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Elk Creek Dam
The failed Elk Creek Dam is killing salmon and wasting tax dollars in the Rogue River basin.
What do you do with a failed dam project that serves no purpose other than to kill salmon?
Logic would dictate that you take it out. But when that boondoggle is the Elk Creek Dam on a tributary of the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, logic and common sense seem to be thrown out the window.
The Bush administration and Oregon Congressman Greg Walden are currently blocking the US Army Corps of Engineers from removing Elk Creek Dam. This, despite the fact that construction was halted in 1987 and thus the project generates no electricity, provides no water for irrigation and that it serves no legitimate flood-control need. Instead they are forcing U.S. taxpayers to spend millions of dollars each year to trap salmon below the dam, then haul them around it in trucks.
Although this is a Corps of Engineers project, the Corps does not want to complete the dam. After reviewing the economic viability of the project and the impacts on endangered salmon, the Corps wants to call it quits, breach or "notch" the Elk Creek Dam and restore salmon passage. In the long run, notching the dam would be far less expensive
More than $100 million has been spent so far on Elk Creek Dam. To finish the dam will cost an additional $70 million. What's more, the Corps spends hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to collect and truck salmon around the partially completed dam. By contrast, notching the dam would cost $7 million. That's why Oregon Wild, together with a coalition of other conservation groups, fishermen and taxpayer advocates, is working to remove this failed dam and stop the waste of salmon and tax dollars.
Explore the links below to learn more about our work to remove Elk Creek Dam and restore what was once one of the most productive salmon- and steelhead-spawning streams in the Rogue Basin.
Elk Creek Dam press releases and news itemsLetter from Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber on the Elk Creek Dam to the House Appropriations Committee (8/27/2002)
