Removing four old hydroelectric dams from the Klamath River was always a delicate undertaking, but one complication came from a source that had nothing to do with fish or river ecology at all: wildfires.
The dams’ reservoirs have served as a reliable water source for decades for helicopters and fire crews battling fires across the rugged, drought-prone Klamath Basin that straddles the Oregon-California border. Removing that water meant that the organization overseeing the project had to build an entirely separate plan just to ensure that regional firefighting capacity was not weakened at the precise moment the river itself was restored to its natural course, all while the surrounding landscape continued to face a worsening wildfire threat.
Why the loss of tanks raised real firefighting concerns
According to reports published by the Klamath River Renewal Foundation, residents near the four dams slated for removal have expressed concerns about wildland firefighting efforts in rural and mountain watersheds once the reservoirs are gone, as wildfire crews have been drawing water directly from those reservoirs for as long as the old dams have been in existence. The concern was clear: Without a large, accessible body of standing water, aerial firefighting crews would lose a reliable retreat point specifically in an area already considered highly vulnerable to fast-moving wildfires.
How officials built a plan to keep firefighting capacity intact
To address this issue, Klamath River Renewal Corporation has developed a customized fire management plan that works directly in conjunction with the Siskiyou Unit of CAL FIRE and the Oregon Department of Forestry’s regional districts. According to Klamath River Renewal’s account of the plan, the fire plan was developed specifically to ensure that removing the four Klamath River dams and their reservoirs would not reduce the region’s ability to effectively fight wildfires, and the plan has since been officially approved by firefighting agencies in both California and Oregon.
Part of this plan includes identifying 96 separate aerial river access points along the river between Keno Dam and Interstate 5, locations where current hydraulic conditions and vegetation removal operations allow helicopters to safely dip a snorkel or bucket into the water, with 41 of those points falling specifically within what served as the reservoir footprints prior to removal.
What do administrators do to ensure that these access points actually work?
Simply identifying potential water access points on paper was not enough in itself, because restoring the river to a free-flowing state changes the landscape around those same locations.
According to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, restoration crews planned to plant plants at two aerial access points to the river within each former tank footprint in a way that would leave a wide enough berth for helicopters to operate safely, while also constructing a permanent dip tank near Copco Lake along with up to five additional portable dip tanks to support aerial firefighting efforts once the tanks themselves are gone.
The careful and deliberate re-engineering of certain sections of the restored river reflects how seriously fire agencies took the loss of tanks as a real operational risk rather than just a minor inconvenience.
Why the broader Klamath Basin remains a high-risk area for wildfires
Concern about access to firefighting water falls within a much broader pattern of worsening wildfire activity across the entire Klamath Basin. According to the federal Wildfire Hazard Reduction Declaration covering the region, catastrophic wildfires have damaged or degraded ecosystems and communities across five national forests within the Klamath Basin, a trend officials expect to continue as the regional climate gets hotter and drier.
The same announcement noted that the effects of a changing climate on hydrology and wildfire activity are degrading fish habitat in the basin, including through post-fire landslides, directly linking fire risks in the region to the same river restoration and salmon recovery efforts that the dam removal project was designed to support in the first place.
How one wildfire has already tested restoration efforts
The interaction between fire and Klamath restoration is not just theoretical; it has actually happened directly on the ground. According to a research project summary published by the USGS Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, the 2022 McKinney Fire burned twelve kilometers of riparian habitat, destroying stands of sand willow, a plant essential to the Karuk tribe’s traditional basket-weaving practices, at the same time that decades of disruption of natural river flows by dams reduced willow abundance and made access more difficult.
USGS-funded researchers, in coordination with the Karuk Tribe, are now studying exactly how dam removal, high-intensity fires, invasive species, and active restoration work together to shape willow recovery, using the timing of the broader dam removal project as a natural opportunity to track these combined impacts as they unfold.
Why are fire and river restoration now part and parcel of the same story?
What emerges from these overlapping efforts is a river system, where wildfire risk and ecological restoration can no longer be treated as separate problems anymore.
Removing the dams addressed a long-standing environmental crisis, reconnecting salmon to habitats from which they had been cut off for a century, but also required fire agencies to rebuild from scratch the practical firefighting infrastructure that the old reservoirs had quietly provided for decades.
At the same time, the same fires to which the region remains vulnerable are actively affecting how quickly and to what extent the restored river ecosystem, from salmon to culturally significant plants like sand willow, can recover. In other words, the Klamath’s transformation is no longer just a story of dam collapses, but increasingly the story of an entire river landscape learning how to manage fire and water together, in a basin where each now shapes the other’s future in ways that researchers are still working to fully understand.
