In the summer of 2023,DesiréeTullos and two students from her engineering lab finished an eight-hour day of field work. Midday temperatures approached 100 degrees along the Klamath River in northern California. They returned to the Tree of Heaven campground and walked to the boat ramp to take a swim in the cool, clear river. A year later, she and her team found themselves once again camping at Tree of Heaven and looking to cool off, but the river had changed. Water the color of chocolate milk lapped against a boat ramp covered with sun-cracked sediment up to a foot thick. And when they stepped into the river, they sank two feet in quicksand-like mud strong enough to suck a sandal off a foot. “The models predicted there’d be a lot of piles of sediment, and it made sense from a physics perspective,” said Tullos, a river engineering professor at Oregon State, sitting at a picnic table next to the boat ramp this June. “But seeing it — somehow it is still a surprise. Somehow, I guess in my mind I thought it was going to flush out into the ocean.” Surprises are expected when you’re working at this scale. Tullos and her team, alongside other Oregon State researchers, are studying the impacts of the removal of four dams on the Klamath River and the restoration of almost 2,500 acres of land about 15 miles upriver from the campground. This $500 million project — led by an Oregon State alumnus — is, according to the nonprofit American Rivers, the largest dam removal project in the world. “The Klamath is just one example of this big broader story of ‘Wow, we’ve got all these big, old dams; what are we doing with them? Are we handing this all off to our kids to figure out, and the grandkids to pay for?’” Tullos said. “I think we don’t pay enough attention to dams as infrastructure and it’s all old, and there’s a reckoning coming.” Looming over the group’s work, and indeed everything on the Klamath, is the plight of the salmon. T The Klamath runs more than 250 miles along the Oregon-California border, through desert, rainforest and redwoods, to reach the Pacific Ocean. What Tullos and other Oregon State scientists learn here will P.32 The Iron Gate Dam before removal.
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