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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, the Executive Director of EPIC, and I am joined by my friends and colleagues, Jen Kalt, the Director of Humboldt Baykeeper. Hey, Jen.

JEN KALT:

Hey, Tom, good to see you.

WHEELER:

Good to see you. We're also joined by Alicia Hamann of Friends of the Eel River. Hey, Alicia.

ALICIA HAMANN:

Hey, Tom.

WHEELER:

We are going to be talking about something that I think is kind of self-evident to anybody who lives here on the North Coast, which is we live in a very seismically active area, and we should make planning considerations based on that seismic activity. So Alicia, this is kind of your episode. This is your story because we're talking about how our fault lines are going to impact dams on the Eel River and dam removal on the Eel River. So I recently got the news in my email inbox that PG&E has made a major announcement. Tell us what's going on.

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, I'll start by just orienting people a little bit. The Eel River, it's the third largest watershed in California, this spectacular wild and scenic river, but it does have two dams in the headwaters that are a part of the Potter Valley project and PG&E owns that project. And they are right now in the process of preparing a licensed surrender and decommissioning plan. So we're already on a trajectory toward dam removal. The news we got just, let's see what, what's the date? Just about two weeks ago is that PG&E announced without a lot of notice to anyone, it came as quite a surprise, even to all of us insiders, PG&E announced that they got some information from their consultants who were evaluating dam safety and seismic stability of Scott Dam, which is the larger of the two dams. And immediately upon getting this information from their consultants, they announced that that PG&E is going to start managing Scott Dam differently. And they're never again going to raise the gates on top of Scott Dam, thus reducing the capacity of the reservoir by about 20,000 acre feet. And that that's a significant amount. It is not a huge reservoir and that's really a big deal for some people who in the past have enjoyed abundant water diversions into the Russian river from the project. But one thing that really had us kind of excited about this announcement from PG&E was that they referenced in their press release that expedited dam removal is likely going to be something that results from, from this whole revelation about dam safety. Now, what that revelation exactly is, is confidential. A lot of information that is developed about dam safety is classified as critical energy infrastructure information and is thus concealed from the public. So this is something Friends of the Eel River has really been focused on for, for quite a few years now, because we recognize that dam safety is, is a huge concern at this facility, which is rated as a high hazard facility, meaning loss of life is likely in the event of dam failure. And, and we find it further, further troubling that so much of the information is kept secret from the public. So it's really difficult to get a clear and transparent picture of the real situation up there.

WHEELER:

So Alicia, you say that Friends of the Eel River has been kind of aware of the seismic issues for a while. I know that you have your own internal reports on the dam and seismic activity. How long ago have, how long has it been that Friends of the Eel River has been concerned or has kind of known about these same risks that PG&E is now seeking to address?

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, I would say that I think there are some people affiliated with Friends of the Eel River who since our beginning in 1994 have been concerned about dam safety. But really, I would point back to right around 2017 is when we started getting really serious about it. And there's really, there's a variety of issues, but there's kind of three main points that I always think of when I'm thinking about dam safety at the Potter Valley Project. The first is that Scott Dam sits almost directly adjacent to the Bartlett Springs Fault, which is one of three major complexes in the San Andreas Fault system. The Bartlett Springs Fault is capable of producing up to a magnitude seven earthquake, which is just huge. What we experienced here on the North Coast back in December, remind me, was that like a, was that a six?

WHEELER:

Six four, I think. Six and four. Although, as you can hear on our episode with Dr. Lori Dengler, it was a six four, but it was a very violent six four because of the way the energy was released.

HAMANN:

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that in itself is concerning. The way that the reservoir is situated right on this fault line. And I have to say, I know I've shared this before on the EcoNews Report, but something I learned years ago when we first started really digging into dam safety is that it's actually not uncommon for dams to be adjacent to fault lines because that's the point at which a river channel is naturally most narrow. So 100 years ago when engineers were out looking for places to place dams, they were like, oh, this looks great. It's a little narrower right here. Let's put the dam right there. Two other issues at Scott Dam that are just make the seismic situation a little bit worse are the fact that there is an active landslide that is slowly moving all the time on the south side of the dam. And you know the south side of the dam when you look at the dam and you'll notice that there's a really severe angle at kind of one side of Scott Dam. And that where that abutment is, that's the south side. And that severe angle is another cause for concern. During the original construction back in 1920, engineers thought they were anchoring the dam to bedrock, but there was a little bit of seismic activity and what they thought was bedrock moved. And they realized that it's actually a giant boulder. So some joker on the engineering crew nicknamed that boulder the knocker. And then they did a little bit of seat of the pants re-engineering of the dam and designed it to have this sharp angle to go just in front of that giant boulder that's slowly moving. So as I said before, there's not a lot of transparency when it comes to dam safety, but I can't help but wonder if that quick revision in the engineering during original construction may be resulted in a weaker structure.

WHEELER:

I would also just like to point out that this is why we have federal environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act, right? This like 1920s approach of just like, oh yeah, well, we'll just like make this kind of random fix and like jerry-rig it as we go. This is why we want to study the environmental impacts of our decisions and so that we don't in the future locate dams on top of fault lines, on top of disconnected boulders that are not part of bedrock. This is why environmental laws exist, folks. They keep us safe. So, thank you.

KALT:

Alicia, how has all this rainfall affected or raised concerns about all this? I mean, is the reservoir filling up more rapidly than normal or what's going on with that? Well,

HAMANN:

I'll say that it's clear that PG&E's consultants alerted them to the fact that having a higher volume of water stored behind the reservoir was not safe. And normally on April 1st, they raise those gates to increase the capacity of the reservoir to be able to hold that additional 20,000 acre feet. And so they starting next week, they're not going to be doing that, thus reducing the amount of pressure that is going to be behind Scott Dam. And yeah, you know, the abundant rainfall, I think really the biggest way that this impacts the project, and I'm thinking about this from the perspective of someone who's like constantly trying to push on that political narrative that says, oh, we must keep dams to help with water supply. I think the way that all the rainfall is going to really shift that is that this is a really good year for water users. And this is a time for us to be thinking about what we do in times of abundance, how we reconnect floodplains and use aquifer storage and, you know, make sure that we are using our water in a smart and sustainable way. This is kind of a good year to have this happen at the Potter Valley Project, because we're not going to be hearing from water users that they're totally dry and really, really suffering for a lack of water. What it will mean in the future is yet to be seen. And I think we're also seeing a lot of action from water users really starting to finally take seriously the fact that dam removal is inevitable. And it's coming maybe a little sooner than they anticipated. So yeah, I think that that's probably the main way that we're going to see it, you know, the rainfall impact the situation. But I will add, I will add that just on today, which is Tuesday, March 28, we saw a filing from FERC that says to PG&E, wait a second, you said you're not going to raise the gates. And there's actually a proper way that you need to do this. There's a particular pathway you need to take to make that decision. You need to consult with National Marine Fisheries Service, you need to consult with tribes and other stakeholders. And by the way, if you're not able to meet your flow requirements on the eel, and your flow requirements to the extent they exist in the Russian, you may be violating the Endangered Species Act, which which was a pretty serious tone for FERC to take a little bit of a surprising tone. But if listeners who are fully following this situation will recall, Friends of the Eel River and a coalition of our allies are actually suing both FERC and PG&E over violations of the Endangered Species Act at that project right now. So with that in mind, it's maybe not quite so surprising that FERC is on high alert about violating the Endangered Species Act.

KALT:

Can you talk a little bit about the Endangered Species Act and how this will affect them?

HAMANN:

Potentially? Yeah, well, so the way that they're being affected right now is both Winter and Summer Steelhead and Central California Chinook are unable to access hundreds of miles of prime spawning habitat that is trapped behind Scott Dam. As the fish are migrating upstream, they first come to Cape Horn Dam, which does have fish passage, but it also violates the Endangered Species Act. The fish passage is just woefully inadequate. It does not function at high flows like we're seeing right now. The entire structure just gets completely inundated. PG&E has made some attempts at modifying the structure to prevent it from being totally clogged with debris, but it's still really dysfunctional. It kind of serves as an all-you-can-eat buffet for otters and other creatures who are able to really easily access the fish as they're going up the ladder. There's quite a number of problems there. But if fish do manage to mount the fish ladder at Cape Horn Dam, then they come to Scott Dam, which has no passage at all. So PG&E and FERC, in managing this project without providing that passage, are violating the Endangered Species Act, which says that thou shalt not harm endangered species. And harm can include harassing them, interfering with their migratory and breeding behaviors, and a whole host of other harms to this day.

KALT:

And we know that salmon are doing very poorly this year because the commercial salmon season has been canceled in California for the third time in history. So at the request of commercial and sport fishermen, no salmon season in the ocean. And I believe tribes are waiting or in the process of advocating for what level of fishery they might be able to participate in in the rivers. But salmon are suffering terribly. And I mean, sometimes I can't believe they've lasted as long as they have and that people aren't just absolutely freaking out at the state of the salmon. So this has been going on for a long, long time, but it's not getting any better, it doesn't seem like.

HAMANN:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I continue to hold on to a little bit of optimism for the opportunity that dam removal presents in the Eel River. And a large part of that is because of the genetic research that's been done that shows that the genes for both anadromy, which is the behavior that makes a salmon or a steelhead fish that goes out to the ocean and comes back to freshwater, the resident trout that are behind Scott Dam have been found to have that gene for anadromy, but also to have the gene for early run timing that would make those trout not just a steelhead, but a summer steelhead. And so there really is this great opportunity to unlock those genetics that are trapped up in the upper headwaters. Like you said, Jen, the salmon have been around for a long time, and they've been through a lot of changes. We even saw a time on the Eel where there was this massive inland lake. I've heard really cool stories from folks from the Round Valley tribes talking about times when their peoples forgot how to fish because it was so long that there weren't salmon coming up. And yet here we have salmon again. So I think that we have a really, really strong responsibility right now to make sure that salmon and steelhead don't go extinct on our watch, because boy, would that be something we should all feel a lot of shame over, honestly.

WHEELER:

This is the EcoNews Report we're talking about Scott Dam and seismic activity.

KALT:

Well, and there's another reason for hope, and that is the Klamath Dam Removal Project is actually beginning to happen. The Lost Coast Outpost had a story just last week about the groundbreaking of this project, which is not dam removal yet. That's going to start next year. But they're preparing various on-the-ground access roads for heavy equipment and all the things that will go with basically letting a lot of the sediment and water out to do the least amount of harm to the watershed. But the plan is to have all four of the six dams that are going to be removed. So the four dams will be removed entirely by the end of 2024. There's a fantastic video called Restoring the Balance, I think it's called, on the Lost Coast Outpost story that is being a botanist. I was really surprised that it was mostly about plants and how people are collecting the seeds, massive, massive quantities of native plant seeds to revegetate and restore the watershed. Because dam removal is just the first step to restoring that landscape. Because there's going to be all this bare soil, and if you don't restore it with native plants, it's going to become a bunch of invasive species, and erosion will pollute the water and whatnot. So it was really interesting to me to see the quantity of seeds that are being collected and stored and then will be grown out to revegetate that area. It's so exciting after all these years. And hopefully it's in time for the salmon. I think it's going to open up something like 38 miles of spawning habitat that have been inaccessible to Salmonids since the dams were built a century ago. We should talk also a little bit about, a lot of times there's this misconception that, oh, we're going to need to replace all the electricity that these dams are producing. And can you speak a little bit to that on the Eel? I know that the Klamath Pacific Corps decided to give up that license a long time ago now, and it's very minimal. These dams weren't producing very much electricity. But what about on the Eel River? Is that going to be an issue?

HAMANN:

Oh, it's it has long been not an issue at all on the Eel River. Actually, the project has a nameplate capacity of nine point four megawatts. So if it were operating at full capacity using all its turbines, that's how much it could generate. I don't know when the last time it operated at full capacity was, maybe 20 years ago.

WHEELER:

So 9.4 megawatts to give people an idea of how little that is. That is one modern windmill. That is one, one turbine that, that is 9.4. So it's just a drop in the bucket.

KALT:

I just did a quick internet search to see how many homes would be powered by that amount of electricity. One megawatt can power 400 to 900 homes a year, so we're not talking a lot of electricity here.

HAMANN:

Yeah, it represents such a small fraction of PG&E's portfolio of hydropower projects that it's like, I'm struggling to remember right now if it's even a whole percentage of a whole single percent of their portfolio. So energy generation has never been the real value of this project. The value for PG&E, I think, is the ability to divert some amount of water to the Russian River and curry political favor in exchange.

KALT:

And do I recall that the powerhouse was shut down because it needed some major investment and they just said, we're not going to do that.

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, so what what happened was back in 2021, one of the transformers went offline, and there it's kind of specialized equipment. And so PG&E after quite a while, they didn't tell anybody that it was offline for it might have been four or six months. But all of a sudden, we hear Oh, by the way, this this piece of equipment has been non functional for a little while now. And they said that they were going to, you know, request permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to rebuild this infrastructure, which we thought was kind of ludicrous, because at this point, it was already clear that the two basin partnership had or was about to fail in their efforts to purchase the project. And PG&E had already declared bankruptcy and abandoned their efforts to relicense the project. So that PG&E was going to request five to $10 million of taxpayer funds to rebuild this infrastructure for a project that's going to come down anyway, seemed really foolish. They ended up getting that authorization from the CPUC, and then didn't begin the work for quite a while. I think quite a few of us were aware that PG&E would not be actually pursuing rebuilding the infrastructure. And they actually just made that announcement just in the last couple of months, they they formally declared, we have decided we will not be rebuilding that infrastructure. So So yeah, the project, the tiny little amount of electricity that it has generated over the last several years, is is no more, and it will never again generate electricity, it will never again have the capacity that it does. And you know, this is really just more and more reasons why PG&E we're starting to see is is moving quite quickly to rid themselves of this liability.

WHEELER:

So we have a number of things that are all working in friends that you'll ever receive her, you know, sometimes we create our own luck like you did by suing FERC for endangered species violation. So you've put pressure on FERC. There's pressure by PG&E now given seismic risks. Alicia, I want you to look into your crystal ball and, and, and tell me what's going to happen in the next 10 years with these dams and what's going to happen with the larger Potter Valley project and how we are going to be able to prevent Sonoma County from, from having a freak out and, and how are we going to make this system work again? Give us, give us your vision from the crystal ball.

HAMANN:

Okay, well here's my vision. I'm doing a little bit of manifesting here because boy do I want to see us give the fish the best chance at recovery that we can. PG&E told the California Public Utilities Commission that they believe they'd be finished with their decommissioning process by 2026. And some of the preliminary evaluations we've seen for what dam removal might look like, estimate that removing the physical structures could happen in as little as two years. So being incredibly optimistic, maybe those dams will be gone by 2028, maybe 2030. That's a fast, fast timeline. But everything I can see says that PG&E is finally interested in moving very fast. As far as what it's going to mean for water users, we're seeing some efforts by water users to really think creatively about providing for their continued water supply. Sonoma County and Sonoma County Water Agency, they're smart and highly capable people. And they've had an option to purchase the project all along throughout this whole relicensing, delicensing, decommissioning process. And they've never exercised that option. I think that they look at the project and the high costs of maintaining it, the extreme liabilities from dam safety and endangered species violations. And they compare that to the value of that diversion. And I don't know for certain what's going on in their minds, but I think that they're really evaluating how much they need that diversion and how much they can make up the difference, so to speak, with other measures. Water conservation measures, curtailing illegal diversions, which we know there are a lot of in the Russian River water system. I know they're exploring aquifer storage options. And I will add, too, that I think there is still a possibility that water users might come up with a plan for a dam-free wet season diversion that could be ecologically appropriate. And as long as it doesn't hurt Eel River fish, Eel River advocates are not going to fight something like that. As long as it comes at no further cost to the Eel, we're OK with that.

WHEELER:

Is there anything in your crystal ball that keeps you up at night? Do you what do you might see as kind of the most major risk, if any, to to damn removal?

HAMANN:

Well, you know, it's less about the risk to dam removal and more about what else are we going to learn on the dam safety front. It's pretty clear from the filings we've seen from PG&E that this is all preliminary information and that there's more to come. I know that the California Division of Dam Safety, or I'm sorry, I think they are the Division of Safety of Dams, but anyway, they have an ongoing reevaluation of seismic stability at Scott Dam. I think we're going to be probably seeing something from that agency in the next year to two years. And so honestly, I have a little bit of concern that there might suddenly be an immediate need to dewater the reservoir. That is worst case scenario, and I don't think it's likely, but that's the thing that I sometimes think as I'm falling asleep, like, oh my gosh, what would happen to the fish if they had to dewater the reservoir and the dam was still in place and they didn't have the time to do all the wonderful things that are happening on the Klamath right now, preparing those native seed banks, thinking of ways to handle the sediment. And I will say for what it's worth, the Eel is highly erosive. It's got the highest suspended sediment yield of any river of its size in the U.S. There is a lot of sediment back there, but initial evaluation of the sediment has shown that it is not highly contaminated. And so it's likely going to be pretty safe to allow the sediment to flush through the river system like they did on the Elwha when it comes time for dam removal. So I don't really have a lot of concerns that dam removal is not going to happen. I think it's quite obvious that it's going to happen. My main question is just when and will we be able to adequately prepare?

KALT:

I just had this vision of the Humboldt Bay entrance just being completely blocked with sediment if they had to let all that out at once in an emergency because experts say that's where most of the sediment that ends up at the bay entrance and in Humboldt Bay comes from is from the Eel River. And it seems kind of far-fetched until you look at aerial photos during massive rainstorms and the plume of sediment that's visible is mind-boggling. I think just recently there was a drafting limit so ships that draft that are a certain level below the surface of the water can't come into Humboldt Bay now because of the shoaling out at the entrance.

HAMANN:

Yeah, I'll just I'll just add that for folks who haven't seen the image that you know, some of the aerial imagery that Jen referenced, look it up. It is really, really interesting to see the coastline of like Oregon and California and you can see where all the river mouths are and you see these little like tufts of brown going out into the ocean and then where the Eel is, like she said, it's just this giant plume of sediment and it's moving directly north to Humboldt Bay. So yeah, I'm sure that when it does come time for dam removal, that's going to be a consideration and maybe, maybe we'll call in a little extra dredge work at that point for Humboldt Bay.

WHEELER:

So, Alicia, for folks who want to keep on top of Eel River issues, where should they go?

HAMANN:

Eelriver.org, that's our website. It's a great place for information. And if you're particularly interested in dam removal and want to just like read all the studies, freetheeel.org is a new website we built last year with a coalition of dam removal advocates. It's a great place that just stores all of the research. And so if you want to do kind of a deep dive, that's a great place for it. And then you can also follow us on all the socials at Friends of the Eel River. We're around.

WHEELER:

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Alicia. And also you can find all the links on the lostcoastoutpost.com. 'Cause that's where we have our show notes for today's show. So Alicia, thank you so much for joining the show and telling us about what's going on in the Eel River. And thank you listeners for joining the show and for putting up with my voice throughout the show. Join us again next week on this time channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.