Dam removal required building a new riverbed from scratch

Evidence

So much silt had accumulated behind the dam that before the agencies could remove it, they had to reroute the river around the old dam site, which would be used for sediment storage. Thus, the project involved not only tearing down a structure but building a riverbed from scratch. Drone footage of the new riverbed is surreal. The project engineers designed a series of cascading pools specifically to be trout-friendly, but without anything yet growing around the artificial banks, it looked like something from Minecraft. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 639

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own published article ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — both concern human-designed natural systems and restoration as constructive labor, not mere absence.

Related

• Removing human structures let the land remember being an estuary. (similarity 0.79)
• Construction of dams was actually destruction of ecosystems (similarity 0.78)