Cougar Dam

Cougar Dam is a 519-foot (158 m) tall rockfill hydroelectric dam in the U.S. state of Oregon. It has a gated concrete spillway and a powerhouse with two turbines totaling 25 megawatts of electric power.

The dam impounds the South Fork McKenzie River about 42 miles (68 km) east of Eugene, Oregon, creating Cougar Reservoir which has a storage capacity of 219,000 acre feet (270,000,000 m3). The purpose of Cougar Dam is to provide flood risk management, hydropower, water quality improvement, irrigation, fish and wildlife habitat, recreation, storage, and navigation.

In 2005, the Willamette temperature control facility was constructed to help regulate the water temperature released to the river below Cougar Dam in an attempt to reduce the negative effects on salmon migration. To further help recover endangered salmon and bull trout populations in the Willamette River Basin, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a fish collection and sorting facility on the South Fork McKenzie River below Cougar Dam which was completed in 2010. From 2003 to 2005, state-of-the-art turbine runners were installed in the turbine-generator units at the Cougar powerhouse, and were designed to resist cavitation and operate efficiently at very large head ranges.