
Why in the world are people proposing to breach/bypass our dams? To save fish?
I dare our county, state and federal governments to try a simple experiment to PROVE whether or not dams hurt fish.
Pick a class 1 stream (one that spawns fish) and designate it a free-dam-zone. Let any property owner of land on that stream be able to freely design and build dams and spawning systems as desired in exchange for government access to the stream on their property for the purpose of sampling and counting fish. If an owner has no spawning fish found above his dam, he looses the right to that dam and the dam is removed but the owner can always try a new design that doesn’t harm fish.
What would happen if you did this?
Property owners would gladly invest in creating micro-hydro-electric dams on the stream with an eye to preserving and promoting fish numbers at the same time.
Hundreds of designs could be tried and explored in short order.
Owners would easily be able to power their own homes and distribute power to their neighbors either directly or via the grid way cheaper than solar or wind power.
Property values would likely explode.
Tax income would rise for that area.
And after about 5 years of doing this we will know if it is possible to actually increase fish numbers despite dozens or hundreds of dams on a stream.
If that works out, start opening up all our streams to private micro-hydro projects and watch the fish and wealth rise.