When a hydroelectric plant shuts down for good, you’d figure the water just goes back to the river and everybody moves on. That’s more or less what happened to the river part of the Leaburg Hydroelectric Project on Oregon’s McKenzie River, which hasn’t made a watt of electricity since federal dam-safety regulators ordered it drained in 2018. But the five-mile canal that used to feed the powerhouse never got the memo.<\/p>\n
Several creeks on the north side of the McKenzie Valley still run straight into that canal, the way they have since the thing was dug about a century ago. So when it rains hard, and in western Oregon it rains hard, the canal fills up with storm runoff whether anybody wants electricity or not. All that water needs somewhere to go, and one of the main exits is still the powerhouse at the bottom end.<\/p>\n
The catch is the two turbines sitting at the bottom. They’re dead, and they’re in the way.<\/p>\n
The Eugene Water & Electric Board, the city-owned utility that runs the place, already had the blades pulled off one of the two turbine runners so water could pour through the empty pit instead of fighting its way past the hardware. Now it’s doing the same thing to the second one. On September 8, EWEB’s board approved a $197,000 contract with Kaminski Construction of Eugene for what the utility calls the Leaburg Powerhouse Second Turbine Runner Removal, and the paperwork says the job has to be done by November 13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Fair question, and it took me a minute too.<\/p>\n
The Leaburg powerhouse was built around two Francis turbines, which is the workhorse design for medium-head hydro. Water comes down a pipe, gets squeezed through a ring of adjustable gates, and hits a wheel of curved blades called the runner. The runner spins a shaft, the shaft spins a generator, and the water drops out the bottom through a flared passage called the draft tube and into the river.<\/p>\n
Basically, the runner is a very carefully shaped plug. It’s designed to grab as much energy out of the water as possible, which is the same thing as saying it’s designed to get in the water’s way. If you leave it bolted in place and just open the gates, you can still push water through, but nowhere near as much as you’d get through an open pipe.<\/p>\n
Pull the blades off the runner, and what you’ve got is a 12-foot-diameter hole running from the top of the forebay straight down to the river. EWEB’s own description of the project puts it in dam-safety terms: removing the blades increases what it calls the low-level outlet capacity of the forebay, so the utility can pass more water through the powerhouse, hold canal levels down during storms, and deal with debris piling up on the trash rack at the penstock intake. The whole point is to take hydraulic load off the canal embankment, and that embankment is what keeps federal regulators up at night.<\/p>\n
I’d argue it’s a pretty elegant fix for a plant nobody’s going to run again. You don’t need to build a new spillway or cut a new channel through an earthen bank. You just pull the hardware out of the pipe that’s already there.<\/p>\n
EWEB did this once before. Its quarterly operations report covering the end of 2023 says a turbine was removed from the Leaburg powerhouse that December to increase stormwater capacity through the building by 1,000 cubic feet per second. For scale, the canal was designed to carry up to 2,500 cubic feet per second when it was diverting river water for generation, so one gutted turbine bought back a big chunk of that as pure drain capacity.<\/p>\n
That outlet’s been doing real work since. EWEB’s January update to its board mentions the utility hired Wildish Building Company last November for emergency repairs to the trash rack system on that low-level outlet, which tells you the water’s been flowing through it and dragging stuff along with it.<\/p>\n
What I can’t tell you is how much the second removal will add. EWEB hasn’t published a flow figure for it, and the contract documents talk about “greater operational flexibility” rather than a number. It’d be a reasonable guess that it lands somewhere near the first one, since the two penstocks are the same size, but that’s my guess and not the utility’s.<\/p>\n
The scope in EWEB’s board consent calendar<\/a> is unglamorous and kind of fascinating if you like this sort of thing. The contractor has to bring extra dewatering gear to supplement EWEB’s own system, build a redundant containment setup so no debris or anything hazardous gets past the existing bulkheads and into the McKenzie, and break out a concrete slab to get safe access to the draft tube. Then it’s scaffolding, confined-space equipment to keep OSHA happy, and the actual removal of the blades without wrecking the equipment and structures around them.<\/p>\n Four companies bid. Kaminski came in at $196,970, Staton Companies at $209,800, Wildish at $259,770 and HP Civil out of Salem at $286,800. Kaminski’s new to EWEB, but its welding subcontractor, Bezates Construction, has done emergency repairs on the utility’s water mains before, which is presumably how the blades are coming off.<\/p>\n The money comes out of a line item EWEB calls the Leaburg Near Term Risk Reduction Subproject, which has a 2026 budget of $3,085,000. So this is a small piece of a bigger program, and the bigger program is itself a small piece of an even bigger one.<\/p>\n One thing makes Leaburg different from your average hydro rehab. Nobody’s fixing this plant. EWEB’s board voted to decommission the whole project after its consultants figured out that bringing the canal up to modern dam-safety standards and running it through 2080 would produce electricity at about $117 per megawatt-hour. EWEB buys from the Bonneville Power Administration for a lot less than that, and Leaburg only ever covered about 4% of Eugene’s demand anyway.<\/p>\n The long-term plan is to pull out the dam, let the McKenzie run free through the project area, and rebuild parts of the canal so the creeks can get to the river without an earthen embankment in the way. EWEB hired McMillen, the firm that managed the Klamath River dam removals, on a ten-year contract to run that program. Its January memo to the board puts the final application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first quarter of 2030 and FERC approval to start tearing things down around the first quarter of 2032.<\/p>\n That’s a long time to leave a leaky canal collecting creek water. Which is why FERC’s dam-safety division has told EWEB it can’t just wait. The regulator wants the near-term risks handled, in EWEB’s words, as soon as reasonably practicable and before decommissioning is finished. Hence the turbine surgery, the property purchases along the canal, and a geotechnical drilling program that, according to McKenzie River Reflections<\/a>, started boring holes at multiple sites along the canal earlier this month, closing sections of the canal trail as it goes.<\/p>\n It’s an odd way to end a power plant, frankly. The building’s still there, and it’s a good-looking one, designed in the Art Deco style by Oregon architect Ellis F. Lawrence with motifs from Greek mythology. It’s just that the machinery inside is being hollowed out one unit at a time so the building can do the only job it’s got left, which is being a very ornate storm drain.<\/p>\n If you’ve been reading our coverage of hydro lately, you’ll have noticed turbines going the other direction. At Old Hickory Dam in Tennessee<\/a>, the Army Corps of Engineers is swapping five-blade runners for seven-blade ones to squeeze more power out of the same river. At Hoover Dam<\/a>, the worry is cavitation chewing up runners as Lake Mead drops. Leaburg’s the opposite case. The runner’s coming out because the water has more value as a drain than as a power source, and I’d say that’s the honest end state for a fair number of small, old run-of-river plants in the West.<\/p>\n There’s a sister plant, too. EWEB’s Walterville project downstream has had its own canal drained for more than two years over seepage at the forebay, and the utility plans to decide by the end of this year whether to fix it for a new license or decommission it as well. So this probably isn’t the last Oregon turbine you’ll read about being taken out of a pipe.<\/p>\n The dates that matter are the ones in the contract. Kaminski Construction has until November 13, 2026 to get the blades off the second Leaburg runner, and EWEB’s decommissioning page<\/a> still lists the plant at its original 15.9 megawatts, 8.4 from one unit and 7.5 from the other, neither of which will ever spin again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When a hydroelectric plant shuts down for good, you’d figure the water just goes back to the river and everybody … <\/p>\nThe plant is being taken apart in slow motion<\/h2>\n
Where this fits with the other dam stories<\/h2>\n