Flush with federal funds, dam removal advocates seize opportunity to open up rivers, restore habitat

BOONE, N.C. -- On the whooshing Watauga River, excavators claw at the remains of Shulls Mill Dam, pulling concrete apart piece by piece and gradually opening a waterway kept in check for nearly two centuries.

Removal of this privately-owned hydropower dam in western North Carolina will be a boon for rafters, kayakers and tubers by allowing the river to flow freely for nearly 80 miles (129 kilometers). But maybe the biggest beneficiary will be a strange, ancient creature known as the eastern hellbender salamander.

Sometimes called a snot otter or Allegheny alligator, it's North America's largest salamander and can reach two feet (61 centimeters) in length. But the salamander's range in places such as southern Appalachia has shrunk and its numbers are down 70% over the past 50 years.

“What’s so important about the hellbender is they need special habitat — clear, clean, cold, heavily oxygenated water,” said Andy Hill, a Watagua Riverkeeper with MountainTrue, which teamed up with American Rivers to remove the dam in July. “The hellbender is kind of a keystone species for a mountain stream ecosystem, and removal of this dam will create new habitat.”

Demolition of Shulls Mill Dam is part of a national trend to return rivers to their natural state by removing aging, sometimes derelict structures that once powered mills, irrigated farmland or impounded water. Aimed at boosting biodiversity, improving water quality and strengthening flood protection amid worsening storms, the campaign to demolish dams dates back several decades but has intensified with a once-in-a-generation funding infusion from the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

More than $2 billion is going to federal agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency, for maintaining, repairing and removing dams, culverts and other barriers. Of that, $920 million has already been spent on 544 projects.

The wildlife service is getting $200 million over five years for dam removal. In April, the agency announced plans to award $70 million in grants, supporting 43 projects to remove dams and other river barriers in 29 states.

“It’s a huge, huge uplift,” said Amy Horstman, the service's National Fish Passage Program coordinator, who noted grants once capped at a few hundred thousand dollars are now into the millions of dollars.

“This is really is changing the scope and scale, even the way we can think about aquatic connectivity,” she said. "People came in with bigger, more complicated projects and asked us to help shoulder a bigger slice of that pie.”

States, too, are putting money into dam removals.

North Carolina — which The Associated Press in 2019 found had the second largest collection of dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition — set aside $7.2 million for removal of Shulls Mill Dam and at least five others in the western part of the state.

Michigan's Legislature allocated more than $43 million for dam maintenance and removals after a dam failure in 2020 displaced thousands. A dozen dams, including one on the Maple River that breached in 2023, have been removed with that funding.

“Obviously we’re trying to reduce that risk to human life and property damage,” said Mason Manuszak, an environmental engineer in the state’s dam safety unit. “One of the things we’re really trying to hammer home to people is ecological benefits of dam removal."

Serena McClain, senior director of the national dam removal program at the conservation group American Rivers, said the funding spike, especially from the infrastructure bill, is an “opportunity to get critically important projects funded."

But McClain emphasized it was only a start — many of the nation's 500,000 to 1 million dams are over 60 years old and removal costs can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions.

“It’s a great down payment on what’s needed to restore and reconnect the vital river habitat all around the country,” McClain said.

Among the biggest beneficiaries for dam removals are aquatic species, especially migrating fish. Studies have found removals can lower water temperatures and increase dissolved oxygen in rivers and boost populations of trout and salmon as well as freshwater mussels and American eels.

“The science is pretty good that when we have obstructions, ... it’s really the whole system that suffers,” said Horstman of Fish and Wildlife.

Some large dam systems are being removed, including four Klamath River dams in California — the largest removal project in history. But most dams being demolished are relatively small.

In Maine, the Remnant Mill Dam on the Sabattus River is slated for removal this summer. Along with flood protection, the project will provide passage for river herring and federally endangered Atlantic salmon. In New Hampshire, Washburn Mill Dam on the Mohawk River was removed to restore connectivity to nearly 40 miles (64 kilometers) of brook trout habitat.

In Flint, Michigan, the Hamilton Dam, built more than a century ago to power mill operations, is coming down. The dam, on the Flint River, has long been at risk of failing and flooding the city's downtown. Removal will reconnect 25 miles (40 kilometers) of upstream habitat, which will help the lake sturgeon population, according to U.S. wildlife officials. It will also strengthen flood protection, improve water quality and boost efforts to redevelop the riverfront.

Dam removal normally utilizes excavation equipment but the McKinley Lake Dam about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Missoula, Montana was blown up — with explosives transported by mules. It's one of 10 century-old dams on eight glacial lakes being removed to lower water levels and allow for return of wetland crucial to native amphibians such as the long-toed salamander and Columbia spotted frog. Native trout species in the streams below the lakes would also benefit.

“It's a rewilding, a re-naturalizing exercise,” said Rob Roberts, a senior project manager with Trout Unlimited, which partnered with government agencies on the nearly $4 million project to remove all the dams in the next decade.

But not everyone supports removing dams, especially larger structures.

Republican lawmakers in the West, including U.S. Reps. Doug LaMalfa of California, Cliff Bentz of Oregon, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Russ Fulcher of Idaho, argue the projects drain reservoirs, leaving acres of sludge, eliminating water sources for farmers and wiping out hydroelectric plant jobs.

They contend dam removal advocates don’t understand that many factors cause depleted fish populations beyond spawning obstacles, including overfishing, disease and pollution.

“It’s a political power play,” said LaMalfa, who tried to block dam removal on the Klamath River. “They’re hell-bent on tearing them out. These are trophies for these guys."

In North Carolina, dam removals along the Wautauga River have been largely applauded, and advocates already are seeing cleaner water and fish swimming parts of the river disrupted for decades.

Life for hellbenders living below the dam should improve, too. Eight were captured by divers and relocated to a safer location downstream where another dam was removed in 2021.

Appalachian State University's Michael Gangloff, who is coordinating biological monitoring at the Shulls Mill site, said the free-flowing river should improve water quality and become more attractive to salamanders. Sediment will be flushed downstream, he said, exposing larger rocks and boulders where salamanders live, lay eggs and raise young.

“We should see better habitat conditions around the dam and, in 10 to 15 to 20 years, it will be hard to tell there was a dam there," Gangloff said.

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Casey reported from Boston. Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed from Madison, Wisconsin.

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