The Oregonian; Portland, Or.; Oct 27, 2002;
By MICHAEL
MILSTEIN
Abstract:
Instead of rushing into the Klamath and west to the
ocean, the Trinity River collects behind Trinity Dam. The
dam reroutes as much as nine of every 10 gallons through
an 11-mile tunnel east out of the Klamath drainage and
into the Sacramento River. There it joins water from
other Northern California reservoirs and flows south
toward San Francisco Bay.
The district has a contract with the federal
government for 1.15 million acre-feet of water annually,
more than twice what the Klamath Project uses. But like
the Klamath Project, Westlands has felt squeezed by
drought and water set-asides for endangered species and
other wildlife.
A study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last
year found that higher releases from Trinity Dam would
cool the Trinity River and counteract the warm Klamath
downstream, making the water safer for salmon. Amid the
die-off, state, federal and tribal biologists pleaded for
more water in both the Klamath and Trinity.
Full Text:
Summary: The nation’s largest-known salmon die-off
leads biologists and the Bush administration to consider
cutting off California and keeping more water in the
Klamath River system’s largest tributary More water from
the Klamath River system flows to the rich vegetable,
cotton and nut fields in California’s Central Valley than
to farms in the Klamath Project on the Oregon-California
line.
It moves through immense tunnels and canals from the
Klamath’s biggest tributary, the Trinity River in
Northern California. As much as 90 percent of the
Trinity’s water, which would otherwise flow into the
Klamath and out to sea, instead rushes south toward
California’s thirsty center.
When more than 33,000 migrating salmon died in the
dwindling, overheated water of the lower Klamath last
month, most were struggling home to the Trinity to spawn,
biologists say.
In an unusual show of support for a Clinton
administration policy, Bush administration officials say
they want more water in the Trinity. And studies suggest
that the cooler Trinity water might have aided the dying
fish.
But Bush officials looked instead to the Klamath
Project in Oregon for water to end the fish kill, because
water headed for California is locked in a ferocious
fight that leaves not a drop to spare.
“The water from the Klamath Project is only a part of
the water in the system, but it’s the easiest part to
get,” said Jeffrey McCracken of the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation.
No one wants to take blame for the fish kill, the
largest known U.S. die-off of adult salmon. But Klamath
farmers, who went without irrigation water last summer
for the sake of protected fish, argue that they are
shouldering undue responsibility for the dead fish and
for other ills that extend far beyond their fields.
“People are concerned at how focused the hostility has
been on us, when all the while a relatively clean and
cold Trinity River is sitting there and hardly a topic of
conversation,” said Michael Connelly, who farms and
ranches near Bonanza, Ore.
If last summer’s cutoff of irrigation water to Klamath
Project farmers exposed a river system stretched to the
limit, it stretches tighter still when the demands of
California, the nation’s thirstiest state, are figured
in.
“All of this is going to be a huge balancing problem,”
said Sue Ellen Wooldridge, a top aide to Interior
Secretary Gale Norton and the administration’s point
official on Klamath. “We didn’t get here in a day, and
we’ve got to bring it back over time without causing
major dislocations for people.”
Water is always part of conversation in such worn
California farm towns as Mendota, Huron and Tranquility.
They get their water from the massive Central Valley
Project, a billion-dollar federal irrigation works that
is a monument to western ambition. Without it the valley,
which gets scarcely 10 inches of rain a year, would be a
sun-baked plain.
The project begins in the north with the Trinity and
ends 400 miles south with the Westlands Water District,
the largest irrigation district in the nation.
Instead of rushing into the Klamath and west to the
ocean, the Trinity River collects behind Trinity Dam. The
dam reroutes as much as nine of every 10 gallons through
an 11-mile tunnel east out of the Klamath drainage and
into the Sacramento River. There it joins water from
other Northern California reservoirs and flows south
toward San Francisco Bay.
A gigantic pumping plant intercepts it in the
Sacramento Delta, slurping it up and into the
Delta-Mendota Canal. A second plant boosts more water
into the California Aqueduct on its way to Southern
California cities, including Los Angeles and San Diego.
The pumps operate only when incoming flows maintain the
water quality of the Delta.
The Delta-Mendota Canal carries water south to the
computer chip- makers of Silicon Valley and a series of
farming districts, concluding with Westlands.
“In fact, San Diego is connected to the Klamath River,
because Trinity water in the Delta also supports water
quality that makes it possible to get water to Southern
California,” says Tom Birmingham, the intense and
carefully spoken manager of Westlands. “Literally the
entire state of California is plumbed, from the north end
of the state to the south end, and every basin is
connected.”
At 605,000 acres, Westlands is bigger than Rhode
Island. For two months of the year, its prolific farms
produce nine of every 10 heads of lettuce in the nation.
Half the nation’s garlic grows here. And one of every
five tomatoes.
John Deere cotton pickers navigate fields deep into
the night, and warehouse-size cotton gins roar around the
clock, turning out more than 800 million-T-shirts worth
of downy, government- subsidized cotton.
All told, the district calculates that it is a $3.5
billion slice of the California economy. Its farmers must
repay their share of the Central Valley Project
construction costs, but most pay no interest – – a
benefit worth close to $1 billion, the U.S. General
Accounting Office found.
Farms in Fresno County, which encompasses most of
Westlands, boasted a higher net return than those in any
other U.S. county, according to the last Census of
Agriculture, completed in 1997. No other county held as
many farms with sales of more than $100,000.
Fresno County farms also topped the national list in
agricultural subsidies, taking in $17.5 million. That’s
roughly 20 times the subsidies that went to farms in
Oregon’s Klamath County, which encloses much of the
Klamath Project.
Westlands also wields serious political clout.
It has allies high in the Interior Department, which
oversees water policy. Birmingham is a famously tenacious
water attorney. The district has spent more than $500,000
to lobby Congress and the California Legislature since
1999, according to state and federal records.
And the district is still waiting for the government
to build it a congressionally mandated drainage system to
handle farm runoff laden with toxic salts and metals. An
initial attempt poisoned waterfowl in national wildlife
refuges, and any future system is likely to cost $1
billion or more.
The district has a contract with the federal
government for 1.15 million acre-feet of water annually,
more than twice what the Klamath Project uses.
But like the Klamath Project, Westlands has felt
squeezed by drought and water set-asides for endangered
species and other wildlife. It has not received full
water deliveries in more than a decade. In an average
year, its farms are likely to get about half what the
contract calls for, Birmingham says.
They make up the rest by purchasing water from other
farms and by idling cropland. Many have installed drip
irrigation lines to conserve water and turned to more
profitable crops, such as almonds and pistachios, to
cover the escalating price of federal water, which now
includes fees for environmental restoration.
But cotton remains by far the district’s largest crop,
although farmers concede they could never grow it without
government water subsidies.
Westlands has claimed water used by other farms. It’s
also pursuing a federal buyout and the retirement of
about 200,000 acres of cropland. That would free more
reliable water for remaining farms. In exchange, the
district would let the government off the hook for the
billion-dollar drainage system.
“Basically we’re having to pay more and more for less
and less water,” Westlands farmer Ted Sheely said.
“Anything that affects the balance of water we get
obviously is critical to our future.” Including new
demands on the Trinity and the Klamath.
About 20 percent of the Klamath drainage’s original
salmon habitat remains, and coho salmon numbers have
fallen as much as 95 percent. Private irrigation
diversions can turn small California tributaries such as
the Scott and Shasta into trickles.
In recent weeks, state biologists have reported salmon
forming schools where the Scott joins the Klamath because
there was too little water for them to swim up the
Scott.
In 1992, Congress ordered studies of Trinity fisheries
as part of an environmental overhaul of the Central
Valley Project. That led to a 2000 decision by then
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to send more water down
the Trinity for fish, leaving less for the Central Valley
and Westlands.
It especially jacked up spring flows to scour the
river and make it more hospitable to salmon. That could
leave Westlands with 20 percent less water and, added to
earlier cuts, would be “devastating,” Birmingham
said.
Westlands, other irrigation districts and a Sacramento
power company sued to block the Babbitt plan. They argued
that it went too far in redirecting water into the
Trinity and ignored how that might harm wildlife on the
Sacramento side.
A federal judge agreed. Until the lawsuit is resolved,
which could take years, the judge has barred the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation from pouring more water into the
Trinity if it would short Central Valley farms.
Although the Bush administration has sought to undo
many of former President Clinton’s environmental
initiatives, Wooldridge said officials see higher Trinity
River flows as an element of a healthier Klamath system.
That’s why it has joined Native American tribes and
fishermen in backing the Babbitt decision, she said.
“You don’t take 90 percent of the water out of a river
and think good things are going to happen over time,” she
said. “None of these systems stand alone. They all run
together, and the Trinity flows would obviously help the
lower Klamath.
You’ve got to get the fish recovered, or everyone’s
going to keep having these major problems.”
A new federal estimate puts the toll of last month’s
fish kill at 33,000, most of them chinook salmon but says
that number is conservative. Electronic tags on many
salmon showed that most of the dead were headed to the
Trinity to spawn.
The main Klamath was flowing lower than it did during
last summer’s drought because Klamath Project farmers
received a full water allotment this year.
Migrating fish crammed into the river’s mouth, where
warm water fueled deadly disease.
Farmers and the Bush administration say there is no
proof that irrigation diversions caused the fish die-off.
It remains unclear whether and how more water from the
upper end of the drainage, where the Klamath Project
stores water in Oregon’s shallow, warm Upper Klamath
Lake, would have relieved the die-off.
“To the extent it provided more room in the river for
the fish, it would have helped,” said James Lecky,
assistant regional administrator for the National Marine
Fisheries Service.
A study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last
year found that higher releases from Trinity Dam would
cool the Trinity River and counteract the warm Klamath
downstream, making the water safer for salmon. Amid the
die-off, state, federal and tribal biologists pleaded for
more water in both the Klamath and Trinity.
But Bush officials said the Westlands lawsuit over the
Trinity prohibited extra releases there, and instead sent
a two-week “pulse” of water down the Klamath. By the time
it arrived, fish numbers had dwindled and the die-off was
subsiding.
Mary Nichols, California’s resources secretary,
pointed to the Klamath Project in Oregon as the
convenient spigot. If not for low flows there, she said
in a letter to Norton, “this tragedy would likely have
been avoided.”
“The irony of that argument is that sending more hot
water from here is not going to fix it,” said Connelly,
the Klamath farmer. “But the powers that be aren’t
looking elsewhere for a solution because taking on
Westlands is not a politically expedient thing to
do.”
Michael Milstein:
503-294-7689;
michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com
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