Column: Torpedo the Dams — and Free the Rivers

According to Dakota legend dating to the 19th century, a young Indian woman and her child refused to accompany her tribe as they fled before the advance of white soldiers. When some of her people later returned to the camp to find her, they discovered that she and the child on her back had turned to stone. That stone, called Standing Rock, has been held in reverence by the Sioux for generations, and today it rests on a pedestal in Fort Yates, N.D., overlooking, in the words of a nearby plaque, “the waters and the empire once held by the mighty Sioux nation.”



When I visited Standing Rock Indian Reservation some years ago, my host, Innocent Good House, a Sioux Indian and Episcopal priest, told me that story with a kind of sad resignation. And then he turned to the water at Standing Rock’s feet. The Army Corps of Engineers had recently transformed the waters of the Missouri River into Lake Oahe, a huge expanse that drowned several Sioux villages, swallowed up much of the land along the Missouri, clogged adjoining wells with silt and left the carcasses of countless trees pointing their dead, whitened branches above the surface in a kind of eerie and desolate beauty.



“An Indian believes that the waters of a river should flow,” Good House told me quietly. That dam, he believed, was a travesty.



Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the interior during the Clinton administration, once estimated that the United States had constructed an average of one dam a day since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Army Corps of Engineers calculates the number of dams on American rivers at 80,000. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River was completed in 1936, and on the Columbia River the Bonneville Dam was completed in 1938 and the Grand Coulee Dam in 1942.



Apologists for dams tout their flood control and the generation of clean energy. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal embarked on a dam-building binge, notably the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provided jobs to help rescue the nation from the clutches of the Great Depression.



But at what cost? Sediment and nutrients build up behind dams, altering the fragile ecosystem of rivers (and eventually leading to the failure of the dams themselves). Dams destroy flood plains, which function as sponges to store water, filter sediment and reduce the velocity of rivers during high-water periods. They impede the movement of fish, many of which perish in turbines. Because rivers are no longer flowing, the stagnant water behind a dam warms in the sun, thereby changing the ecosystem, an issue compounded by climate change.



In addition, dams are just plain, well, ugly. I suppose you can cite exceptions — the Hoover Dam, for instance, which is undeniably an engineering marvel. But balance that against what was lost. Environmentalists still lament the flooding of Hetch Hetchy in California and the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell at the expense of flooding miles and miles of magnificent canyons.



I recall visiting the Grand Coulee Dam during a family vacation when I was a child. My father, born in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression, was fascinated with dams, and he wasn’t alone. Many Americans of his generation believed almost religiously in the ability of engineering to tame the passions of nature.



With the emergence of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, however, those attitudes began to change. As governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter successfully blocked the construction of dams on the Flint River, which flows from Atlanta to the Gulf of Mexico. As president, Carter sought, in his words, to “get the Corps of Engineers out of the dam-building business,” although his efforts were thwarted by Congress.



Public sentiment is shifting. Throughout the West in particular, as told in a superb documentary called DamNation, dams are coming down and rivers once again are flowing freely, some for the first time in decades, even centuries. In Washington state, the removal of the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam on the Elwha River began in 2011. Once the sediment washed to the sea, runs of salmon, obeying some instinct that had been frustrated and dormant for decades, resumed their ancient migration patterns upstream for spawning. Trees and other plants are sprouting again in the drained reservoir areas.



The American Rivers website includes an interactive map of the dams across the nation that have been removed since 1934, and most entries include the number of river miles restored. Judging by the map, many dams have come down in the far West, the upper Midwest, Pennsylvania and New England, including several in the Twin State area.



With more on the way. As reported recently in the Valley News, the dam in Randolph is slated for removal. “The long-term goal is to free up almost 90 upstream miles — of the upper Third Branch, and the smaller brooks and streams feeding it — to fish populations that haven’t had access to those upper reaches for more than a century,” staff writer David Corriveau wrote. “The White River is often called the longest free-flowing river in Vermont, and removing the dam in Randolph is meant to remove one of river’s few remaining barriers.”



And that brings us to the Wilder Dam, which spans the Connecticut River between Lebanon and Hartford. The present dam was constructed in 1950, and if there is a bigger eyesore in the Upper Valley, I don’t want to see it.



The good — or at least hopeful — news is that federal licensing for the Wilder Dam is coming up for renewal in 2018. The bad news is that, as nearly as I can tell, no one is talking seriously about removing the dam. Even the Hanover Conservancy, which one might expect at least to raise the issue, has suggested only minor conditions for the license renewal.



When I consulted my Dartmouth colleague Frank Magilligan, who studies the issue and is passionate about dam removal, he told me that he testified at a recent hearing on the matter. When he suggested that removal of the dam should at least be a topic for consideration, his comments were met with blank and uncomprehending stares.



I have little doubt that TransCanada, current owner of the Wilder Dam, would like nothing more than for the review period to pass quietly and for the license to be renewed.



TransCanada’s counterargument to removing the dam, of course, is that the Wilder Dam’s three turbines have a generating capacity of 35,500 kilowatts. That argument is not unimportant; clean energy is essential. But the modest generating capacity of the Wilder Dam needs to be balanced against the damage done to the health of the Connecticut River as well as the possibility that other clean sources of energy, especially wind and solar, might be able to make up the difference. (And, by the way, why don’t we mount solar panels on top of warehouses and box stores rather than cluttering farm fields?)



The Wilder Dam impounds 45 miles of the Connecticut River, and any decision to remove the dam should not be taken lightly. Dam removal elsewhere assures us that nature would eventually take its course, restoring wetlands and reviving fish populations, undoing decades of damage. But imagine a free-flowing river once again. According the the Hanover Conservancy, Wilder Dam obliterated Olcott Falls, which were 650 feet long and 40 feet high. It must have been quite a sight!



If the license for Wilder Dam is renewed, the area’s pre-eminent eyesore would be in place for another 40 years. We need to consider that possibility carefully. At the very least, we should be having a serious conversation about the future of the Connecticut River in the Upper Valley.



Innocent Good House was right. The waters of a river should flow.







Randall Balmer is chair of the Religion Department and director of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.





