PORT ANGELES, Wash — The celebration of the removal of two dams on the Elwha River in Olympic National Park Saturday had all of the elements of similar ceremonies since the Edwards Dam was bulldozed on Maine’s Kennebec River 12 years ago.
Politicians gave speeches. Performers sang and danced. People who had worked for years on what had once seemed an impossible dream laughed and cried together.
What set this weekend-long party apart was the involvement of the Bureau of Reclamation, the big-shouldered agency that built more 600 dams that made development of the American West possible. Its former Commissioner Floyd Dominy in the 1960s personified the drive to bring rivers under human control to supply irrigation water, hydroelectric power and flood control as he pushed through Congress the last big dams projects such as eastern Idaho’s Teton Dam, which failed as it was being filled in 1976.
But here was the Bureau of Reclamation’s current Commissioner Mike Connor, breathless over the historic removal of the largest dam in the U.S. to date.
“Dam removal is not the best option everywhere,” said Connor. “But it’s the best option here.”
His agency, which supplies water to 31 million people and 10 million acres of irrigated farmland, is reconsidering the costs and benefits of the hundreds of dams it has built since 1902. He’s certain that most are going to remain critical for years to come.
But the agency’s mission has expanded to restoring rivers and values like fisheries and recreation, and meeting treaty obligations such as those of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, who had waited a century for this day to come.
“I hope in the coming decades the Bureau of Reclamation is known as much for river restoration as we are for dam operations,” Connor said.
The National Park Service has led the Elwha effort, which started when federal power officials recognized they could not relicense the 210-foot Glines Dam in the 1980s because it was within Olympic National Park. Congress approved removing the Glines and Elwha dams in 1994, and the local owners sold them to the federal government.
The movie is a study of an aristocratic family in the Victorian England. William Adamson, a young scientist, is introduced into the aristocratic family Alabaster by reverend Alabaster who is also fascinated by insects. William marries the older daughter of the family and studies the amounts of insects in the garden of the villa. His - for the aristocrats - strange behaviours reveal at the same time their own failures and passions. | |
| Views : | 3188 |
| Released : | 10 September 1995 |
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Angels and Insects (1995) Links
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