(water splashing) It's all about the water, above it and below it.

- So removing this dam allows this pristine water from the headwaters to keep flushing the needed nutrients and cold, clean, oxygenated water downstream.

- Dams are kind of like clogs in your artery.

You don't want that kind of blockage.

And so when you can let the river be a river again and be free flowing, have room to move, that's really helpful.

- Removing abandoned dams like the Scholl's Mill Dam, just outside of Boone, brings new life to rivers.

This is the Watauga River.

Once the dam is gone, water and nutrients will be free flowing, habitats opened up.

But there's a challenge.

You're looking at the Eastern Hellbender Salamander.

It's the largest aquatic salamander species found in North America.

About 29 inches long, four to five pounds.

- We care about hellbenders because we care about the health of the river.

Everything is interconnected.

- Eastern Hellbender Salamanders live in the underwater caves created by boulders just below the dam.

Taking down the dam will send a mountain of sediment into the pool.

That will bury prey, fertilized eggs, and hiding places for juveniles.

It will essentially wipe out the salamanders.

Which is why, days before the dam deconstruction started, scientists were searching the pool at the base of the dam for salamanders.

This salamander rescue operation will move the hellbenders a few miles downstream.

- We relocated the hellbenders to suitable habitat downstream to avoid any impacts from the dam removal.

So the process is monitoring and relocation of the hellbenders to fresh habitat.

Then comes the dam removal.

Hey, sweet thing.

- Hi.

- Whoa.

- Eight hellbender salamanders were caught, weighed, measured, tagged.

- So I'm gonna go in, back out, insert, pull it out.

So we go right here.

Sorry, buddy.

Sorry, buddy.

In, out, insert, that's it.

- And then relocated.

The move also allowed researchers to test a new relocation plan.

- To my knowledge, hellbender relocation has never been done in this way before.

We collected eight adult individuals and moved them to another site.

And they actually were able to hang out and habituate into crayfish traps for a little while.

And when we released them, they were wriggling and raring to go.

- That small adjustment dramatically increases the survival rates for relocation.

- When hellbender populations are doing well, we know that the river is doing well.

So we're really excited to be able to keep an eye on these hellbender species for years to come, to just really see how the Watauga River comes back to life after these two dam removal projects.

- Now for the dam.

Think deconstructing Lego blocks.

The Schill's Mill Dam was built in the late 1800s.

It's an obstruction, but it's not watertight.

Flooding in the 1940s punched a hole in the dam and it was abandoned.

(metal clanging) Environmental groups orchestrated its removal.

- Vital to remove the Schill's Mill Dam to reconnect the aquatic habitat, right?

So the headwaters, kind of the cradle of stream health, right?

Clean, clear water coming down from the source, flows down through the forested, protected slopes of Grandfather Mountain.

While this barrier was here, limited connectivity upstream, right?

So fish passage, passage for the hellbender salamander muscles, and also provides an impairment for stream health.

Things like collecting sediment, slowing down the water, warming it up, lowering dissolved oxygen.

- I mean, one of the main things that we're trying to do is recreate the passage that existed before the dam was in place.

And so by removing that, the concrete and that barrier, that lets things move back and forth up the stream channel.

- And so the best thing when you have these kinds of structures that are serving no purpose is to get them off the landscape.

It helps to support biodiversity, in this case, hellbenders.

It helps public safety to get rid of an attractive nuisance.

And then it's also just really good for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

So what we're seeing in climate change is that we know that we're having more extreme droughts.

We're also seeing more extreme floods.

Rivers need room to move.

We're also seeing temperatures rising.

So we have species like hellbenders here that need clean, cool water.

And so when you remove a dam, you allow them to move in the river system.

- Hellbenders used to be found in rivers across 15 states in the eastern part of the US, but almost 80% of the population has been lost because many rivers are filled with sediment from farms and development.

Hydropower dams stopped free-flowing rivers and cut off hellbender populations.

But Western North Carolina is one of the few places in the country with relatively stable hellbender populations.

In addition to removing the dam, the river's banks will be restored and replanted with native species.

78 miles of the Watauga River will be free-flowing once again.

- And so when we have hellbender populations doing really well, that tells us a lot of things about the river.

It means it's clean and it's cold.

We're really excited to be able to keep an eye on these hellbender species for years to come to just really see how the Watauga River comes back to life.