This is one river that might see some dams come down if all are in agreement and the water created power can either be generated easier elsewhere or is no longer needed, (hard to imagine).
An excerpt.
Editorial: Klamath soup
River runs thick with wrong kind of green
Published 12:01 am PDT Wednesday, August 16, 2006
The tribes and fishermen who depend on fish from the Klamath River can't seem to catch a break. There was a smidgen of good news last week, when Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez declared a commercial fishing disaster on the West Coast. The declaration frees up grants for salmon fishermen hit by restrictions aimed at saving depleted salmon that spawn in the Klamath.
Yet as everyone knows, fewer hooks in the water won't replenish the once-mighty runs of chinook and coho in the Klamath, California's second-largest river. Salmon and other fish need viable habitat and clean, cool water. The emergence of a noxious algae bloom in Klamath reservoirs has again demonstrated that this river is sick.
Go online to sacbee.com to see images of the algae, microcystis aeruginosa. It has turned parts of the Copco and Iron Gate reservoirs into a pea-green mess. This algae is as nasty as it looks. Health officials are urging people not to touch it or breathe the fumes it emits.
As the Los Angeles Times ( http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-oceans-series,0,7842752.special ) recently noted in a five-part series, these algae blooms -- caused partly by man-made pollution -- threaten rivers and oceans worldwide. In the Klamath, fertilizers from farms on the Oregon-California border flow downstream. The reservoirs warm up the water and the nutrients, creating perfect conditions for noxious algae.
A company called PacifiCorp owns the hydroelectric dams that impound these reservoirs, which were created solely for power purposes. PacifiCorp is now going through a federal relicensing process. Indian tribes, environmental groups and state and federal wildlife agencies are exploring if the dams could be removed, both to improve water quality and to improve passage of salmon.
