California has thousands of dams, from small earthen barriers to large dams hundres of feet tall. more than 1,400 of those dams are large enough to fall under state safety regulations. A great number of them provide critical water supply, flood control, and hydroelectric power. But many have outlived their functional lifespan and the ecosystem and economic benefits of removal far outweigh the cost of leaving them in place.
In 2019, CalTrout published the Top 5 California DAMS OUT Report which highlights five dams that are ripe for removal and that must, for the health of the ecosystem and communities around them, come out.
Our partners at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) published an interview with Dr. Andrew Rypel, the Peter B. Moyle and CalTrout endowed Chair in Coldwater Fishes and co-director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences on the need to develop tools to help prioritize dam removals in California.
Below is an excerpt from their article published on November 9, 2020
