The Goddess of Dam Removal

Dam removal expert Laura Wildman closes out the 2016 Mitchell Center Speaker Series…

Upon introducing Laura Wildman—last week’s speaker for the Mitchell Center’s final Fall 2016 Seminar Series talk—David Hart, director of the Mitchell Center and lead scientist on the center’s Future of Dams project, paraphrased the title of the bestselling 1989 book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” and said, “All I really need to know about dam removal I learned from Laura Wildman.”

Hart then introduced Wildman to the packed house as, simply, “the goddess of dam removal.”

Laura Wildman
Laura Wildman

Indeed, Wildman is considered one of the foremost experts in the U.S. on barrier removal and alternative fish passage techniques and has been involved in some 200 dam removal projects around the U.S. primarily in the Northeast. She is now working on efforts in Europe as well.

Wildman is a practicing fisheries engineer who established and runs the New England Regional Office for Princeton Hydro and focuses on ecological restoration consulting for aquatic systems. Her expertise and passion centers on the restoration of rivers through the reestablishment of natural functions and aquatic connectivity.

Her talk centered on the proactive dam removal movement and evolution of that movement over the last 25 years as garnered through interviews with 25 experts similarly involved in dam removal and research. These experts include scientists, engineers, managers, environmental activists, researchers, and regulators from the private, academic, non-profit, state and federal sectors.

Wildman says this work has helped construct a template that can be used in other regions where “the cascading impacts of river fragmentation” are extensive. That said, she notes that removing dams to restore rivers “is still sometimes considered to be a taboo subject but is gaining credibility”

Born into a dam family

Wildman’s connection to dams goes way back in her family. Pointing to one of her PowerPoint slides she said, “This is my great grandfather. He was on the survey crew for the Roosevelt Dam, one of the first really big dams out west. And my grandfather designed and built large dams, so I was raised in a house with all these pictures of dams around and I knew from a very young age I wanted to be an engineer. All the yellow equipment moving around construction sites just really fascinated me—I was one of those kids that could spend hours watching construction sites.”

She ended up becoming a civil engineer specializing in water resources just like her grandfather and thought she wanted to do something similar by building “these huge monoliths.” So she became a structural engineer only to find out it was definitely not her thing. She nearly left the field of engineering until she encountered her first project involving fisheries, specifically, the impacts dams have on fisheries populations downstream.

“I was born into a fishing family and I’d found a way to bring my love of fish and rivers together and the family interest in engineering to, but instead of building dams, I have become a specialist worldwide on the removal of dams.”

“I started removing dams in the mid-1990s. We didn’t have any guidance so one of the reasons I ended up becoming an expert in this field is because there were few experts before me,” Wildman says. “There were no studies. The only thing I had was the Environmental Impact Statement for the (108-foot-high) Elwah Dam and we’re not going to apply that to a 10-foot-high industrial dam in Connecticut.”

Elwha dam during removal
Elwah Dam during removal. Photo U.S. Geological Survey.
Elwha_Before removal
Elwah Dam before. Photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey.

Wildman’s work has also emphasized reconnecting communities to rivers, and the socio-economic complexities relating to the balance between natural resource management and healthy river systems. She has been involved in hundreds of river restoration, barrier removal, and fish passage projects throughout the U.S., working on all aspects of the projects from inception through design and construction, both as a licensed professional engineer designing and managing the projects and as a non-profit project partner when she was the chief engineer of American Rivers.

To view Wildman’s talk, “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: The Evolution of Proactive Dam Removal Over the Last Quarter Century,” visit the Mitchell Center’s Seminar Video on Demand page.

Learn more about the Mitchell Center’s Future of Dams Project here.

By David Sims, Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions