| Salmon Stranded In Puddles, Klamath Water Still A Muddle |
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by Tim McKay
As biologists struggled to rescue baby salmon stranded in side pools along the Klamath River, a federal judge last month refused to issue a temporary restraining order that would have provided more water for fish.
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June 2002
Judge Sandra Armstrong turned down the request by the NEC and a handful of fisher and conservation groups even as water levels dropped and left coho, chinook, steelhead and other species high and dry.
The situation was a reprise of last year when thousands of salmon died in dried-up Klamath tributaries, highlighting a protracted tug-of-war over Klamath water between irrigators and commercial and Native American fishers.
At issue was whether the federal Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) could divert spring flows to the Klamath Irrigation Project without an explicit biological approval from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) that it would not jeopardize threatened coho salmon.
Caught In A Draft
Because the Bush administration had kept all supporting documents “draft,” the court had no solid basis for finding BOR’s actions to be threatening.
But the bad press generated by the fish strandings prompted the BOR to find “water-banked water” to increase Klamath flows slightly.
NMFS did make it clear that more water needs to flow down the Klamath in the spring to save the coho from extinction. But due to the draft nature of its hydrologic model, the complex problem will fester until next spring’s flows come into question.
Coho fry generally emerge from spawning gravels during March. Yet the young coho stay in fresh water for 18 months or more before going to sea, while chinook smolts begin an immediate migration toward the ocean.
The fish are plagued by delays in California, too. Although the state is under a legal mandate to act on a petition filed in April, 2001, to list and protect the coho, the necessary status-review report won’t go to the Fish and Game Commission until this month for action at its August meeting.
More Delay
The state, in the form of Fish and Game director Jim Hight, is pressuring the petitioners--including the NEC--to agree to an unprecedented delay of another 18 months before the commission acts. A governor’s election is coming.
At the April, 2001,meeting where the petition to list was first filed, Mark Rentz of the California Forestry Association argued that there was no scientific proof coho were endangered.
Coho catches off the California coast have fallen from more than a million fish annually to fewer than 10,000. Review after review has documented that hundreds of streams where coho were found in northwestern California no longer support them.
It seems environmentalists will have to go to court on behalf of the fish.
Big Timber has a surrogate in the coho matter in a new anti-environmental group called Save Our Scott and Shasta Valleys. They think they are the target of the coho listing because they have been killing the fish for years through unscreened diversions.
Restoration
The decline of salmon across the West has led to the expenditure of vast sums of money for restoration activities.
North Coast Congressman Mike Thompson testified before the Senate last month in support of his Pacific Salmon Recovery Act which passed the house on a 418 - 6 vote last summer. He said 106 historically abundant populations of salmon in the Northwest have already become extinct and another 214 stocks are at risk.
Thompson said fishermen in his district have seen their catch go from an average of 4.8 million pounds annually between the ports of Brookings, Oregon, and Fort Bragg, California, to 50,000 since 1988--when the area was largely closed.
Senate action on the bill, S. 1825, could come within a month. It would authorize as much as $200 million for salmon recovery in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and California.
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Updated Monday, June 17, 2002 |
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