When Copco, the company, first started damming the Klamath, bringing hydroelectric power to a remote corner of California was a higher priority for government and industry than the passage of fish up and down from the river’s headwaters in southern Oregon to the sea. Today, scientists count damming alongside overfishing, hatcheries, degraded habitat, and climate change as the biggest blows to what were once the third-largest salmon runs in the lower 48 states.
Dam proponents also ignored Native American rights and interests. Their projects’ reservoirs flooded homelands of the Shasta people, so utterly dispossessing them that they are not currently a federally recognized tribe. The Klamath Tribes, upstream of Reservoir Reach, and Karuk Tribe and Yurok Tribe, downstream, have led the two-decade campaign to see the dams eliminated and salmon and other river fish restored, joining forces with conservationists.
Tear down the dams, bring back the river: to me, an outsider, there doesn’t seem to be much not to like. The local economy, for example, is not on the line. Two small towns are most directly affected: Hornbrook, just downstream from Iron Gate Dam, has a population of 650 if you include the surrounding district; the cottage community of Copco Lake, on the Copco reservoir, has 120 residents, not all of them full-time. According to PacifiCorp, the Oregon-based company that owns the Klamath dams today, the structures are mainly monitored and controlled remotely—from Lewis River, Washington, more than 500 kilometers away. Local jobs add up to 13, and all the affected employees either retired, voluntarily left the company, or will be reassigned within it.
There’s perennial conflict over how much Klamath water should go to agriculture and other uses and how much to fish. But that battle is centered upstream, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where a pair of dams will remain standing. (Technically, these are also part of Reservoir Reach; geographically, they stand in a distinctly gentler, more open landscape. Both are equipped to allow fish to pass.) The four dams slated for removal don’t hold water for irrigation.
The dams do produce enough hydropower to serve 70,000 households, so PacifiCorp will have to draw on the rest of its grid to replace that electricity. Still, the energy involved is less than 1.5 percent of PacifiCorp’s supply, which is steadily getting greener thanks mainly to wind and solar power. Since 2010, only 15 percent of the new electricity they’ve brought online has come from fossil-fuel burning
Still, Dave Meurer, a spokesperson for RES who used to do the same job for KRRC, explains that most residents of Reservoir Reach are dead set against dam removal. That’s not surprising: people facing change and uncertainty frequently challenge and resist it. What does surprise me is learning that many locals fear the project—for some, it’s a “white-knuckle fear,” says Meurer. Later, Ren Brownell, the current director of community affairs for KRRC, mentions that when she stepped into her job in June 2023, death threats started rolling in immediately.
Resistance to dam removal on the Klamath is emblematic of the profound mistrust of official narratives that increasingly leads to such upside-down outcomes as survivors of climate disasters denying climate change, or rural communities accusing the wildfire fighters who protect their homes of deliberately setting the fires. Reservoir Reach is a place where, if KRRC is using helicopters to prep for dam removal, it must make sure the public knows that the choppers aren’t carrying out black ops against American sovereignty on behalf of the United Nations.