It's the world's biggest dam removal, a three-year demolition project to tear down two huge hydro-electric dams on the Elwha River in Washington state and bring the river back to life. But although the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams are big - 33m and 64m high respectively - they're not the first concrete hulks to be removed from river systems across the United States. Over the past decade, more than 400 dams have been taken out, and the tally is currently heading toward the 1000 mark.
There are lessons here for Australia, and for politicians who equate dams with nation-building. While Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is planning to launch a Coalition policy platform calling for more dams to be built in Australia, the US is removing them as ageing relics of a bygone era. Dams are coming down across America as the cost of maintaining them, and the safety risks posed by the potential failure of ageing concrete, far outweigh the benefits they provide.
''We have been brought together by the power of a river,'' former US senator Bill Bradley told a crowd last week, gathered to watch a river blessing ceremony performed by dancers, drummers and singers of the Lower Elwha Klallam nation and cheer on an excavator removing the first scoops of concrete from behind the Elwha Dam wall.
For the Lower Elwha Klallam people, it marks the end of a 100-year struggle to have treaty rights restored that will enable them to make a living from the river. The two dams were built and financed by banker Thomas Aldwell and Canadian businessman George Glines, to power local timber mills. Construction began on the Elwha Dam in 1910 and Glines Canyon Dam was completed in 1926. At the time, they were hailed as engineering marvels epitomising America's entrepreneurial spirit, but the dams also blocked - and destroyed - wild salmon runs that had once seen more than 400,000 adult salmon return to the river to spawn, providing food and livelihoods for the Lower Elwha Klallam. The dams wiped out local populations of sockeye salmon, and led to drastic declines in 10 other fish species, including chinook salmon and steelhead trout. The river currently supports less than 3000 salmon.
In 1992, four women from the Lower Elwha Klallam gave evidence about the poor health of the river, and resulting economic hardship for their people, to a US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Bradley, a basketball-hall-of-fame elite athlete and investment banker.
''I remember the four women well. We heard that day from a parade of white men. They're a little harder to remember, but the four women from the Elwha, I remember them,'' the former Democrat presidential candidate told the crowd gathered to witness the first steps toward demolishing the dams.
Bradley said one of the women ''spoke of the salmon and the devastation of the tribe's economy when the salmon runs collapsed''. He also paid tribute to lawyer Tom Jensen who helped craft legislation to remove the dams, the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act.
''One of the first and best pieces of advice I got from Tom was that there was a way to bring the dams out of the Elwha, restore the salmon, and take care of the human needs tied to the river. He came to work for the Senate determined and ready to restore the Elwha and to restore the Nation's word to the Lower Elwha Klallam people. I turned him loose, and here we are,'' Bradley said.
The dam removal and river restoration will cost about $US350million and restore more than 112km of habitat for five species of salmon - chinook, coho, chum, pink and sockeye - and four species of native trout. The removal will generate 1650 construction jobs and it's estimated it will add $US355million to the local economy through eco-tourism and recreational fishing.
And in a reversal of the ''build 'em big'' mentality, one of America's earliest geek-mags, Popular Mechanics, details the marvels of green engineering required to demolish the dams and bring the Elwha River back to life.
''Destroying both dams involves breaking up and recycling 35,000 cubic yards of concrete - more than half the amount used to construct the Empire State Building - along with hundreds of tons of metal,'' the magazine says. The two reservoirs must be drained of a vast volume of water, ''enough to flood Safeco Ballpark in Seattle, the home of the Mariners, to the height of a 130-[storey] skyscraper''. And then, says the magazine, there's the sediment from the reservoirs, ''18 million cubic yards of the stuff, an amount so large that scientists have studied the debris flows from the explosion of Mount St Helens to gauge how aquatic life will react to it washing downstream''.
And the salmon won't be back in one season. Experts estimate it could take 30 years for populations to be restored. Writing about the dam removal for a local Washington state newspaper, chair of Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission Billy Frank said the river restoration would bring jobs and new hope to a region where local timber industries are in decline.
''The Lower Elwha Klallam people have put their treaty rights to work, restoring the Elwha for all of us, Indian and non-Indian. Their name means 'strong people' and you damn well better believe they're strong. It's the kind of strength we all need on our journey to recover the salmon,'' he writes.
But Frank warns more dams need to go if river health is to be restored on a national scale.
''There are many more Elwha dams out there. They might not look the same, and they might go by other names, like floodplain development, shoreline armouring and non-point pollution, but they are just as deadly to salmon. And like the Elwha dams, they're just as effective at denying all of us healthy salmon runs, a healthy environment and a healthy economy.''
Rosslyn Beeby is Science and Environment reporter.
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