The United States has more than 92,000 dams, with an average age of 61 years. As an owner or a community, you already feel what that means: rising maintenance and repair costs, mounting relicensing burdens, public-safety liability, and a structure that fragments the river habitat around it.

Older dams simply didn’t face today’s level of scrutiny on their impacts to ecosystems and tribal resources. So the question becomes a difficult one — how can a free-flowing river be restored, with the highest benefits and the lowest risk?

RES helps you answer it. We identify viable alternatives for removal and restoration, navigate funding and stakeholder concerns, match grants to projects to reduce the cost burden, and design for changing hydrologic conditions.

For smaller dams, a “remove and restore” approach is possible — straightforward, ecologically sound deconstruction paired with river restoration techniques that return the waterway to natural function.

For larger-scale dams, RES partners with engineering firms to handle the full complexities of an integrated, well-planned operation, backed by RES financial surety and long-term stewardship.

Once a dam is removed, restoring the river becomes its own discipline, and RES handles that work end to end:

• Revegetates the former reservoir footprint.
• Stabilizes the banks and any remaining sediment.
• Re-establishes tributaries.
• Monitors downstream water quality and aquatic species health, applying adaptive management as needed.

Integrated delivery means one team is accountable for the entire project. RES provides assessment and analysis, design, permitting, construction implementation, inspection, and monitoring — and stands behind the result with long-term stewardship and performance-based contracting.

That structure is what lets us guarantee outcomes rather than deliverables. You aren’t buying a sequence of services; you’re buying a restored, free-flowing river.

Your river’s health doesn’t stop at the dam. RES’s expertise in salmonids, river herring, and other diadromous fish species means we can improve water flow and restore access to spawning habitat at every scale.

Aquatic organism passage (AOP) — the ability of fish and other species to move freely through a river system — is not just a dam issue. Road-stream crossings also block passage into vital spawning areas, fragment populations, and are vulnerable during floods. RES resolves AOP barriers at every level, from herpetological to mussels to integrated mammal passage. We know more than water and fish pass through a culvert.

And if a dam needs to stay in place? RES designs bypass channels and nature-like fishways, as well as float park cascades that add local recreation.

The benefits reach well beyond the project site. Reopening a single segment of a fragmented river can improve water quality far downstream and across the watershed, and reconnecting tributaries has a multiplying effect on fish habitat.