[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 30 (Thursday, February 15, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H643-H644]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       DAM REMOVALS IN CALIFORNIA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, what I am illustrating here today is one 
of the largest environmental disasters in American history. This was 
caused by environmental movement actions here.
  What you see is the Klamath River up in northern California, which

[[Page H644]]

reaches partly into Oregon. There have been four hydroelectric dams 
that have been there anywhere from 60 to 100 years, creating clean, 
renewable, CO2-free, green electricity, something that 
Americans seem to want and certainly the government is pushing hard for 
as it tries to electrify everything by mandate: our vehicles, leaf 
blowers, lawnmowers, stoves, what have you. On the other hand, they 
want to take away the generation capacity to make all this electricity.
  Here you see this plume right here on the Klamath River, where one of 
the stems of the Klamath still has clean water. What you see here is 
the plume from where they started to knock down one of the dams so far, 
as well as release from the bottom, unplugging many, many years of silt 
and sedimentation that had been built up underneath at the bottom of 
the various lakes in the chain.

  Guess what? We warned them about this. They just glossed over it and 
said: Oh, the silt will be fine. It will be fine. Well, they are 
finding out there are high levels of chromium and other heavy metals in 
that silt. We knew this. They ignored it anyway because these four dams 
for them are trophies for the environmental movement.
  It is not about protecting fish. The latest projection by Fish and 
Game personnel, just said this week in meetings up in the north--again, 
you see here a normal part of the river, a tributary coming in. It is 
winter water there, so it isn't perfectly clear, but that is normal 
water for the winter.
  Here is the dirty plume coming down the Klamath, this brown, mucky 
stuff that is killing the wildlife in that system.
  They are actually expecting, and they said it with a straight face, 
that it might be 10 to 12 years now for the fish population that they 
ostensibly are trying to protect to return. The life cycle of a salmon 
is 3 years, so you are going to be wiping out several generations, 
hoping, I guess, that the salmon that are out in the ocean that return 
up the river will somehow find their way back after 10 and 12 years of 
forgetting about their habitat and where their imprint is to their 
normal breeding grounds.
  Would you have bought into this idea that the salmon are going to be 
wiped out for 10 or 12 years and think that is an environmental win? I 
don't think any normal person would think that. That is what they are 
saying since they started this project of tearing down.
  This shows an existing dam that makes hydroelectric power, but you 
can see the plume right here. It may be hard to see on TV, but this is 
a gray, blackish, brown crud hitting that dam from up above and coming 
through at the bottom where they have unplugged it and just let it run. 
Again, if it is supposed to be about wildlife, it isn't.
  The final poster I have to show you here, this shows dead deer that 
have waded out into that muck that came from the bottom of the dam. 
This is not the natural condition of the river, by any stretch, with 
the dams in place. At least three deer in this photo--there are several 
more in the larger pull-away of the photo--that wandered out and got 
stuck, as the Fish and Game Commission helplessly stood on the shore 
and could hear them bellowing and bleating, being unable to get out.
  They had, of course, no means to go out and rescue them. Heaven knows 
if people would have gone out there or some crazy kids out there mud 
bogging in their four-wheel drives or something, how they would get 
anybody out of that. They don't have a plan for that. We will have that 
plan later. They are working on it as they monitor it, says Fish and 
Game.
  This is what you have, an environmental disaster under the guise of 
preserving fish. They are trying to differentiate, well, there is a 
bunch of nonnative fish that are dying off, like yellow perch and 
others. The salmon they are trying to protect, we still think they are 
up in the tributaries, hiding out right now. What happens as soon as 
they come down into that, if they move at all or if they come upstream 
at all? What happens? They are going to get wiped out on that.
  As much as farmers and ranchers there have bent over backward in the 
Scott and Shasta Rivers, as well as the Klamath River up in Tule Lake 
Basin, not to mention the refuges that don't get water for ducks, 
geese, and other waterfowl habitat, what is the answer to them? Oh, I 
guess we messed up.
  Likely, they are going to want to take even more water out of Klamath 
Lake and cut off agriculture even more so because they have to now 
clean this mess up here.
  Who is going to be held liable for this? Who is going to be held 
liable for the lies about this whole system here? Is it going to be the 
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, which signed off on this 5-
0 finally, after we tried to give them facts on what was going on here?

                              {time}  1030

  Is it going to be EPA? Is it going to be NOAA fisheries? Is it going 
to be the California Department of Fish and Game? Excuse me. It is now 
known as Fish and Wildlife--politically correct. Will it be U.S. Fish 
and Wildlife?
  Are they just going to keep coming back more and more to agriculture 
and saying: Well, you are going to have to pay more for your water 
supply because we screwed up?
  The people out there have been wronged by this, and the government 
needs to do much better, and they are going to have to be paying 
restitution for the damage.

                          ____________________