Marmot Dam Field Trip

The Marmot dam was built by PGE (Portland General Electricity) in order to generate electricity, but after interrupting part of the Sandy River (which comes from Mt. Hood) for almost a century, the dam was destroyed in 2007 as an experimental procedure which has been observed and analyzed to gather information about its effects on its ecosystem. Another part of what I learned on this field trip, was that this really will help fish habitat (that used to migrate to the salty part of the water close to the beach) and other organisms to survive. Another reason why the dam was destroyed is because it was not worthy to maintain a dam that did not produce enough electricity as before, and also following the new and strict regulations made to protect salmon habitat, PGE would have to invest even more to help salmon migrate to the bottom of the river trough the dam; it just was too expensive, so the dam was destroyed.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS ), March 18, 2007. Marmot Dam

One of the concerns that environmental organizations and PGE had when they decided to destroy the dam, was that fish living downstream could be buried by all the sediment accumulated on the dam, so they collected wild salmon and save them on a hatchery and then released into the river after the dam was totally removed, this action protected fish population. About the amount of sediment accumulated, this did almost nothing. Thanks to storms, all the sand, gravel, etc. were digested quickly and it did not expand in a large area. Below you can observe a video about it.

After the demolition of the Marmot dam, PGE donated the land where the dam was to organizations that want to conserve and protect this land. In one side of the Sandy River, you can see how the trees look younger than the forested area from the other side. It also looks harvested because the area was used for logging. Now that this land is under protection, we can say that is going through a secondary succession process since the land was already there, the only thing people worked on was on applying fertilizers to improve soil quality in order to reforest the area with native trees (the area is starting to recover). Compared to the other side, I observed how it has a greener and forested place, there is mostly cedars and the ground has a thick layer of woody debris and really reddish and soft soil, which are great signals for a very good forest! 

Would things be the same as before? Who knows, but this is an important starting to care about nature, its course, its connectivity with everybody else. Human kind probably should leave nature as pure as possible I think, but unfortunately that is not realistic, neither possible, we need from natural resources. What we should learn is how to peacefully interact, and manage the natural resources in a sustainable way.