Cal Am President: It’s a good day to be a steelhead
From a “river in ruin” to a “river in renewal,” there’s a lot of history at the former site of the San Clemente Dam. Monday marked another historic moment; for the first time, the many people and organizations involved in the removal of the dam came together to celebrate the progress of a monumental riparian habitat restoration.
In 1999, the Carmel River was regarded as the most endangered river in the United States due to the dam. Declared seismically unsafe by the California Department of Water Resources Division of Safety of Dams after a buildup of sediment, the dam also impeded the passage of the anadromous, threatened steelhead trout of the Central Coast.
A few years later, stakeholders had to decide whether to repair the dam, or take the road less traveled.
“So rather than buttressing, which, it was going to be the solution, we said, ‘you know, if we can remove it, it would be much better for the environment,” Lorin Letendre,Executive Director of the Carmel River Watershed Conservancy, said.
The $83 million deconstruction and restoration carried a great deal of risk becoming the largest dam removal in California history. It involved sequestering the silt and rerouting a half-mile stretch of the river into an adjacent stream.
After more than a decade of work, the public-private partnership that made the San Clemente Dam Removal and Carmel River Reroute Project possible is paying off. Ecologists said there’s already evidence the steelhead trout are taking advantage of access to more than 25 miles of spawning and rearing habitat.
“Granite Construction has already seen some fish here in the water,” Letendre said. “They had some divers in the water just a few days ago and they saw a bunch of fish. So it looks like this is really working beautifully.”
Joyce Ambrosiuswith NOAA Fisheries said she’s hopeful.”These last couple of years with the drought that went on, I think we had maybe 11 come up one year and zero one year,” she said.
Replanting to create a healthy habitat for the steelhead and other species has also been a big part of the restoration.
While the progress is visible, there’s still more work ahead to restore the river’s flow and reduce reliance on the river as a water supply for the Monterey Peninsula.
“We’re hoping the California Public Utilities Commission will approve a groundwater replenishment project that will be 3,500 acres of feet of recycled water that we will not then need to pull from the Carmel River,” Cal Am President Robert MacLean said. “We’re also trying to get some new aquifer storage and recovery water. And then finally, we project around 2019, the new desalination plant will come online.”
This summer, the original dam built on the river, called the Old Carmel River Dam, will be removed. Once that is complete, the land will be donated to the Bureau of Land Management. The plan is to eventually open the site for public access.
