I'm reading "America the Undammed/More miles of the country’s rivers were reconnected last year thanks to dam removals than at any other time in history" (NYT).
And I noticed this, from a few years ago: "Dams like the one that killed Anna Last are 'drowning machines'" (Knox News). There's a good diagram at the link, showing the treacherous water flow, and here's part of the explanation:
- The recirculating waters will trap even the most experienced swimmers (including would-be rescuers) and disorient them in the thrashing water as if they are in a washing machine;
- The water has low buoyancy due to all of the air bubbles making life jackets all but useless;
- The water pushes, pulls and dips individuals in an infinite number of ways where rocks, rebar, concrete and other debris from the river are waiting;
- The rivers and streams are filled with cold water and can lead to hypothermia even in the summer;
- The dams are usually made of vertical concrete or masonry, which make climbing out nearly impossible.
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Removing dams. Yet another sign of cultural decline. Self-destruction. We don't have to do this.
Like I trust the government to make the right choices.
Coincidentally, California’s first major dam since 1979 is proceeding full speed ahead.
to generate power and irrigate farm fields.
This is what they want to get rid of?
So maybe don't swim downstream from the dams, then?
A couple of nephews of mine nearly drowned going over a dam in a pretty slow moving river. They got trapped for some minutes before escaping, and neither could explain how they managed to get out if it. They had all their phones, wallets, and keys in a dry bag. They went back the next day and the dry bag was still stuck in the trough going underwater and popping back up then going down again....
"and neither could explain how they managed to get out if it"
I can't get back into the article — paywall — but I think I remember seeing that eventually the water will throw you out. You have to stay alive until that happens. Did the dry bag ever escape or is churning there still?
Like the aprs banging on the obelisk
Aa if that did work the floods in the appalachians worse
There are 92,000 dams, many of them deadbeat dams. The ones that serve a good purpose aren't being removed. Things go up and some of them need to come down.
Swimming/boating/canoing/rafting on a river of any size near one of those ubiquitous low head dams is a recipe for disaster. If you go over and get caught, you simply spin like a load of laundry in a front-loading washing machine until you run out of air and/or the gods of the dam decide to spew you out below the hydraulic. Don't ask how I know.
Many of them are currently (heh heh) pointless. They existed for some reason years ago that no longer exists. Round here, crews recently removed dams on the Menomonee River and the Milwaukee River and it has improved habitat and fish migration. https://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/columnists/paul-smith/2016/04/06/paul-a-smith-milwaukee-river-has-come-far-but-much-work-remains/84954668/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=false&gca-epti=z1101xxu003646e1101xxv002544&gca-ft=197&gca-ds=sophi
> The ones that serve a good purpose
> aren't being removed.
Guess again -- that statement needs to be amended to read "
The ones that serve a good purpose in the mind of some bureaucrat or activist aren't being removed."
We have a small local dam that serves a fabulously good summer water recreational purpose, that is almost certainly going to be removed because The Beautiful People aren't the ones using it.
Post about a recent lawsuit after dam removal lowered the water level by 4 feet, turning a riverside home into a marsh-side home.They Removed the Dam Thing
They went home and got an extension pole for tree trimming and fished the dry bag out. This was around the time that there was an incident where multiple young people rafting down a southern river were drowned in a similar situation. Here's a website that lists drownings from swimmers or rafters going over dams and getting trapped.
https://krcproject.groups.et.byu.net/browse.php
Hot dam!
Older dams cause the water body to fill with sediment -- this starts were the river/stream enters and where the sediments first drop out from moving water. Over time the lake/pond turns into flat marshy wetlands and loses the ability to store water.
Here NYT is doing the legwork for Obama-era EPA regulations that sought to take control over all waterways in the country. Removing dams is somewhat ironic, as environmentalists are ALSO introducing beavers and fake beaver dams to rebuild wetlands that support more plants and animals.
Leave old dams alone = new wetlands and faster moving waterways SOON
Take old dams out = faster moving waterways NOW
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/bdas.htm
https://nmbeaverproject.org/
Kirk Parker said... "The ones that serve a good purpose in the mind of some bureaucrat or activist aren't being removed."
Don't Trust Big Stupid Government. Big Stupid Government is Asshoe.
Near Dayton there were a number of those low dams on the Miami River creating those hazards. They were removed and with some minor work it was turned it into a popular whitewater kayaking area right in the middle of town. Absolute plus to the area and the major dams for flood control still exist performing their purpose.
Damme! Damme I say!
The same shitheads who want to ban natural gas - while forcing us into electric vehicles - also want to remove four hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake River.
Yeah, nobody needs flood control or electricity. Dynamite them all
Ann Althouse said...
There are 92,000 dams, many of them deadbeat dams. The ones that serve a good purpose aren't being removed. Things go up and some of them need to come down.
Oh Gawd. Another liberal who presumes that the government makes always right and never wrong. Would you bet your pension on the highlighted text, Professor?
Responding to Jim - I live in NW Montana and am part of an electric co-op. We depend on those dams to provide affordable power.
I personally watched a kayaker drown going over a low head dam. He chose to go over it after heavy rains as a challenge. Expelled from the kayak, he was trapped in the “churn” for 45 minutes at the base of the dam. His hand would surface every 60 seconds and then go subsurface again. Firefighters were helpless. His lifeless body finally broke free. It was terrible to watch.
I am still not sure of the value of low head dams.
This is great news. New England has thousands of dams built over a 100 years ago take aren’t used, pose failure flood risks, hurt fish migration and a host of other problems. Get rid of them all.
The
We depend on those dams to provide affordable power.
So do we. And farmers rely on them for shipping crops to market.
The ones that serve a good purpose aren't being removed. - Althouse
Uh-huh
What does Rev Jeremiah Wright have to say about all this? CC, JSM
Those damns got put up for a reason. Maybe that "reason" was a bad one. Or maybe "the reason" no longer applies. If someone is doing this dam removal responsibily - well OK.
But this "woo hoo who lets let the river run free! It was born free" can be based on goofy emotionalism. And pushed by urbanites who don't leave their big cities. The same impulse that leads to coyotes and grizzly bears being re-introduced to areas where they'd been quite rightly gotten rid of.
BTW getting rid of hydroelectric dams and pushing for wind power is 10x of stupid. wind power causes a lot of enviromental problems.
Damn vs. Dam. Boy Lou, they give those rivers awful funny names.
The Potomac River’s Little Falls Dam, not far upstream from Washington, DC, is one of those drowning machines. Answering Humperdink, its role is to maintain the river’s water level sufficient to keep the intakes at the adjacent pumping station underwater. It used to kill multiple unwary kayakers and canoeists annually but the most recent death at Little Falls Dam I can find online is a Columbia University student 3 years ago.
The Potomac River between the Memorial Bridge down to Georgetown varies from placid to challenging to downright dangerous, and it is no coincidence that the Washington area has produced numerous Olympic kayakers, including one gold medalist and multiple silver and bronze medalists. The most recent death in the ferocious rapids known as the Great Falls of the Potomac happened just last weekend.
I once struck up a conversation in a bar with a Canadian govt representative who was here to try to talk the US into building more dams. I told him good luck, we are tearing them down. I guess if you consider rainbow trout and walleye and sturgeon to be threats to the people who live around these rivers, sure, but the dams were built to provide power for mills.
And then there was the Klamath Dam removals in California.
Best intentions....
When I was a youth in New England, every spring we'd run small rivers full of mountain snow-melt. There were not a few small dams, presumably from long-gone small mills. If the water was high you could see those things coming, and sometime we'd "dump".
Never wore life jackets, which would kill us. Anybody with the brains God gave to a goose knew that you had to dive as deep as possible. That's where the water was flowing hard and fast. Fifteen, maybe 20, yards downstream we'd pop to the surface in some small, calm pool. Usually the canoe was there, too.
We'd keep going, because the air was spring-day warm. But I remember one old farmer, watering his cows. "You boys look like half-drowned rats, but you knew what to do. Life is going to do that to you, more than once. Fight the fear and dive INTO the trouble. That's how you survive. That's what makes you MEN. Sometimes you'll have to drag the womenfolk with you, but the good ones already know. Make one of THOSE your wife."
And yet, I have been seeing articles like this lately:
Beaver Dams Save Soutwest Streams.
It only takes a few feet of head and good water flow to spin a turbine. Small scale plants aren't standardized, and are almost impossible to get permitted. Probably any one of those small dams being taken down could generate between 5-50 KW year round.
I recall a study done a few years back about returning all east coast rivers back to their original watercourses. Turns out it's not possible because it's impossible to determine what the original watercourse was. Fallen trees, beavers, and human activity going back to prehistoric times when large stones were placed across the water to allow fording them without getting feet wet all altered the water flow. Not to mention curved stone formations to create still pools in which to fish.
And Spain had been the global leader in dam removal. And all the flooding in Spain after their removal is NOT because the dams were removed- that's a myth. According to all easily found news articles and government publications.
Instead of demolishing the low-head dams, put in a diversion pipe to direct flow around the dam.
Beavers are nature's most talented ecologists. They create entire ecosystems in a gentle and effective way, and create habitat for many different species other than themselves. Watch a beaver work and learn about permaculture.
Big Mike, there are three drowning incidences at the Little Falls dam in the list I linked. Check out that one from 1984: Six soldiers from Ft.Myers rafting the river got caught in the churn. The Park Service sent a helicopter to try to rescue them. Only 2 had the strength to hold on to the rescue net. The raft stayed bobbing in the churn for over a week before someone lassoed it and dragged it to shore.
Kayakers don't need no stinkin' dams to die. Back in 1998 an elite group attempted the first whitewater descent of the Tsangpo River in Tibet. Down Douglas Gordon went and he didn't come back up. Ever. The surviving expedition team hiked back down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_C._Gordon
Not to make light of the tragedies noted above, but If I was even thinking of getting into a raft/canoe/kayak, I wouldn't do it until I was damn certain of what I would encounter downstream.
The greatest cause of death in Tennessee and North Carolina was Dengue Fever, until the TVA built dams to control flooding in the 20th century. And the places in NC that flooded and destroyed towns were in areas that the TVA planned to dam but locals stopped it to preserve the wild rivers. So you are going to die of drowning in an old dam pool, drowning in a flood, or dying of disease from mosquitoes.
People don’t remember yesterday but complain about today.
I remember Butthead at Hoover Dam, when he and Beavis were doing America, asking the tour guide, "Is this a god dam? Heh-heh."
Chesterton's Fence should be, but won't be, applied to any and all dam removals.
@Michael Fitzgerald, I think here have been more deaths at Little Falls Dam than just 3. In fact the 2023 death isn’t listed.
There’s a nice park and picnic area by the Great Falls, and if you’re picnvng there on a pleasant day it can be fun to watch the experienced kayakers running the falls. They seem to look out for each, which is a good thing because that stretch of the Potomac looks pretty scary.
Similar problems have happened in valencia and barcelona
Dams should be huge and West of the Mississippi. They should be used to refill depleted groundwater, provide irrigation and generate power. Water wheel mill ponds on the east coast are obsolete.
The Fox River starts in S. East Wisconsin and wanders south until it empties into the Illinois River. I think the first dam is in Burlington Wisconsin. Every town on the river has a low head dam. Originally most of these dams provided water power for manufacturing. In my towns case, windmills. Later they were used as flood control and sewage control. Just think. Your great great grandparents poop is lying in the silt at the dam in the next town down river.
As far as I know there are only two hydroelectric dams on the river. One is a wing dams used to power the turbine in the Baker Hotel in St. Charles Illinois and the other is the Dayton dam in Ottawa Illinois.
The Fox is a shallow river. In most places along its length you can wade across it. What would the river look like if the dams along its path were removed? It would look a lot like it does now, but with all of the silt and debris washed downstream.
BTW All the towns on the river have their sewage treatment plants on the river. When there is a heavy rain all the overflow goes into the river. Unless your fishing the river above Burlington never eat any fish out of that river.
Highly useful dams were destroyed in California greatly reducing water available to Central Valley farmers. For the salmon they said. But rewilded rivers overflowed creating mud bogs and the salmon suffocated. This article (surprise!) just elides the inconvenient truths.
One my brothers was canoeing down a small river in central Iowa. The group went over a low-head dam. I think there were about 6 or 8 guys, two to a canoe. The other canoes shot straight across and made it just fine. Some of the guys had done it before. My brother's canoe turned sideways and capsized. My brother avoided being drawn under but the other guy did not and drowned.
He was an intelligent, motivated young man. What a tragedy.
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