Graffiti artists have editorialized on the obsolete Matilija Dam in Ventura County | Photo: Patrick Maloney, some rights reserved
When Interior Secretary Donald Hodel suggested in 1987 that California might tear down OShaughnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park, few took him seriously. The powers that be in San Fransisco were outraged: the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir supplies San Francisco with its drinking water. Even the radical environmentalists who sometimes talked about removing dams like Glen Canyon mistrusted Hodel, saying that he was likely trying to manipulate greens into supporting the controversial Auburn Dam as an alternative to Hetch Hetchy. The era of building big dams was just ending, and the thought of removing them was so far off the radar that Hodel just wasnt taken seriously.
Flash forward 30 years, and dams are starting to fall across the west. Two huge dams on the Elwha River in Washington State came down in 2011. The San Clemente Dam in Monterey County is coming down from the Carmel River. Four dams on the Klamath River are so ripe for removal that their owner intends to take them out even if the state and federal governments arent on board. In Southern California, the handwriting is on the wall for the Rindge Dam on Malibu Creek and the Matilija Dam on the Ventura River.
It may seem counterintuitive. California and the rest of the west are held in a crippling drought that this current El Ni o season is doing little to alleviate. And from the 1850s through the 1980s, dams went up in California in part to ensure a secure supply of water for homes, farms, and factories. But dam removal is still often a good idea even as the state looks at yet another year of drought. Here are five reasons why.
--
--
1: Safety
Eighty-eight years ago this month, the poorly engineered St. Francis Dam failed just a few years after it was completed near Santa Clarita. It sent a wall of water down San Francisquito Canyon and the Santa Clara River to the sea, killing at least 431 people; perhaps more than 600 actually died in the flood, some swept all the way out to the ocean.
The St. Francis Dam failed mainly because its construction was unequal to Californias geology. Unbeknownst to engineers of the day, the dam site sat on ancient, unstable landslides. We know a lot more about Californias geology these days, and what weve learned about the locations of many existing dams is unsettling. One example of many: when the Anderson Dam was built near the Northern California city of Morgan Hill in 1950, geologists thought the nearby Calaveras Fault was inactive. Weve since learned the Calaveras Fault is anything but. A sizable quake on the Calaveras could cause the 240-foot earthen dam to fail, devastating Morgan Hill and dumping eight feet of water into downtown San Jose. (The Santa Clara Valley Water District is in the process of retrofitting the dam to be more seismically sound.)
One of the states most prominent dam removal projects stemmed in part from new awareness of earthquake risks. The San Clemente Dam, removed from the Carmel River in 2015, was identified as seismically unsafe as early as 1991. The 106-foot concrete arch dam, built in 1921, was also determined to be at risk of failure in a large flood, in part due to its reservoir having silted up almost entirely - more than 95 percent of the reservoir had been filled with sediment by the time it was removed. If the San Clemente Dam had failed, a wall of mud would have devastated communities downstream.
All dams fail eventually. Flowing water is one of the most inexorable forces on the planet. One of the biggest dams ever built in western North America, the 2,300-foot-tall lava flow in the Grand Canyon that geologists call Prospect Dam, was worn away to almost nothing over just a few millennia by nothing more than the flow of water and river-borne silt. Come back to visit planet Earth in 500 years, and its unlikely any of our present-day dams will be both unmodified and in working order.
Thats especially true in earthquake-prone California, where many of the best sites for dams - deep river canyons cut into rising mountain ranges - are found near earthquake faults. A 5.7 quake near Oroville Dam in 1975 surprised engineers, who reexamined the site of the then-proposed Auburn Dam on the North Fork of the American River and found a major fault system beneath the site capable of unleashing a 7.0-magnitude quake. Thats much of the reason Auburn is yet unbuilt.
But before the advent of modern seismology, we did build a whole lot of dams, large and small, in earthquake hazard zones. And even if a quake never damages those dams, watersheds in seismically active California carry a lot of eroded sediment. That sediment silts up reservoirs, reducing dam operators ability to manage seasonal flood. Sediment can also speed erosion of dams, as we saw when the silty Colorado River nearly took out Glen Canyon Dam in 1983.
Sometimes, a dam just isnt a safe answer for water management in Californias unstable watersheds. And dams built before we knew what we were doing, such as the completely silted-up Rindge Dam on Malibu Creek, just need to come out for public safety.
Shasta Dam being built, circa 1939 | Public domain photo via Library of Congress
2: Dams are bad for fish
Its no secret that dams hurt fish populations. Some of Californias once-thriving salmon runs have been wiped out, or nearly so, by huge 20th Century dams. Take the Shasta Dam, for instance. When that 600-foot dam closed its gates in 1943, it closed off access to almost all of the Sacramento River winter-run chinook salmons historic spawning habitat. Before 1943 there had been hundreds of miles of winter-run habitat on the Upper Sacramento, the Pit, and McCloud rivers, which flowed together to form the Sacramento River just above the site of Shasta Dam. After 1943, there was 1
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Graffiti artists have editorialized on the obsolete Matilija Dam in Ventura County | Photo: Patrick Maloney, some rights reserved 
