BOARD02415

• Board Meeting Date: 3/20/2000
• Description: Directors' Reports
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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A Riyer Runs Against It : America's Evolving View of Dams
by Bruce Babbitt
Creating a balance between the needs of the river and those who use it
(reprinted from an story that appeared in Open Spaces on March 6)

During the New Deal, President Franklin Roost)velt and his Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes,
toured the West dedicating dams before large, enthusiastic crowds. Now, at the end of the
century, I am out touring the country with a different message - it is time to un-dedicate some of
those dams by removing them and letting the rivers run free. For we now have too many of these
dams, some 75,000, the equivalent of one every day since Jefferson wrote the Declaration of
Independence. Along the way I am asking questions: Is this dam still serving its purpose? Do the
benefits justify the destruction of fish runs and drying up of rivers? Can't we find a better balance
between our needs and the needs of the river?

In some places the case for remoYing a darn is so easy to make that one wonders why it took so
long. Last December I took a sledgehammer to the Quaker Neck Dam on the Neuse River in
North Carolina. As dams go, Quaker Neck isn't much; it's only six feet high and it doesn't
generate power. But to the American shad trying to spawn upstream, that six feet might as well
be six hundred, blocking off 900 miles of upstream spawning waters. Now biologists and
engineers have figured out an alternative water diversion method and the dam has come down.
And, just a year later, the shad are spawning seventy miles upstream all the way to the city of
Raleigh.

Onward to the Kennebec river in Maine. In June I joined Governor King and local officials in
Augusta to announce an agreement for the removal of Edwards Dam. Standing on the river bank
we could see the dam up to our left, a stone and timber crib structure built clear back in 1837 at
the start of the Industrial Revolution. On the barIk above the dam, we could see the brick
skeleton of the long abandoned textile mill. In tbe river below the striped bass were swimming
haplessly in circles searching for a way through the dam. An osprey circled overhead then
plunged into the waters to scoop up a stranded [Ish.

The textile mills were eventually abandoned, but the Edwards Dam refused to die. It was
converted to produce the electricity that powered the first electric lights in Augusta. But by 1997
the darn was producing less than one half of one percent of the power used in tbe city. Residents
began asking the inevitable question. Is that trickle of electric power worth destruction of the
legendary runs of Atlantic salmon, stripers and six other species of migratory fish? And now,
after 157 years, Edwards Dam is coming down.

Each stop on these dam busting tours stirs enormOUs local, regional and national attention. And I
always wonder, what is it about the sound of a sledgehammer on concrete that evokes such a
reaction? We routinely demolish buildings that bave served their purpose or when there is a
better use for the land. Why not darns? For whatever reason, we view dams as akin to the
pyrarnids of Egypt - a permanent part of the landscape, timeless monuments to our civilization
and technology.

Those 75,000 dams are the cumulative result of two centuries of innovation and progress,
accompanied by indifference to the natural world of river ecology. What started out as
reasonable and desirable went on and on beyond all logic, overstating benefits, ignoring the
damage to fisheries and river systems, and understating the financial costs. At the extreme, dams