While some groups are fighting to keep new dams from being built and prevent raising existing dams, others are removing dams to return the watercourses’ natural flows and enhance fisheries. In California, two dams on the Central Coast are finally gone and biologists are assessing the early responses to hydrology and improved access to spawning habitat.
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The Carmel River in Monterey County is flowing in its natural course for the first time in 95 years after the dam removal in November 2015.
The dam which was built in 1920, no longer served a purpose. It was full of silt, structurally unstable, and was an environmental roadblock for the threatened Steelhead trout trying to get up river to spawn.
“We're hoping that will be able to get somewhere near about four or five thousand adults in the river over next few years and be able to restore the population and get it to equilibrium again,” Lorin Letendre of the Carmel River Watershed Conservancy said. [snip]
The engineering involved rerouting and reconstructing the Carmel river and creating dozens of pools for Steelhead to spawn and mature. Natural barriers have also been constructed to stem the flow of water during flooding and native vegetation has been planted to restore the area to its natural setting.
Another dam removal was on Pescadero Creek in San Mateo County (just south of San Francisco) in October 2015. Recent rains have filled the watercourse and opened up habitat along 62 miles of the creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which empties into the Pacific Ocean. Finally, Pescadero Creek can once again deserve its name (pescado is Spanish for fish).
A 77-year-old concrete dam is now gone from San Mateo County's Pescadero Creek, opening a route for rare coho salmon to once again return to their ancestral habitat. [snip]
But it prevented the fish from making their swim from the Pacific Ocean to freshwater pools to spawn. The coho was listed as endangered in 2005 and is now on the brink of extinction. [snip]
"We're trying to give them a fighting chance, where they come to spawn," said Kellyx Nelson, executive director of the San Mateo County Resource Conservation District, based in Half Moon Bay.
"We're doing everything in our power to make sure they have the right habitat to feed, grow fat and lay their eggs before going back out to sea," she said.
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