The Olympian.

Published April 07, 2009
Removal of Rogue dam spells end of bitter battle
JEFF BARNARD
Within weeks, jackhammers will start knocking Savage Rapids Dam into rubble,
and with it two decades of bitter battles over whether to keep what had
become a crumbling symbol of a bygone era when rugged pioneers bent nature
to their needs.
When irrigation season starts next month, 12 modern pumps will fill the
canals serving 7,500 acres of the Grants Pass Irrigation District. By
December, the northern half of the dam on the Rogue River will be gone,
allowing salmon and steelhead to swim freely past the site for the first
time since 1921.
After the lawsuits and arguments of the past, Grants Pass Irrigation
District Manager Dan Shepard is ready to see the dam go.
"This digging in your feet like the Alamo makes good movies," said Shepard,
but in those movies, "a lot of people are dead."
In the 88 years since Savage Rapids was built, the logging and mining that
once sustained Southern Oregon have faded. Farms that the irrigation
district once served have sprouted homes that tap the water for lawns and
gardens. And the salmon and steelhead have struggled.
"They are giving up an aging infrastructure with high (operation and
maintenance) costs for a relatively stable pumping facility," said Bob
Hamilton, who has overseen the project for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
since 1988. "They will have an electric bill they never had (to run the
pumps), but they will also have reliability they never had these many, many
years."
The battles started in 1988, when the conservation group WaterWatch, Rogue
Fly Fishers and the American Fisheries Society filed a protest to stop the
irrigation district from drawing more water from the Rogue.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation took a look and decided the cheapest and best
solution to provide water efficiently without harming fish was to remove the
dam and replace it with pumps.
The district initially went along, knowing the federal government was likely
to pick up the tab with powerful Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., in office, but
later flip-flopped and fought to save the dam. Lawsuits were filed. Battles
flared in the state Capitol. The Rogue's coho salmon was declared a
threatened species, and more lawsuits were filed.
By 2001, after losing every lawsuit and spending more than $1 million on
legal fees, the district agreed to remove the dam. The next year the Oregon
Watershed Enhancement Board pledged $3 million, and a year later Congress
started approving funding that would eventually cover the rest of the $39.3
million cost.
Shepard recalls one of the valley's major orchardists asking him why
irrigators cared how they got water, as long as they got it.
The answer was a tough one, he said.
It has to do with people feeling powerless before their government, mindful
of how spotted owl protection triggered a huge reduction in logging that
took away the resource-based economy of the region.
"Nobody likes change," Shepard said. "If you were a businessman - a farmer
or rancher - when something comes up you can get all emotional about it for
a short period of time. Then you have to back up and look at it from a
business perspective.
"Since we didn't have any full-time ranchers or farmers, it's very easy for
people to get emotional instead of dealing with reality."
On Tuesday, workers for Slayden Construction of Stayton dumped truckloads of
rocks and gravel into the river downstream of the dam and looked over the
dry riverbed upstream as they started building a cofferdam that will hold
back the water while backhoes and workers equipped with jackhammers start
pounding the 88-year-old concrete structure into rubble.
The river flowed through the radial gates at the center of the dam.
For three weeks while the coffer dam is built, no straggling winter
steelhead or early spring chinook will be able to climb the fish ladders to
spawning grounds upstream.
When the project is finished this December, the northern half of the dam
will be gone. The southern half that remains will no longer have the
concrete pillars that held in place the needle logs that raised and lowered
the dam for irrigation.
Winter storms will start washing downstream the 250,000 cubic yards of sand
and gravel built up behind the dam.
Adult fish swimming upstream will no longer struggle with the poorly
designed fish ladders. Young fish migrating downstream will no longer get
shunted into irrigation ditches or a turbine to die.
Removing Savage Rapids comes on the heels of removing a diversion dam
upstream at Gold Hill, and talk that Gold Ray Dam, also upstream, could be
out by next year. That would open 157 miles of freeflowing river from Lost
Creek Dam, the one dam that stores water and controls flooding on the Rogue,
to the Pacific.
"We are seeing one of the nation's largest river restoration projects," said
Bob Hunter of WaterWatch.