When the dams come tumbling down, good things happen
Biological Boomerang
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. - You come to the big green heart of the American rain forest because you want to be far, far away from the dead-eyed young man with dyed red hair and the thumping chatter about what's wrong with a country in which 16,000 lives are taken every year in violent homicide.
Each murder is inexplicable in its own way, so you look for something restorative and reliable in a park holding trees that were living when Thomas Jefferson puttered around Monticello.
It doesn't take long to find a miracle in the newly released Elwha River, focus of the largest dam removal project in American history - the Berlin Wall of environmental restoration. When wrecking crews started whacking away at the Elwha Dam last September, it was projected to take two, or even three years to bring it down.
By late spring the 108-foot-tall dam was completely gone, and the river looks frisky in its gravitational search for old channels. Another dam, twice the height of the Elwha and eight miles upriver, is also coming down. With these two concrete barriers gone, about 70 miles of some of the cleanest, coldest water on the planet will tumble through the park at the edge of the continent.
It defies experience-hardened cynicism whenever any big public works project is under budget and ahead of schedule. But the Elwha has served up something even better: life itself, in the form of ocean-going fish answering to the imperatives of love and death. Not long ago, scientists were stunned to find wild steelhead trout scouting habitat well past the site where the Elwha Dam had stood for nearly a century. They didn't expect fish to return this soon.
(More here.)
OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. - You come to the big green heart of the American rain forest because you want to be far, far away from the dead-eyed young man with dyed red hair and the thumping chatter about what's wrong with a country in which 16,000 lives are taken every year in violent homicide.
Each murder is inexplicable in its own way, so you look for something restorative and reliable in a park holding trees that were living when Thomas Jefferson puttered around Monticello.
It doesn't take long to find a miracle in the newly released Elwha River, focus of the largest dam removal project in American history - the Berlin Wall of environmental restoration. When wrecking crews started whacking away at the Elwha Dam last September, it was projected to take two, or even three years to bring it down.
By late spring the 108-foot-tall dam was completely gone, and the river looks frisky in its gravitational search for old channels. Another dam, twice the height of the Elwha and eight miles upriver, is also coming down. With these two concrete barriers gone, about 70 miles of some of the cleanest, coldest water on the planet will tumble through the park at the edge of the continent.
It defies experience-hardened cynicism whenever any big public works project is under budget and ahead of schedule. But the Elwha has served up something even better: life itself, in the form of ocean-going fish answering to the imperatives of love and death. Not long ago, scientists were stunned to find wild steelhead trout scouting habitat well past the site where the Elwha Dam had stood for nearly a century. They didn't expect fish to return this soon.
(More here.)
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