TO DAM OR NOT TO DAM

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Flyfishing42

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Is their a general consensus if damming rivers is good or bad thing for trout? Just curious, some seem quite crazy about the damn dam issue!
 
Maybe you could give us more details of what issues you're thinking about, as well as your own views.
 
Probably,today, not a good plan. TVA dams in the South have been great for trout fishing. They provided flood control and cheap electricity.
Dams that started out as flood control and Hydro Electric in some locations have proven to stop migration and access to spawning grounds. ie. the Columbia River the Clyde River in Vermont and
http://www.salmonatlas.com/atlanticsalmon/usa-maine/mapusa-ne.html
I'd say make your own mind up from the evidence . GG
 
Watched a documentary and read in several popular trout magazine articles and also some books by some popular folk in fly fishing world both pro and con about damming. I was just curious what the Pa folk here thought about the topic.
 
All depends on the setup- bottom fed tail waters turn WW fishery into a CW fishery. Top or spill over dams prevent fish migration(as do bottom fed). If your looking for trout in a area that's normally WW and put a bottom feeder it could be turned into trout water-many known trout waters on the east coast are from this.
 
Dams have saved human lives by controlling, to some degree, flooding, and provide for recreation by creating lakes and all the additional activities you can do there.

However, dams wreak havoc with ecosystems, by disrupting natural movement of animals upstream and downstream, warming the water downstream (unless it is a bottom release dam, in which case the water is cool) - reality is neither temperature regimes is natural, and blocking the distribution of sediment.

It's difficult to stake a position universally on one side or the other, namely you can't rip out all of the dams, nor should every stream be dammed.

I'd be happy to see less of them, but folks also seem to like to live on floodplains, so I don't see a wholesale removal of them occurring on the big rivers. I think it's a good thing that they are being removed on smaller streams, where their prior purpose for creating a mill pond or some other industrial use is long past. I believe PA has one of the highest number of dams in the US, but that is from my at times faulty memory. I know that we have had the highest number of dam removals in our state over the past ten years or so, compared to all other states.
 
My opinion is what most already posted they stop fish from migration. most think they can just put up fish ladders which is a waste of money to me but at least they work. Just blow up the dam.
 
Ive always been of the opinion that messing with Mother Nature for our own short sighted desires really isn't a good thing....regardless of potential fishing opportunities.
 
American Rivers has some good reading on dams and their removal.
IMO I prefer my rivers free flowing.


American Rivers
 
"TO DAM OR NOT TO DAM"

Are new dams being proposed?

The title suggests that they are.

There have not been many new dams created in the US in recent decades.

 
When was the Kinzua Dam built? GG
 
Not in favor new dams without really good reason.More needs to be done to get old useless dams that serve no purpose removed or breached.These would mainly be old mill dams.There are 2 on Valley Cr and 3 on Sand Spring Run and a few more on Hickory Run,just a few examples.These small dams do nothing but fill with silt and solar heat the water behind them,and of course heat the water below them.Some would say these dam are historic and worth saving.But the history is,before man came along there were no dams.I wonder why when the PFBC repairs dams on their properties that they don't replace with bottom release?I believe once a dam is taken out of service it should be breached and let nature take its course.IMHO
 
Small jack dams on fast flowing freestone streams seem to help with providing holding water and catching sediment. I'm sure brook trout have no trouble navigating them. Really no different than a beaver dam or a fallen tree. Does it really benefit the fish or the angler more tho?

Big Army Corps dams obviously help with necessary flood control. Ideally they would of been avoided, but it's too late to relocate millions of people lol.

The dams in between those are the ones that need to go IMO. Most of them are obsolete. Old mill dams, spill ways, some of them you kind of look at and just scratch your head wondering why they were ever made to begin with. I think a lot of these types of dams came from the Great Depression era of public works projects.
 
Dams are overall bad. Read above. Some things they do well, in addition to energy, water stores, flood prevention, etc are prevent invasive species from moving up stream. They also prevent migratory fish from moving up stream, so depending on the water it can be bad. They cut streams in half, limiting diversity and re-population sources. At the same time, reservoirs often provide a safe space for fish to survive a drought and repopulate from, while also causing the water below the dam to dry up even worse.

So there are a few good things that come out of dams, but usually they come with a negative component as well, and also lots of other negatives that have no positive.
 
My three go to rivers are tailwaters; gunpowder, savage and NB of the potomac. So selfishly I greatly appreciate them because they have provided some fantastic trout fishing for me.
 
ryansheehan wrote:
My three go to rivers are tailwaters; gunpowder, savage and NB of the potomac. So selfishly I greatly appreciate them because they have provided some fantastic trout fishing for me.
Click to expand...

Have you ever heard any serious proposals to remove these dams?
 
troutbert wrote:
ryansheehan wrote:
My three go to rivers are tailwaters; gunpowder, savage and NB of the potomac. So selfishly I greatly appreciate them because they have provided some fantastic trout fishing for me.
Click to expand...

Have you ever heard any serious proposals to remove these dams?
Click to expand...

Nope
 
Very bad, and I don't care if it is a cold water release. Lakes and ponds change many of the characteristics of the streams they block from ph to temperature.
Oh and there isn't an Atlantic Salmon River in New England that has recovered from a dam removal sufficiently to make the fisheries for salmon sustainable again. Nearly all the Salmon Rivers of NE were destroyed by dams. There are still thousands of the dams in NE that should be removed.
 
Theres a dam I fished as a child this empties into a salt water river in NE. It would be perfect place foe Atlantic salmon. They are supposed to dredge the pond and then destroy the dam. Also remove the silt first to protect the eel grass. So called evironmentalists said it will bring back all of the fish populations. One has to wonder it it will all work out.
 
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