Green News Roundup: Giving a Dam
Mother Nature Network
October 12, 2009
Oregon’s Savage Rapids Dam came down this weekend, ending an 88-year legacy of hindering salmon and steelhead on their annual march to spawn. The Rogue River is now able to flow freely, following a breaching that could foreshadow future dam removals aimed at protecting the Pacific Northwest’s spiraling salmon populations. The Savage Rapids Dam was built in 1921, and state biologists calculated it was blocking an estimated 58,000 salmon and steelhead from reaching their spawning grounds each year; conservation groups have been fighting since 1988 to remove the dam. On Saturday, an armada of rafts, kayaks and canoes floated down the Rogue to celebrate its first natural flows in nearly nine decades.