer size, expertise, and funding. As Congress stalled, longtime dam opponent and tribal counsel Richard Roos-Collins thought back to the early days of the settlement talks. He had been involved in Klamath negotiations for more than 10 years, and had been one of the tribes' only representatives at the tense West Virginia talks back in 2008. He recalled that, during those early stages, before the Bush administration had signed on to the deal, environmental groups had proposed that PacifiCorp transfer the dams to a new corporation run by the tribes or by the states — essentially a holding company that would accept the dams only to destroy them using money from PacifiCorp and the states. At the time, PacifiCorp had rejected the idea as ridiculous and unproven, and negotiators had given up on it, putting their hopes in the Interior Department. But Roos-Collins remembered that a group of environmentalists and local organizations in Maine had created a nonprofit trust to purchase two dams on the Penobscot River back in 2004. The trust had since destroyed those dams, reopening the river for fish migrations. He thought there might be a chance that the same idea could work with PacifiCorp: The utility would apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to transfer the hydroelectric dams to a nonprofit entity, and that nonprofit would take them down, shielding PacifiCorp from liability and costs. It was still an outlandish plan. The Klamath dams were several times the size of the ones in Maine, and far larger than any other dams that had ever come down in the United States. FERC had a history of support for hydropower, and there was no way to know if it would endorse the idea of demolishing an active power facility if the Interior Department wasn't the one doing it. Neither the states, the tribes, nor the environmental groups wanted to take ownership of the dams, which meant the 'removal entity' would have to be a bespoke nonprofit created for that express purpose. 'There was resignation, and kind of a demoralization, that was, 'Well, we only have one option left, and that is FERC,'' said Chuck Bonham, who had helped negotiate the original settlement at Trout Unlimited and was now the lead Klamath negotiator for the state of California. PacifiCorp executives worried the system was a Trojan horse to keep the utility involved: If the process cost more than projected, would the dam removal entity come back to the company for more money? If the sediment that got released from behind the dams turned out to be toxic enough to kill off downstream wildlife, would lawsuits drive the removal company into bankruptcy? Federal, state, and company negotiators went back and forth over the details for months toward the end of 2015 as the settlement fell apart in Congress. They made little progress. Remembering his meeting with Fletcher back in 2008, when Fletcher demanded that the Bush administration bring PacifiCorp to the table on dam removal, Interior lawyer John Bezdek called another closed-door meeting at the same remote site in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Once again, he bartered with PacifiCorp official Andrea Kelly late into the night, pushing her to endorse the idea of transferring ownership of the dams. She refused to commit: The proposal left PacifiCorp too exposed to liability. As Kelly and Bezdek debated utility law, they grew increasingly frustrated. After dinner one evening, the two got into an argument and stormed off to their respective dormitories, fed up with one another. 'I actually thought for sure it was done,' Bezdek said. 'I went back to my room, and I called my wife, and I said, 'I think it's done. I don't think we can get there.'' Some time after midnight, Bezdek got a call from Kelly, who couldn't sleep either. They threw on their coats, met on a bench outside the dormitories, and started talking again. Bezdek emphasized that the entire Klamath Basin, from the tribes to the farmers, had come together in the belief that the dams needed to go. It was time for PacifiCorp to do the same; the fight would never be over until the company let go. By the time the sun came up, Kelly had agreed to the new plan. California and Oregon would endow a joint nonprofit dedicated to the dams' removal, and PacifiCorp would apply to FERC for permission to transfer the dams to that nonprofit. Bezdek took the agreement to his boss at Interior, Sally Jewell, who approved it. There was no need, with this new arrangement, to get Congress involved. Walden said he wishes he had known it was possible for the dam removal to take place without Congress' involvement. If he had, he said, he would have pushed to pass the rest of the Klamath settlement and advocated for the FERC path toward dam removal, potentially saving the settlement and speeding up removal by several years. 'Had I understood that, dam removal would never have been a federal issue, because it didn't need to be, and we might have been able to find a different solution,' he said. 'That's my fault.' A few months after the second Shepherdstown summit, on a hot April day at the mouth of the Klamath River in Requa, California, tribal leaders gathered with Jewell, Bezdek, and the governors of California and Oregon to celebrate the revived dam removal agreement. They signed the documents on a traditional Yurok fish-cleaning table, a long white plank of stone that tribal members had cleaned for the occasion. Then the dam removal advocates took the group on a boat up to Blue Creek, the same part of the river where the devastating fish kill had occurred in 2002. There was a notable absence: Jeff Mitchell of the Klamath Tribes was not part of the celebratory photo op at the fish table. There was still a path toward dam removal, but the broader Klamath settlement had died in Congress, dashing hopes for a water accord between the Klamath Tribes and the irrigators. The Klamath Tribes did not sign the amended dam removal agreement because it did not have the same protections for their treaty rights as the original deal. 'I wish that we would've been able to work through that,' Mitchell said. 'The price that we paid for that was pretty, pretty deep — pretty, pretty big price — because it took us away from the table.' For the other tribal leaders who had been fighting for dam removal, the day felt momentous. 'I was naively stoked,' said Amy Cordalis. To her, the memory of the dead salmon was still fresh, even 15 years later — she could still smell the rotting flesh. It had been a moment of clarity of her life's purpose. 'I felt like my great-grandmother, who had passed away when I was 6, came to me and was like, 'You need to make sure that this never happens again,'' she said. Cordalis was part of a new generation of tribal leaders and their allies who were determined to carry on the fight. But neither Sally Jewell, nor the governors of California and Oregon, nor the tribal activists knew whether or not FERC, a government body that operates independently of the presidential administration, would accept the new transfer proposal. It would take years to refine the details of the new agreement, and it was far from certain that the coalition would hold together: Not only was Fletcher gone, but PacifiCorp's Kelly was about to retire. Bezdek was about to leave the negotiations as well, since the Interior Department would no longer have direct involvement in the dam removal. More than a decade after the fight to remove the Klamath dams began, none of the campaigners could have known that the new agreement would next have to survive a global pandemic. This is Part III of a five part series. This story was first published by Grist.
