All you need is one dam and one hatchery to destroy a river.

I was born in 1945 so you can imagine that many of the dams on California's river were built during my life time.

They seemed to dam the big river right away then proceeded to dam every small stream the entire length of the state.

One hundred years ago California had one of the largest populations of anadromous fish in the world.


In my lifetime they are finally removing some dams and that makes me feel good.


To make a river healthy again you need to remove all dams and have no hatcheries.

I hope we can have a few more wild rivers in California.

In Texas, virtually every single river has been damned. There is a ray of hope though. The Guadalupe River has some 100 year old damns that may be coming down. Two have failed catastrophically in the past few years, hence the Guadalupe River authority announced that all the old damns would be removed as a safety precaution. However property owners have filed a lawsuit to block it and the action has been halted. Property owners along the artificial lakes will see their values likely plummet in the short term. They want the old damns rebuilt but there is no money in the system. What will probably happen is we’ll have another damn failure before this all gets resolved with the risk of the safety of those downstream.

With a population of approximately 40 million and a pronounced shortage of housing, developers want water and big-Ag demanding more water, removal of major dams is not likely (even tho many are identified as unsafe or lacking maintenance) and new, major dams are in the planning stages. Besides, many tailwater fisheries have developed below the dams (not all) we already have.

It says we have about 1,400 dams in California.

I guess some have actually filled in completely so they are actually just like a water fall.

It would be great if they could take out just a few to open up some nice little rivers?

We might need to build some some more dams or raise some dams higher for water for humans and AG?


If you search YouTube videos they are taking out small dams world wide and rebuilding small streams.

The SacBee recently reported that Westlands backed out of their participation in the raising of Shasta Dam. Altho that doesn't necessarily kill the project, it certainly slows it down to a crawl.

Also, DWR bought some space in the Sacramento News & Review to tout the benefits of Oroville Dam and the State Water Project. As an aside, I've been following the proposed contract from State Water Project (SWP) negotiations between DWR and water contractors. Allocation of costs, operations, tunnel stuff and intake(s) included. Looks like the "single tunnel" re-design of "the tunnels" project is being rapidly pushed by our new governor. Hopefully, Westlands withdrawal from participation in the raising of Shasta Dam isn't an indication that they're getting more than they already get from the SWP or from the Feds.