For nearly a century, a 106-foot concrete barrier kept one of California’s most resilient fish from reaching its spawning grounds. Crews began rerouting the river in the summer of 2013, and over roughly two and a half years, finishing in November 2015, they dismantled the dam piece by piece. A 2023 study titled ‘Six years of fluvial response to a large dam removal on the Carmel River, California, USA’ published in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms tracked the river for eight years, six of them after dam removal, and found that the dam removal did not trigger major downstream damage.
A dam built for growth, not for fish
