I am really late to this thread party...in fact, it was so corny there,
with a few of those posts,  that I wasn't  going to join in, even though
the White Salmon river is just down the Gorge from me, about 8 miles.
There were Portland TV trucks there with crane-mounted cameras, and Turkeys
parked on both sides of the road, gawking gawking....quite the spectacle.
Not the dam being blown, but all the attention the event was creating...

   So, they blew the dam and the water from Northwest Lake spewed out,
bringing lots and lots of silt out of the basin behind the dam.  I was just
past there yesterday in my Vanagon (content).  The river below where that
dam held the water, it is now a big mucky mess.  Most of the Northwest
rivers are quite trashed from logging run off anyway, but at least this
one, they are trying to clean it up and re-introduce Salmon and Steelhead
to their former habitat.
  At many of the other dams along the main Columbia (almost the whole
length of the Columbia has been dammed by the Army Corp of Engineers.)
there were giant Aluminum plants.   Non of these have been operating since
it became more profitable to make the Aluminum in Chile, Mexico, or
somewhere else....so every dam has these huge defunct giant abandonded
plants with piles of slag, etc.  They have also begun cleaning up that
mess.....It seems the power created by all these dams is no longer very
profitable, I am told they often don't turn on the turbines in the
dams.......... there are thousands of wind generators springing up along
the Gorge, I guess making power more cheaply than those dams...

  Google recently built a huge power-sucking (I don't know the term for it)
computer server station near our local dam....The Dalles dam...They must
get a good deal on power from the Bonneville Power Administration, who now
are a bit 'superflous' since Wind Power has taken over 'the market'....

  What's all this got to do with Vanagons?...
  Don Hanson....very very late 'friday' post

  Google the book title "Cadillac Desert" if you are interested in how the
BLM developed all these dams in the Columbia, the Colorado, etc etc.

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 11:38 PM, Karl Wolz <wolzphoto@q.com> wrote:

> Dam wasn't blown up till after the water was released through the
> spillways.
>
> Karl Wolz
>
>