Dam Removals in California

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, what I am illustrating here today is one of the largest environmental disasters in American history. This was caused by environmental movement actions here.

What you see is the Klamath River up in northern California, which reaches partly into Oregon. There have been four hydroelectric dams that have been there anywhere from 60 to 100 years, creating clean, renewable, CO2-free, green electricity, something that Americans seem to want and certainly the government is pushing hard for as it tries to electrify everything by mandate: our vehicles, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, stoves, what have you. On the other hand, they want to take away the generation capacity to make all this electricity.

Here you see this plume right here on the Klamath River, where one of the stems of the Klamath still has clean water. What you see here is the plume from where they started to knock down one of the dams so far, as well as release from the bottom, unplugging many, many years of silt and sedimentation that had been built up underneath at the bottom of the various lakes in the chain.

Guess what? We warned them about this. They just glossed over it and said: Oh, the silt will be fine. It will be fine. Well, they are finding out there are high levels of chromium and other heavy metals in that silt. We knew this. They ignored it anyway because these four dams for them are trophies for the environmental movement.

It is not about protecting fish. The latest projection by Fish and Game personnel, just said this week in meetings up in the north--again, you see here a normal part of the river, a tributary coming in. It is winter water there, so it isn't perfectly clear, but that is normal water for the winter.

Here is the dirty plume coming down the Klamath, this brown, mucky stuff that is killing the wildlife in that system.

They are actually expecting, and they said it with a straight face, that it might be 10 to 12 years now for the fish population that they ostensibly are trying to protect to return. The life cycle of a salmon is 3 years, so you are going to be wiping out several generations, hoping, I guess, that the salmon that are out in the ocean that return up the river will somehow find their way back after 10 and 12 years of forgetting about their habitat and where their imprint is to their normal breeding grounds.

Would you have bought into this idea that the salmon are going to be wiped out for 10 or 12 years and think that is an environmental win? I don't think any normal person would think that. That is what they are saying since they started this project of tearing down.

This shows an existing dam that makes hydroelectric power, but you can see the plume right here. It may be hard to see on TV, but this is a gray, blackish, brown crud hitting that dam from up above and coming through at the bottom where they have unplugged it and just let it run. Again, if it is supposed to be about wildlife, it isn't.

The final poster I have to show you here, this shows dead deer that have waded out into that muck that came from the bottom of the dam. This is not the natural condition of the river, by any stretch, with the dams in place. At least three deer in this photo--there are several more in the larger pull-away of the photo--that wandered out and got stuck, as the Fish and Game Commission helplessly stood on the shore and could hear them bellowing and bleating, being unable to get out.

They had, of course, no means to go out and rescue them. Heaven knows if people would have gone out there or some crazy kids out there mud bogging in their four-wheel drives or something, how they would get anybody out of that. They don't have a plan for that. We will have that plan later. They are working on it as they monitor it, says Fish and Game.

This is what you have, an environmental disaster under the guise of preserving fish. They are trying to differentiate, well, there is a bunch of nonnative fish that are dying off, like yellow perch and others. The salmon they are trying to protect, we still think they are up in the tributaries, hiding out right now. What happens as soon as they come down into that, if they move at all or if they come upstream at all? What happens? They are going to get wiped out on that.

As much as farmers and ranchers there have bent over backward in the Scott and Shasta Rivers, as well as the Klamath River up in Tule Lake Basin, not to mention the refuges that don't get water for ducks, geese, and other waterfowl habitat, what is the answer to them? Oh, I guess we messed up.

Likely, they are going to want to take even more water out of Klamath Lake and cut off agriculture even more so because they have to now clean this mess up here.

Who is going to be held liable for this? Who is going to be held liable for the lies about this whole system here? Is it going to be the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, which signed off on this 5- 0 finally, after we tried to give them facts on what was going on here?

Is it going to be EPA? Is it going to be NOAA fisheries? Is it going to be the California Department of Fish and Game? Excuse me. It is now known as Fish and Wildlife--politically correct. Will it be U.S. Fish and Wildlife?

Are they just going to keep coming back more and more to agriculture and saying: Well, you are going to have to pay more for your water supply because we screwed up?

The people out there have been wronged by this, and the government needs to do much better, and they are going to have to be paying restitution for the damage.

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