In 2024, a small, century-old private dam finally came off the upper Puyallup River, and the water ran free for the first time in about a hundred years. It's the third "right dam to remove" on this page — and it adds a wrinkle the Elwha and the Klamath don't.
Those dams came out through public agreement. This one had to be forced out — through the courts, after its owner poisoned the river trying to keep it running.
Electron Dam checks every box on the "should it come out?" list — and none of the boxes that make a dam worth keeping.
Electron Dam was a roughly 100-year-old private hydro diversion on the upper Puyallup — small, aging infrastructure long past its prime.
A minor diversion, not a piece of critical grid infrastructure — the kind of dam whose modest output never came close to justifying the salmon it blocked.
It shut fish out of upper-river habitat with no adequate way past — a full barrier on a glacial river feeding one of America's most endangered watersheds.
In 2020, a botched renovation at the dam discharged toxic tire crumb rubber straight into the Puyallup, and the operator hastily threw up an unpermitted "temporary" rock dam and sheet-pile wall to keep diverting water. The Puyallup Tribe and Earthjustice sued. A federal court ruled in February 2024 that the structure was harming ESA-listed salmon and steelhead, and an appellate court upheld that ruling in August 2024. With that, the barrier came out and the river ran free.
It shouldn't take a decade of litigation to remove a derelict private dam that's blocking endangered fish and dumping poison in the water. But it did — and the fact that it took the Tribe going to court is part of the lesson.
Electron belongs in the exact same category as the Elwha and the Klamath: old, small, uneconomic, impassable dams that blocked habitat and earned little in return. Taking them out is obviously right — and that's precisely the calculation that runs the other way for a large, modern, firm-power dam that can be fitted with fish-safe turbines and passage. We judge each dam on its own evidence. Remove the wrong ones; keep and engineer the right ones. Same test, case by case.
The spill that triggered the whole fight pointed at something bigger than one dam. The tire crumb released a chemical called 6PPD-quinone — a breakdown product of ordinary tire wear that washes off every road in every rainstorm, and that kills coho salmon outright, often before they can spawn.
No dam decision fixes that. It's a reminder that recovering these runs means working the whole system at once — the barrier and the water quality and active production for runs already too depleted to wait. Pull the dam, yes — and then keep going. See the rest of the record, or get involved.
Removing a small, derelict diversion dam is about as easy a call as dam decisions get — there was almost no power at stake, which is exactly why it's a clean example and not a hard trade-off. The Puyallup's salmon are still in serious trouble: glacial sediment, Tacoma-area urbanization, and 6PPD are all live pressures, and the ESA-listed Chinook and steelhead will need active production and habitat work for years, not just an open river.
But a hundred-year barrier is gone, the upper river is reconnected, and the people who fought hardest for it — the Puyallup Tribe — got it done. That's the right kind of removal, and it's worth marking.
The figures on this page are drawn from public, authoritative records:
Questions about our facts and figures? Contact us.