Klallam elder Ben Charles Sr. spoke quietly at the ceremonial site overlooking the Elwha River. “So many times we weep. So many times we pray.” He choked up for a moment, then said, “Today, prayers are answered.”
“The sleeping giants up here are starting to wake up.” People in the crowd, including senators, the governor, and federal officials as well as tribal elders, looked up at the Olympic Mountains in the distance. Even in late summer, the tallest peaks had snowfields gleaming in the sunlight.
“What a beautiful day.” Charles laughed a little. “We are compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses,” he said, referring to a passage in Hebrews 12:1. “Witnesses … and loved ones … This is a blessed day. Bless our time together.”
He added, “Bless those who don’t like this. They keep us aware of things that might happen.”
A blessing is a good thing for a $325 million experiment. Scientists have warned that unexpected events will happen with the biggest dam removal in U.S. history, which is probably also the biggest dam removal yet in the world. Even with all the years of planning, scientist Gordon Grant advised, “Expect surprises.”
Only two weeks after dam removal started, the Elwha River cascades down one side of the partially removed dam.
Charles’s blessing was the beginning of a two-hour ceremony on Saturday, September 17th, west of Port Angeles on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. After the officials spoke, musicians sang, and a Klallam tribal group performed a dance, the main ceremonial event began. Instead of a ribbon cutting, this ceremony featured an act of tearing down.
The dignitaries, including Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, National Park Service officials, and Klallam elders, stood in a group and shouted through a bullhorn, “Let the dam removal begin!”
At the lip of the Elwha Dam below, an excavation operator was waiting for this signal. He climbed into his excavator, started it, and lifted its steel jaws. Bam! Bam! Bam! Steel jaws pounded on the dam’s concrete. Chunks broke loose. The excavator’s jaws scooped up debris, turned, and dropped it. The crowd of about 400 people applauded.
Breaking down the two dams and powerhouses will take three years. The river will look worse before it looks better: 24 million cubic yards of sediment have accumulated behind the two dams over the past century. The freed river will carve new channels through that sediment, moving an unknown amount of it downstream over the next decade. According to modeling, as the dams are notched down bit by bit, like eating corn on the cob, the river will move back and forth across the old reservoir beds, churning gravel and rock into its waters.
Eventually the river will recover. As the dams come down and the river slowly drops to its original level, it will leave a series of stepped-down terraces where, in time, forests will grow again. Wild salmon will swim upstream to spawn in the wild streams of the Elwha’s headwaters.
That is the vision, but the project is experimental. Predictions are based on much smaller dam removals and on studies. At a certain point, the officials who make decisions had to consider all the data, take a big gulp, and decide to go ahead with the Elwha dam removals.
Experimenting is the American way, speaker Martin Doyle of Duke University reminded us the day before, at a scientific conference. The founding fathers frequently referred to the American government as an experiment, as a system to be tested, he pointed out, and to be changed over time.
The day before, Doyle ended his talk with a quote from an 1804 Thomas Jefferson letter. It applied perfectly, he said, to the Elwha dam removal beginning on Saturday.
“No experiment can be more interesting than that which we are now trying.”
Photo courtesty of National Park Service, from webcam Elwha Dam
