High school students will study Elwha dam removal impacts.

When more than 70 miles of salmon habitat on the Elwha River are undammed after more than 90 years, Eagle Harbor High School will be there.

“There’s a lot of emphasis in science in getting kids in real life (situations), but the dam removal project is unprecedented,” Eagle Harbor science teacher Mary Kay Dolejsi said. “The project itself is so wide in scope, it’s an unprecedented ecological experiment.”

Historically, the Elwha was the habitat for six species of salmon and steelhead. Annually, hundreds of thousands of spawning salmon used to return to the river, which flows into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, just west of Port Angeles.

Damming the river not only affected fish populations, but also the diet of animals in the forest. Sediment suppressed by the dams caused the beach at the river’s mouth to erode and damage historic clam beds.

Eagle Harbor High School is one of 12 schools in the state that will be working alongside scientists gathering data on the Elwha River ecosystem before and after the removal of two dams, slated to begin in 2008.

Social science teacher Marie Marrs designed the multidisciplinary curriculum, which was accepted by the state environmental education board. Students will study the event from scientific, political, economic, social and cultural aspects.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Marrs said, “to be this age (and have) a chance to work with authentic, real scientists.”

The students’ work will also serve as their service learning project, now a graduation requiredment in the Bainbridge Island School District.

Making the project’s fieldwork possible is a three-year grant of $2,000 each year from the Bainbridge Educational Support Team. Students will raise funds for the rest of the cost.

The dam removal at the Elwha is the largest in the world. As habitat restoration goes, the $182 million effort is the second largest in the U.S., behind only the Everglades.

Scientists with Olympic Park Institute will work with Eagle Harbor students. OPI is part of a consortium of area universities, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.

The lower Elwha Dam went up in 1913 to generate electricity, cutting off all but the bottom 5 miles of the river to fish. The upper dam, the 210-foot-tall Glines Canyon Dam, was completed in 1927, and for nearly 80 years has been catching sediment that used to flow down the river and into the strait.

The dams, built without fish ladders, were even then in violation of state law, but the damage was not just ecological.

Culturally, the Elwha River is the spiritual base of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Marrs said. Traditionally, the river and its salmon were intertwined with the tribe’s well being. When the lower dam went up, it cut off 70 miles of salmon-spawning habitat and the tribe was forbidden to fish in the river – until 1976. And adding insult to injury, the lower dam was built on top of the tribe’s “creation site,” which Marrs compares to building on top of Jerusalem.

No quick fix

But unbottling the dam is not a quick fix, nor are the effects clear. On the plus side, 83 percent of the watershed is in Olympic National Park and thus not subject to development pressures.

But politically, it is as if waters were already unleashed. It took from 1992 – when the U.S. Congress approved the undamming – until August 2004 when the City of Port Angeles, the National Park Service and the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe signed an agreement that let the restoration move forward.

Marrs pointed to a list taped to her board of 16 major players, including the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe; Port Angeles City Council; state and federal agencies; state historic society; property owners along the river and two lakes; fishers both commercial and recreational; recreational users; and the paper mill that owned the lower dam until it the government bought it.

“Some of what we want students to get is how did this decision come about?” Dolejsi said. “It’s democracy in action.”

By the time this year’s ninth graders are seniors in 2008, the undamming – expected to take two and a half years to incrementally let the sediment out – will have just started.

“It’s going to take decades (to restore),” Dolejsi said.

The questions are after the dam is gone, will the “right size” sediment remain in the river? Will the sediment make the water too cloudy for fish? Will fish return? What will reintroducing an animal to the ecosystem do?

“Everything is connected and (the students will) get to interact with the scientists who are doing (the research),” Dolejsi said.

Before the dams, hordes of salmon used to swim up the river, returning nutrients from the ocean to the forest, Dolejsi said.

The 18 students span ninth to 11th grades. In March, they will spend five days at the Elwha with the Olympic Park Institute, collecting baseline data.

Eventually students will design their own experiments around the central question Marrs is posing, “To what extent will the restoration of the Elwha River watershed justify the removal of the two dams?”

“Our hope is we’ll be able to continue this for several years and the students can stay part of this multi-year (learning process),” Dolejsi said. “We hope they will become involved and concerned citizens.”

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Fish for answers

Learn more about the Elwha River dam removal at the Commodore Options School open house 6:30-8 p.m. Feb. 15. Students will have a booth and be selling items for fund-raising.

An excellent resource on the Elwha dam removal is www.americanrivers.org.