Un-building a century of infrastructure

For most of a century, two dams sat across the Elwha River on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Between 2011 and 2014 they came down in what was then the largest dam removal in United States history. That reversal is the whole reason this story is worth telling. We spend a lot of time thinking about how things get built, and almost none thinking about how you take a piece of century-old infrastructure apart without wrecking everything downstream of it.

The pages that follow move through the story in order: why the dams went up and who paid for it, how the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe spent decades forcing removal onto the table, the engineering of taking the dams down, and what the river and the people around it look like now.