On California’s Coast, Farewell to the King Salmon
For the first time there's no fishing for chinook salmon on the California coast. The search is on for why the prize catch is so scarce.

The salmon-boat cemetery in Fort Bragg, a fishing port tucked into shaggy pines about 150 miles north of San Francisco, is full of bleached and peeling hulls. Over the years many California vessels have landed in Bruce Abernathy's front yard, pitched at steep angles among the weeds, some still rigged with trolling poles. The Anita II, the Dag. Eventually Abernathy's son David takes them apart with a tractor and chain saw and sells what he can for parts. Sometimes all that's left is a scrap with a painted-on name: My Pet.

Bruce Abernathy himself doesn't watch the demolitions. He finds somewhere else to be, or he stays inside his house, with its many framed prints of trim little ships atop frisky seas. The fisherman turned resale man, and lately junk dealer, has "a lot of remorse" about what's happening outside his window beyond the hot pink rhododendron bush. "I know almost everybody who owned these boats," he said. "Boats become part of you, like a wife."

Thirty years ago there were several thousand salmon boats in California. More recently, as the fish became scarce, only a few hundred worked the coast. Then salmon populations crashed, and this year for the first time U.S. officials canceled all ocean salmon fishing off California and most of Oregon, and curtailed it off Washington, a $300 million loss. When I visited Fort Bragg, in late May, the harbor felt about as cheerful as a junkyard. The docks should have quaked with activity, but the mooring basin was quiet except for the hoarse bark of sea lions. The fishermen with the biggest boats hoped to go way out after tuna later in the season; others had already joined roadwork crews or cobbled together odd jobs. Disaster relief money would be on the way, but to many second- and third-generation fishermen, a summer without salmon felt like the end of the line. For the better part of a century the fish supported Fort Bragg, home of the World's Largest Salmon Barbeque, at which local politicians flip fillets on the grill and tourists come from far and wide to taste one of the most sought-after fish in the sea, the chinook salmon, a.k.a. the king.

The sudden decline of California's chinooks, most of which originate in the Sacramento River, has shaken scientists as well as fishermen. Typically several hundred thousand adult fish return from the sea to the river in the fall. Last autumn, only about 90,000 made it back, and fewer than 60,000 are expected this year, which would be the lowest number on record. "Usually when something like that happens, you can point to something dramatic, an oil spill, closing of hatcheries, an earthquake," said Donald McIsaac, executive director of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the regulatory group that advised U.S. officials to halt this year's salmon fishing. But no such catastrophe has been definitively linked to the shortage.

Salmon is the third most popular seafood in the United States, after shrimp and canned tuna, with about 600 million pounds consumed annually. Most of the fresh meat is Atlantic salmon raised in fish farms. California fishermen bring in about five million pounds of chinook meat in a good year. That's not terribly much, considering the national appetite, but king salmon is the largest and perhaps the choicest variety, owing to its deep reddish pink color (a result of its krill-heavy diet), high omega-3 fatty acid content and rich flavor. It is the stuff of white tablecloth restaurants and fancy markets, not salmon burgers. ("You would never put king salmon in a can," one fish market analyst told me.)

What's more, local chinook, chrome-colored and strong enough to charge up waterfalls, are revered as a symbol. We savor the salmon's story almost as much as its flesh—its epic slog from birth stream to sea and back again, its significance to Native Americans, who saw the fish as a dietary staple and a religious talisman. Salmon still retain something of that spiritual power. Called the "soul food of the North Pacific," king salmon is the flavor of healthy rivers and thriving coastlines. It is a pepper-crusted or pesto-smeared communion with nature, gustatory proof that in a region where cities are sprawling, wildness still waits below the surface—if you will only cast your fly and find it.

There are about a half-dozen salmon species worldwide, and populations are further defined by their rivers of origin and migration seasons. Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) are found from California's Ventura River to Kotzebue Sound in Alaska to Russia's Andyr River and northern Japan. The species whose sudden disappearance has been in the news, prompting Congressional hearings this past spring, is the fall-run Sacramento River chinook, named for the river to which mature fish return to spawn and the season in which they do so. (The Sacramento River also supports much smaller winter and spring runs, which are classified as endangered and threatened, respectively, and a late-fall run.) After eggs are laid in autumn, young salmon emerge from their gravel nests as early as Christmastime, swimming south a few weeks later. They slink seaward mostly at night to avoid predators, lingering in brackish estuaries to gather strength. As they near the ocean, their bodies change. Their renal systems adapt to salt water. They lose black bars on their sides and gradually assume the silvery color—with a scattering of black spots—that thrills fishermen. "God, they're beautiful," exulted Dave Bitts, of McKinleyville, California, a commercial fisherman for more than 30 years. "That's what a fish is supposed to look like—the whole shape of them, the power of the back, the thickness of the tail."

The fish typically stay at sea three years, ranging thousands of miles in the Pacific and gaining 90 percent of their body mass (between 10 to 50 pounds, though the largest weigh more than 100). Then they head for home, tracing the smell of minerals and organic materials to find their natal streams. It is a brutal journey. The fish stop eating once they hit fresh water, and their bodies begin to deteriorate even as they ascend rapids (the word "salmon" comes from the Latin salir, to leap). Ready-to-mate males flush crimson and grow tough-guy hooked jaws for fighting; females search for gravel for a nest. Soon after laying and fertilizing eggs, the exhausted adults die. But the life cycle doesn't stop there. The kings' spawned-out carcasses nourish not only the baby salmon that will take their place but also living things up and down the food chain, stimulating whole ecosystems. Salmon-rich streams support faster-growing trees and attract apex predators like bears and eagles. In certain California vineyards, compounds traceable to salmon can be found in zinfandel grapes.

This is the elegant narrative that people in the West are fighting to preserve, a tale of determination and natural destiny that somehow touches even those of us who don't live there. And yet this ideal of wild salmon is increasingly an illusion.

Coleman National Fish Hatchery, Anderson, California, 4 a.m.: Had it been light, I could have seen the edge of the Cascade Range, which includes Mount Shasta, the Sacramento River's source. But I couldn't make out the hatchery's outbuildings, or anything much beyond a series of long concrete pools, or raceways, illuminated by floodlights.

It dawned on me that the gray current shifting and flickering below the surface of Raceway 5 was actually hundreds of thousands of three-inch-long fall-run chinooks. A hatchery worker scooped up a couple: squiggles with woeful expressions, they were barely princelings, never mind kings. But every so often one would snap itself suddenly out of the big pond, a hint of the athleticism that would one day launch it upstream.

We were there because the hatchery was taking a historic step. Usually, the federal facility—at the northern end of California's Central Valley—releases the juveniles out its back door into Battle Creek, which feeds into the Sacramento River six miles downstream. This year, though, natural resource managers had decided to load 1.4 million fish, about a tenth of Coleman's total stock, into trucks and drive them roughly 200 miles south to San Pablo Bay, above San Francisco Bay, bypassing the entire river, a tactic that state hatcheries have been using for years. I had already been startled to learn that between 50 percent and 90 percent of the Sacramento River's "wild" fall-run chinooks are actually born in hatcheries, which were created to compensate for the loss of spawning grounds to dams. Every autumn, hatchery workers trap returning adults before they spawn and strip them of sperm and eggs. The offspring are incubated in trays and fed pellets. Now this latest batch would not even have to swim down the river.

The shipment was an effort to rekindle future fishing seasons, Scott Hamelberg, the hatchery manager, said: "If you truck a fish from Coleman and bypass certain areas where mortality can happen, you may improve survival. You take out hundreds of miles of avoiding predators, water diversions, pollution, any number of things."

We spoke in his office, which held a shrine to Popeye, a cat who must have enjoyed an extremely happy tenure at the hatchery. Despite the low numbers of returning Sacramento salmon this year, Coleman planned to go ahead with its annual Return of the Salmon Festival in the third week of October, where in years past schoolchildren have shrieked over the chinooks jamming the creek.

Outside, a worker standing waist-deep in the raceway crowded the fish toward a hydraulic pump, using a broom to goad stragglers. Their shadowy forms shot up a transparent tube and into a tank on a waiting truck. In a few hours they would be piped into net pens in the bay, then hauled by boat farther out and released to swim out to sea. Some scientists say the hatchery fish are less physically fit than their wild brethren, with a swimming-pool mentality that does not serve them well in the ocean. And yet in years past, many survived to maturity simply because they were introduced in such overwhelming numbers. Some wildlife experts speculate that the hatchery-born fish may even be weakening wild populations they were meant to bolster by competing with the river-born fish for food and space, and heading home with them to breed, altering the gene pool.

The trucked fish won't know where home is, exactly. Many will likely never find their way back to Battle Creek, not having swum down the river in the first place. These strays might spawn successfully elsewhere, but without that initial migration it might seem that some essential quality of salmon-ness is lost.

If this is the price of keeping the species going, so be it, said Hamelberg, who wears a wedding band etched with tiny salmon. "There's a greater public good here," he told me. "We're providing fish to the American public to eat, and also for aesthetic reasons—just for people to know they're in the system, that they returned. Our obligation is to keep these runs as sound as possible."

The hatchery workers looked weary as the trucks pulled away. As it turns out, chauffeuring tons of pinkie-length fish hundreds of miles is trickier than it sounds. During shipping the day before, the circulation system in one of the trucks stopped working, and 75,000 chinooks died.

Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest used to think salmon were immortal, and it's easy to see why. Even though the rivers hosted spectacular mass death scenes every year and were filled for weeks with rotting bodies, the next season's fish always mobbed the gravel beds. To safeguard this cycle, tribes were careful to place the bones of the season's first catch back in the river.

But the California and Pacific Northwest salmon populations have been declining for more than a century and a half. Gold miners washed the gravel out of streams and loggers dismembered river habitats. Fishermen caught so many salmon that the canneries couldn't keep up; barge loads were dumped back into the sea, and salmon carcasses were used to feed hogs and fertilize fields. Today, the Columbia River supports at most 3 percent of the salmon it boasted when Lewis and Clark passed through. The Klamath River, which starts in southern Oregon, has suffered major salmon kills. Some Pacific salmon varieties may share the fate of their East Coast cousins, the wild Atlantic salmon, which were killed off in huge numbers in the 19th century by overfishing, pollution and dams and are today nearly extinct in the wild.

By now, Sacramento chinooks have lost an estimated 70 percent of their original spawning habitat in central California. Dams did the most damage, drying up riverbeds and cutting off access to mountain spawning streams. Shasta Dam, completed in 1945, is the nation's second largest, far too big for the fish ladders that in some places help salmon reach their spawning grounds. Some populations barely survived. There are plenty of complaints against hatcheries—the main one is that artificially producing millions of fish masks deep ecological problems—but without the hatcheries, the Sacramento run could hardly have rebounded from industrialization the way it did. The fall run, probably numbering about a million at its peak, was until very recently holding steady at a quarter or more of that level, enough to keep the West Coast salmon industry afloat.

Then came this summer's calamity. The official list of possible causes is more than 40 items long, ranging from bridge construction in migration areas to a surging population of Humboldt squid, grabby predators that may or may not have a taste for chinook. Scientists are looking back to 2005, when the fish that should be returning to the river now would have been sea-bound juveniles, small and vulnerable. There were poor ocean conditions off the West Coast that spring. A shift in weather patterns—possibly related to global warming—delayed the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water that supports the base of the marine food chain. As a result, "everything that was expecting something to eat in May died," including juvenile salmon, said Bill Peterson, a fisheries oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Other experts cite freshwater dangers, since fish weakened by a stressful trip downstream are less likely to survive in a hostile ocean. This is a politically loaded argument: many of those stresses, from pollution to introduced species, are man-made. "Protecting this icon means protecting the watershed, from where these things spawn in the mountains down to the ocean," said Jon Rosenfield, an aquatic conservation ecologist based in Berkeley, California. "If you operate the rivers in the way that's best for agriculture, that's not necessarily how the water would be operating on its own."

In addition to being the most populous state, California is the most productive agriculturally. But much of its farmland, and more than 75 percent of its population, lie south of Sacramento, while three-quarters of the precipitation falls north of it. Huge dams, the Shasta chief among them, hoard water that's released downstream on demand and pumped to the Central Valley and Los Angeles. The arrangement works out for millions of people but not always for the fish, which can get disoriented in artificial flows created by water diversions and never make it to the sea.

Such problems are expensive to fix and the solutions can mean water shortages, especially for farmers, which heighten the conflict between interest groups. "The environmental community exploits the problems in nature and ignores human problems," said Jason Peltier, deputy manager of the sprawling Westlands Water District, which supplies hundreds of farms in the Central Valley. "That's their agenda. I can't understand how they get away with it. I can't understand how [the groups] push a fish-and-nature-first agenda at the expense of human socioeconomic conditions."

Over the past decade or so changes have been made to California's intricate plumbing to give salmon safer passage. Shasta Dam was retrofitted, at a cost of roughly $80 million, with a device that draws from the very bottom of its reservoir, supplying downstream areas with more of the cool water that spawning salmon require. In addition, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent otherwise improving Sacramento River habitat.

But it's doubtful that any amount of effort or money can restore the salmon's world. I didn't fully understand this until I visited the most altered ecosystem of all, the one environmentalists are most likely to lament when discussing the king. It's where ocean and river meet: the vast and troubled estuary at the Sacramento's mouth, through which almost all the river's wild-born salmon pass en route to the Pacific. The former 400,000-acre tidal marsh is California's main water hub, a place both tamed beyond recognition and perilous for salmon in new ways, full of obstacles far more challenging than mere rapids.

Just east of San Francisco Bay, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta stretches 50 miles south of Sacramento and some 25 miles west. Part of the largest estuary on North America's Pacific Coast, the delta was once a marshy haven of cattails and bulrushes. Juvenile salmon from both the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers (which converge in the delta) used it as a kind of staging ground, tarrying in its shallows before going out to sea.

But 150 years and 1,100 miles of man-made levees later, the wetlands have been transformed. During the gold rush, they were drained and converted into a web of farming islands with winding channels in between. Ninety-five percent of the original marsh is gone, and what remains is the epitome of an artificial landscape, so squarely under civilization's thumb that it's almost impossible to imagine it otherwise. The islands—many of them ten feet or more below sea level due to soil decomposition—are a patchwork of crops and alien species: palm trees, European sycamores, Himalayan blackberry bushes, spindly grapevines propped up on sticks, extensive plantings of Bartlett pear trees and fields of lawn turf as green and smooth as a pool table. At times the air suddenly smells of licorice—wild fennel, another invasive species. Go around a levy bend and there might be a beached World War II landing craft used by a local duck-hunting club, a sign for brand-new mansion developments "Coming Soon" or the pink explosion of a garden-variety rosebush.

The waterways surrounding these islands are about as hospitable to salmon as drainage ditches. The remaining marshland teems with nonnative species, many of them ravenous stowaways from the cargo ships of nearby San Francisco Bay. Brazilian waterweed, an aquarium favorite, clogs the sloughs and retains sediments, making the water clearer and juvenile fish easier to spot: predators like largemouth bass—introduced as a sport fish more than a century ago—lie in wait. Upriver farms release potentially poisonous pesticides and herbicides. Wastewater from the Sacramento area, with its ballooning population, also seeps into the delta, and scientists are increasingly suspicious that ammonia from human sewage interrupts the seasonal cycle of phytoplankton blooms at the base of the food chain.

And then there are the pumps. Naturally brackish, the delta is now managed as a freshwater system, because fresh water is what's needed to fill bathtubs and irrigate fields and quench the thirst of Californians, about 25 million of whom rely on the delta for at least some of their water. Mammoth federal and state pumps in the delta's southern end, near the city of Tracy, slurp up roughly half of the Sacramento's flow and send it to Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and beyond. When the federal pumps are going full blast, six 22,500-horsepower motors pull water through pipes 15 feet in diameter, raising the flow into a canal that helps irrigate the middle of California's Central Valley. (The state pumps are even bigger.)

The pumps are powerful enough to alter the currents miles away, confusing migrating salmon. Often, salmon are siphoned along with the water. More than half of these are salvaged near the pumps at fish-collection facilities, where the buckets are checked every two hours, the operators pawing through seaweed to find the tiny fish, which are then loaded into trucks and driven back to the delta. But the smallest chinooks can slip through; in past years tens of thousands have died. In 2005, that fateful year for this season's salmon, the pumps exported record amounts of water from the delta.

"The higher the export rate, the more fish are lost," said Tina Swanson, a biologist and head of the Bay Institute, an advocacy group that monitors San Francisco Bay and the delta. "Even small increases can lead to disproportionately high losses."

Constructed mostly in the middle of the last century, the pumps are relics of a time when fish populations were not much valued or understood. Lately California's attitude has changed. When I visited the federal pumps, they were churning much more slowly than usual because of a court order to protect a threatened fish called the delta smelt. Already, farmers to the south were not getting water they'd asked for. They were also nervous about another lawsuit, filed by a coalition of environmentalists, fishing associations and Native Americans on behalf of the Sacramento's winter-run chinook and other salmon species. Among other things, the plaintiffs want more reliable cold releases from the Shasta reservoir, which could limit flows to the pumps.

"I can't be without [that] water," said Daniel Errotabere, co-owner of Errotabere Ranch, which grows some 5,600 acres of almonds, lettuce and other crops with the help of delta flows. This summer the farm got just 40 percent of the water it had ordered from the pumps. "We're not wasting anything. All our crops are pretty much spoonfed. I can't do any more than I'm doing, unless there's a way to find a crop that doesn't need water."

My guide to the fantastical Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta was Peter Moyle, of the University of California at Davis, an estuary and fish expert who made room on his research boat to show me a bit of what the delta is and used to be. I wanted to see some wild baby salmon, which he said was not likely, since it was late in a dry spring. I felt sure he would be relieved to see some too. When I picked him up in Davis, there were salmon prayer flags fluttering in front of his house.

Moyle has spent much of the past 30 years in the grayish-brown marsh mud on the outskirts of the delta, and he's the authority on local fish—the California roach, the Sacramento sucker, the tule perch—much less glamorous than salmon. He's the go-to person on the delta smelt, a homely little fish that smells like cucumber and faces many of the same challenges as the chinook.

Moyle's rickety aluminum research vessel, The Marsh Boat, was crewed by two graduate students. We pulled on waders and life vests and then bounced off into a stiff north wind, which made the tall grasses on the shore roll like waves. We were surveying fish populations on the outskirts of the delta in the Suisun Marsh, which has not been tampered with as much as adjoining areas and is reminiscent of what the whole place might have looked like before the gold rush: an expanse of bulrushes and brownish water, with snowy egrets stalking the perimeter and white pelicans flapping overhead. It was almost possible to ignore the bellow of an Amtrak train bound for San Francisco and the jets landing at nearby Travis Air Force Base.

The boat stopped by a muddy beach, depositing Moyle, me and a graduate student studying invasive jellyfish from the Caspian Sea. The other student roared off in hot pursuit of zooplankton. We walked the shore, with the professor periodically plunging into the water to drag a net. "If you were a baby salmon, this is exactly where you'd want to be," said Moyle, his bifocal sunglasses glinting as he eyed a particularly inviting stand of bulrushes. "This would have been full of food, full of cover. You could have escaped your predators and there were strong enough currents that you could find your way out to sea."

Nearly everyone's unhappy with the delta as it is today. Some say that rising sea levels and earthquakes threaten its structure, and since Hurricane Katrina there have been calls to armor the levees to maintain the delta as a freshwater system. Others advocate reducing water exports from the delta, doing away with the levees and unleashing the river to become brackish again in places and flow where it will.

The plan that has lately gained the backing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger involves digging a canal upstream of the delta that would send fresh Sacramento water straight to the pumps. With the help of fish screens, the salmon would stay in the main river and continue their migration without the threat of artificial currents. "Separate the water for people from the water for fish," said Timothy Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. "Manage each for their own purposes." Quinn says healthy fish populations and a reliable water supply aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, he takes his grandkids every year to see the spawning in Butte Creek, a Sacramento River tributary. "I don't want them growing up in a state where they'll sacrifice fish to get cheap water," he said.

But the peripheral canal, as it's called, is so controversial it's known as the "third rail" of California politics, and voters have nixed it before. Building it would take more than a decade and cost billions, and California will need to figure out how to accommodate another eight million thirsty residents by 2025. Still, academics from different disciplines have begun to agree that the canal may be the only way. "The devil's in the details, though," Moyle said. "No matter what you do, it's going to be complicated—and expensive."

Our nets yielded plenty of fish that morning on the marsh, many of them nonnative: baby carp, yellowfin goby and inland silversides, transparent little fish with a stripe like thermometer mercury. Moyle held flapping palmfuls as he measured them one by one, then tossed them back into the water. He had been right: we saw no young salmon.

To fishermen, the chinook is known as a fighter, and likewise its advocates won't let the fish die out without a struggle. People desperately want to save wild salmon. "DEMAND Wild Californian King Salmon" stickers adorn car bumpers, and products like Butte Creek Brewing's Spring Run Organic Pale Ale benefit the kings. A SalmonAid concert stirred up support in Oakland this past spring, and an advocacy group for Columbia and Snake River salmon hauled a 25-foot fiberglass chinook from Seattle to Washington, D.C., stopping at schools and farmer's markets along the way. Another lawsuit to ensure the wild salmon's safe passage continues to wind its way through the courts.

Even as the crisis deepens, the nation's appetite for salmon grows, thanks largely to the farmed variety. In 1980, almost none of our fresh salmon meat came from fish farms; now three-quarters of it does. Corporations in Norway, Canada and Chile run many of the farms, and most of the fish are Atlantic salmon. Raised in offshore pens, removed entirely from rivers, they eat formulated pellets instead of krill, so their flesh is naturally gray. Aquaculturists feed the fish color additives to make the flesh pink, fine-tuning the hue with the help of a color wheel called the SalmoFan. As a result inexpensive salmon meat is now sold practically everywhere, including Wal-Mart—an abundance that obscures the wild salmon's plight.

Salmon fishing in California and Oregon will probably have to be limited for a few years, to allow stocks to recover. Among those who continue to have faith in the king's return is 26-year-old Cyrus Maahs, a fourth-generation Fort Bragg salmon fisherman. He grew up trolling with his grandfather, Sonny Maahs, who helped found the town's annual salmon cook-off 37 years ago, when the rivers still thrashed with fish and the sea was full of them. Cyrus' father, Mike, put himself through college on salmon money and died at sea in a storm; his name is on the fishermen's memorial in the harbor, beside the charred concrete barbecue pits.

Cyrus believes he has inherited the family instinct to clear the jetty in a thick fog, to pick the perfect psychedelic-colored salmon lure. I asked him if he ever considered a more stable line of work—serving Fort Bragg's burgeoning tourist trade, perhaps, or leading whale-watching trips. "I'd much rather be out there fishing, and have a job with freedom to it," he said. "Once you get a taste of that, it's hard to give up."

The family boat, Kromoli, spent most of the summer at anchor with much of the rest of the town's fleet. Some fishermen contemplated putting their boats up for sale, on the off chance someone would buy them. And yet, even in Fort Bragg, the myth of a bountiful fishery persists. Visitors to this July's World's Largest Salmon Barbeque did not go hungry, for instance. They were served coho salmon flown in from Alaska.#

Sea turtles are back, noshing on jellyfish

Endangered leatherback sea turtles, unseen off the central California coast only two years ago, have returned and are once again gobbling their favorite food: huge jellyfish that are swarming by the zillions from Monterey Bay to Point Arena.

The leatherbacks were spotted during a monthlong survey cruise aboard a government research vessel and repeated aircraft observations. Researchers said they were seen diving for meals close to shore and snacking now and then in deeper waters much farther out.

"We're getting a better understanding of the leatherbacks and their coastal habitat here after several years when the population was much lower than usual - and after we observed none at all in 2006," said Scott Benson, chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's leatherback survey mission based in Monterey County at Moss Landing.

Benson led teams of specialists aboard the NOAA research ship David Starr Jordan that carried sonar gear to scan for the jellyfish while crew members tagged the leatherbacks with temporary tracking devices - simple devices attached to their shells with suction cups - to record their enigmatic diving and feeding behavior.

The rare and little-known leatherbacks have been around during 100 million years of evolution, and their migration patterns are amazing: They nest and lay their eggs in the sandy beaches of Indonesia and the Solomon Islands, then swim 7,000 miles across the Pacific to their feeding grounds along the California coast. But in the past 25 years, more than 90 percent of the leatherback population has vanished, Benson said.

The abrupt decrease is largely because of egg-hunters raiding their nests, commercial long-line fisheries whose hooks can ensnare the turtles as "bycatch," and most recently the erosion of many nesting beaches because of small rises in the sea level caused by global warming, said Michael Milne of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, an environmental group based in Marin County.

The huge abundance of jellyfish (Chrysaora fuscescens), commonly known as sea nettles, is apparently caused by increased upwelling of nutrients like krill and plankton from just above the sea floor this year, Benson said.

Spotters aboard the NOAA Twin Otter aircraft found six leatherbacks "surrounded by miles of jellyfish" - along with humpback whales and large ocean sunfish - off the San Mateo County coast and in the midst of regular cargo shipping lanes leading to and from the Golden Gate. In one case, a leatherback was observed swimming among the jellyfish only 5 miles west of Benson's home in Moss Landing, he said.

Another leatherback that was equipped with a more permanent satellite tag a year ago had returned to the same area this year, apparently after spending the winter a few hundred miles south of Hawaii along what Benson called "Jelly Lane."

During one segment of the cruise off Pescadero, the mission's trawling team of jellyfish specialists encountered huge hauls of the creatures, including one weighing 24 pounds with a bell 21 inches across and tentacles "taller than any of our scientists," the team reported.

Hungry as they are, leatherbacks don't eat the jellyfish's transparent globular bells - it's the viciously stinging tentacles they love, and Benson and his colleagues found themselves "covered with stinging jellyfish slime" whenever they hauled any of the turtles aboard, he said.

Although the survey found most of the leatherbacks feeding amidst the jellyfish no more than 30 miles from shore, the ship did venture as far out as 150 miles, and even there, Benson said, the turtles were feeding amid an abundance of jellyfish.

Eddies of cold and warm water there attracted the jellyfish, Benson said, "and it made the area a fast food stopover for the turtles - a good place for a quick snack on the way in toward the coast after that 7,000-mile swim." #

Calif. tribe fears losing land if dam is raised

Associated Press – 9/23/08
By SAMANTHA YOUNG, AP

SHASTA LAKE, Calif. (AP) — The federal government is considering enlarging a dam to boost the state's water supply, which would flood what little land remains above water where a Native American tribe has fished and farmed for centuries.

Nine-tenths of the ancestral land of the Winnemen Wintu was submerged in 1945, when the federal government built a 602-foot dam downstream of their ceremonial and prayer grounds.

Now the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is considering enlarging Shasta Dam, flooding the remaining 22 miles of rocky, steep canyon shoreline, including two sacred rocks involved in coming-of-age rituals.

"These sacred places help keep the tribe healthy. They help keep it balanced and they help us to heal," said tribal chief Caleen Sisk-Franco. "There is no replacement. There's not an option to move it."

The desire by the few remaining tribal members to preserve the remnants of their homeland is running headlong into the desires of Central Valley farmers, the main beneficiaries of the federal proposal to enlarge Lake Shasta.

When it was filled to capacity, the lake flooded 46 square miles where tribal leaders say some 20,000 Winnemen Wintu once lived along the McCloud River. Their numbers fell to 395 at the turn of the century, with thousands massacred by western settlers and ravaged by disease during the Gold Rush. Today, the tribe counts 122 enrolled members, about a fifth of whom live in a makeshift village of trailers and a house on 42 acres of private land a few miles from the McCloud River, some 225 miles north of San Francisco.

Lake Shasta is the starting point for the federally run Central Valley Project, a system of 21 reservoirs, canals and aqueducts that funnel water to some 3.2 million acres of farmland and supplies water to about 2 million people.

Supporters say an enlarged lake is needed to meet the needs of California's growing population. The larger reservoir also would be able to store more cold water, which is needed to help the salmon that used to migrate to cooler waters upstream before the dam blocked their path, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The bureau is studying whether to raise the dam between 6 1/2 and 18 1/2 feet, which would enlarge the reservoir by more than a tenth of its current size. That's enough water to serve the city of Los Angeles for more than year.

"What's so potentially promising about raising Shasta Dam, all things considered, is an opportunity to provide more storage at a facility that's already in place," said Ron Ganzfried, a supervisor in the Bureau of Reclamation's regional planning division.

A higher dam also would provide more hydropower, flood protection along the upper Sacramento River and combat future water shortages expected to come with climate change, according to a recent bureau report.

Although the price tag is steep — with preliminary costs ranging from $531.3 million to $854.9 million — it's far less than the cost of building a new dam. For example, the state estimates it could cost $3.6 billion to build a reservoir in a valley north of Sacramento that would store roughly the same amount of water as would be added behind a taller Shasta dam.

That makes it an attractive solution for California's farmers and municipal water agencies whose water supplies have dwindled after two dry winters and a federal court order that greatly reduced water diversions to protect threatened delta fish.

But conservation groups are concerned that swelling of the lower portion of the McCloud River would ruin one of the state's prized trout streams. They also question whether the additional cold water that would be stored behind a higher Shasta Dam would be saved and released for migrating salmon, as government officials claim.

Instead, environmental groups favor building bypasses for salmon to get them around the dam and into the McCloud River. They also advocate paying farmers and other users to increase water conservation efforts.

"We need to come up with permanent solutions that will increase flexibility and provide what we need for the salmon rather than reinvesting in the very projects that caused the problem," said Mindy McIntyre, a water specialist at the nonprofit Planning and Conservation League.

Federal officials say environmental organizations and the Winnemen Wintu tribe will be consulted as plans move forward over the next few years, but how much sway the tribe — which is not a federally recognized tribe — will have to block the dam project is questionable. Congress must still authorize and fund the project.

Although the tribe is small in number, its ties to the area remain central to preserving its heritage. The rocky shoreline along the McCloud River is where tribal members come at least once a year to celebrate the womanhood of their teenage girls. Medicinal plants are ground on a special rock and traditional prayers are offered.

Across the river, toddlers are introduced to another rock where tribal elders tell their ancestral stories. Both cultural spots could be swamped by the rising waters if Shasta Dam is raised. #

Acidification harming sea, expert says
Scientists say impact on oceans could be extensive

Scientists first believed that because the ocean absorbs about a quarter of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it was a good way to soften the blow from global warming.

But science is now showing that just like the air, the ocean can be greatly affected by global warming, and perhaps even more in the Santa Barbara Channel than other places around the globe.

"We now realize it has serious consequences for our ocean," said Richard Feely, a chemical oceanographer who was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which along with Al Gore, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. "It certainly is a problem that has come up quickly over time, but people are beginning to make the connection now."

Feely spoke Friday in Santa Barbara to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council, which voted to start researching, monitoring and educating on the impacts of ocean acidification.

Data show that over the last 50 years, as the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased, so did the level of acidity in the oceans, Feely said. The highest concentrations of the acidic water are in the upper level of the water columns, where the majority of the ocean's species live.

If nothing is done to curb the amount of carbon dioxide that humans produce — by burning fossil fuels for energy — the impact on the ocean could be vast, he said.

Studies show that a higher acidity level in the ocean affects creatures that have shells — lobster, sea urchins, clams — and can lead to them producing weaker, thinner shells as well as hurt their ability to reproduce.

Aside from the obvious impact on fisheries — the California sea urchin fishery, densely concentrated in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, is valued at about $20 million annually — the effects could travel up the food chain.

Salmon, for example, mainly feed on small snails during the wintertime. If the snails are affected, the impact could reach salmon, too, he said. About 20 percent of the protein that people consume worldwide comes from the ocean.

A bill is before the Senate to form a national panel to study ocean acidification.

"This is an issue that represents food resources for a billion people or more," Feely said.

The waters off Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, where a process called "upwelling" brings water from the depths of the sea to the top, could be more affected than other areas because that process would elevate more acidic water to the sea's top layer.

Gretchen Hofmann, a professor at UC Santa Barbara who has been studying the impacts of acidification on purple urchins, said early studies don't paint a good picture.

She has done laboratory research testing how purple urchins would fare even if carbon dioxide emissions were reduced through the use of better technology. Even under that scenario, the urchins' growth and functions were greatly impacted, she said.

However, she said it's possible that other species will learn to be resilient to the change and adapt. Others could just switch feeding habitats or environments.

"I don't think we'll have everything collapse, but this will be difficult," she told the Sanctuary Advisory Council.

Bruce Steele, a Santa Barbara sea urchin diver, said the impacts on urchins are just the start. If global warming continues unchecked, he said, there will a lot more to be concerned with than how one fishery does.

"The cumulative effect of the decisions of the way we live our lives are going to have ramifications for multiple lifetimes on this planet," he said.#

Bill tries to exempt Delta pumps from Endangered Species Act

Sacramento Bee – 9/18/08
By Michael Doyle

WASHINGTON – Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, wants to suspend one of the nation's premier environmental laws in order to increase water pumping out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In a long-shot bill being introduced today, Radanovich proposes to exempt two Delta-area pumping plants from the Endangered Species Act during designated droughts. Farmers would gain irrigation water – essentially, at the expense of fish.

"This is all about preparation," Radanovich said Wednesday. "It gives (us) a means to turn the pumps on and store up water."

If enacted, Radanovich's bill would dramatically shift the flow of water during times of drought. It effectively would override a Fresno-based federal judge's decisions designed to protect species, including the Delta smelt.

Realistically, the new bill is unlikely to be enacted any time soon.

"I will support George's effort, but I don't think it has much chance of passage," said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Atwater. "The reality is, I don't think it will have much hope."

Many impediments stand in the way. Time is one of them, as Congress is set to adjourn in less than two weeks. Substantively, the bill excites the opposition of environmentalists – including close allies of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. Congress has generally been loath to carve such specific exemptions into the 35-year-old Endangered Species Act.

Even so, the bill might serve some other purposes. There are many diverse motives behind the 2,550-plus measures introduced in the House since January. Some are designed to change the law. Others send a signal, strike a pose or frame a debate.

"It's going to be a tough thing," Radanovich acknowledged, "but I want all the legislators on record." He added that "we're not just sending a message."

The bill includes language authorizing a Delta smelt hatchery program designed to help the troubled species, and is also being co-sponsored by Cardoza and Reps. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, and Jim Costa, D-Fresno.

The Endangered Species Act protects more than 300 California plants and animals designated as threatened or endangered.

Sometimes, these protections can come at a steep cost.

Last December, U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger imposed new rules on state and federal pumping plants in order to protect the threatened Delta smelt.

The restrictions on the federal C.W. "Bill" Jones Pumping Plant and the state Harvey O. Banks Pumping Plant near Tracy could cut water deliveries south of the Delta by up to 30 percent.

Radanovich's five-page bill exempts the two pumping plants from the usual ban on wounding or killing a protected species once the governor and the Interior Department have declared a drought emergency.

Cardoza recalled previous failed efforts to rewrite the Endangered Species Act, some led by the former chairman of the House Resources Committee, Richard Pombo, R-Tracy. Pombo tried to rewrite the law for 14 years, during 12 of which his fellow Republicans controlled the House.

But even during the four years he chaired the House Resources Committee, Pombo could not move his bill over the finish line.

Pombo's efforts, in turn, earned the enmity of environmental groups that spent millions of dollars to help oust him in 2006.#

Government says salmon disaster money on its way

Associated Press – 9/18/08
By MATTHEW DALY – AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration on Wednesday released $100 million in disaster relief to West Coast salmon fishermen, $70 million less than the amount Congress approved to help those hurt by the sudden collapse of the Pacific Coast salmon fishing industry.

The salmon collapse left thousands of fishermen and dependent businesses struggling to make ends meet, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said, adding that the disaster aid package will help them get back on their feet.

Of the initial $100 million, about $63 million will go to California, $25 million to Oregon and $12 million to Washington state, officials said. The breakdown is based on the projected economic impacts of the fishing shutdown in each state.

The failure stemmed from the sudden collapse of the chinook salmon run in California's Sacramento River, where the salmon return to spawn. Scientists are studying the causes of the collapse, with possible factors ranging from ocean conditions and habitat destruction to dam operations and agricultural pollution.

Salmon advocates and congressional Democrats complained that the Bush administration was shortchanging fishermen in the three states by $70 million. Congress approved $170 million in disaster relief as part of a recent farm bill.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., accused the Bush administration of "trying to steal money from salmon fishermen to give it to an incompetent defense contractor" that is overseeing the 2010 Census.

The Bush administration announced in June that it wants to divert $70 million from the salmon relief fund to help pay for higher-than-expected costs of the conducting the census. The Commerce Department oversees the Census Bureau and NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for salmon recovery and planning.

Bob Lohn, northwest administrator of NOAA Fisheries, said the salmon money was not being diverted, but merely delayed until the new budget year begins in October.

Over the next few months, the remaining money will be made available to fishermen as they apply for assistance, Lohn said. He denied that the administration was engaged in any accounting tricks or attempts to shortchange fishermen.

"Will the money be there when the people apply for it? The answer is yes," he told reporters on a conference call Wednesday.

A total of 4,229 applications for assistance have been sent out to ocean fishermen, processors, wholesalers and charter boat owners in the three states, said Randy Fisher, executive director of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, which is administering the salmon payments.

Roughly half the requests for assistance are in California, one-third from Oregon and about 15 percent from Washington, Fisher said.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., said fishermen up and down the West Coast "have been economically harmed. They were caught in a disaster, Congress responded and the Bush administration has once again failed the American public." #

Cold water rings dinner bell for West Coast salmon

The Associated Press – 9/10/08
By JEFF BARNARD

A federal oceanographer says a flip-flop in atmospheric conditions is creating a feast for salmon and other sea life off the West Coast, reversing a trend that contributed to a virtual shutdown of West Coast salmon fishing this summer.

Bill Peterson of NOAA Fisheries in Newport, Ore., said Tuesday the change in cycle of an atmospheric condition known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation last fall has brought cold water flows from the Gulf of Alaska, which are carrying an abundance of tiny animals known as copepods that are the foundation of the food chain.

It's unknown how long the good times will last, but Peterson said ocean surveys of chinook salmon in June found lots of yearling juveniles, which should grow up to be plentiful stocks of adults by 2010. Coho surveys start in a couple weeks.

Peterson said last spring that he expected the rebound, and the confirmation of his expectations were reported by The Oregonian.

While the cycle used to last as long as 20 years, it has lately taken about four years for conditions to change; but no one knows for sure what the future will bring, Peterson added.

Ed Bowles, fisheries chief for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, said salmon that spend most of their time in the ocean close to the coast, such as fall chinook, coho and Willamette River spring chinook, should reap the greatest benefits, but crab, ling cod, rockfish, sea birds and other ocean life are rebounding as well.

Bowles was cautious in his assessment.

"Overall, we are seeing more years of poor ocean conditions than we are good," he said. "This is a welcome respite in what more typically has been discouraging news."

Bowles added that Columbia River salmon have also benefited from court-ordered increases in the water spilled over hydroelectric dams, which speeds their migration downriver to the ocean and increases the number that survive.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched last November, developing into the most favorable conditions for West Coast fisheries since 1999, which was the gateway to several good years for fish, Peterson said.

The boost in copepods meant more food for baitfish, such as sand lance and smelt, which are food for larger fish such as salmon.

That changed in 2005, when starvation conditions developed for young salmon migrating from their native streams to the ocean.

Three years later, there were so few adults that federal authorities practically shut down commercial and sport fishing off Oregon, Washington and California.

Federal authorities are investigating a variety of factors that could have contributed to the collapse of salmon returns from British Columbia to California.

One of the leading suspects is irrigation withdrawals from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California. Salmon from the Sacramento River saw some of the sharpest declines, and a federal judge is working to reduce the harm on young salmon from irrigation withdrawals from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.#

California farmers' ads clash over Delta water

Sacramento Bee – 9/4/08
By Matt Weiser, staff writer

California's ageless struggle over water has seen battles between man and nature, between cities and farms, and, of course, between rich and poor.

Now it's farmer vs. farmer.

In an advertising slugfest in newspapers and on television in recent weeks, farming interests have waged a war of words over proposals to build a canal to divert water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The Delta, hub of the state's water system, is threatened by environmental collapse. This has reduced deliveries to farms in the San Joaquin Valley and cities throughout California. Some view a canal as the solution.

The fracas between farmers began last month when Dino Cortopassi, a lifelong Delta farmer and produce packer, bought full-page ads in The Bee and Stockton Record newspapers attacking the canal. He also purchased ads on KCRA-TV in Sacramento.

Cortopassi fears a canal will ruin the Delta environment and its farming economy.

His ads specifically target Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a leading advocate for a canal.

Cortopassi, 71, was a major donor to Schwarzenegger's campaigns. But he recently quit the Republican Party over the matter, and is now registered as an independent.

"I have served as a catalyst to get this thing where it should be in the public eye," he said. "I will fight to the death to protect the Delta, because I love it."

In response, a coalition of politically active farmers in the San Joaquin Valley last week purchased a full-page ad in The Bee targeting Cortopassi. These farmers depend almost entirely on Delta water, and consider a canal the best fix.

"Shame on you, Dino Cortopassi," shouts their ad, which goes on to criticize his "desperate attempt to confuse the issues."

It was signed by Jean Sagouspe, a Los Banos farmer, and purchased by California Westside Farmers State Political Action Committee.

Many members of the PAC buy their water from Westlands Water District in Fresno County, the largest agricultural consumer of Delta water. Sagouspe is Westlands' board chairman. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Sarah Woolf, treasurer of the PAC, said Westlands itself is not a member of the PAC.

She said the committee's ad was "not an attack on Dino." Instead, the goal was to rebut his claim that taxpayers will bear the burden of building a canal.

"It's not going to be paid for by taxpayers. It's going to be paid for by water users," said Woolf, also spokeswoman for Westlands Water District. "Westlands will pay their share for it and have stated so publicly many times."

Schwarzenegger, however, is pushing a state water bond that includes nearly $2 billion that could be used for initial studies for a canal.

Cortopassi has likely spent more than $200,000 on his ad campaign so far, all of it on his own. His most recent ad – in full color – is in today's Bee.

He claims Schwarzenegger is holding the water bond out as a carrot to San Joaquin Valley legislators to induce them to support a tax increase to balance the overdue state budget.

Schwarzenegger denied that.

"We don't trade water for the budget or vice versa," the governor told the Associated Press.

The tussle highlights the fractious nature of water politics in California, said Barbara O'Connor, a communications professor at California State University, Sacramento, and director of its Institute for the Study of Politics and Media.

She said the ads are not aimed at the general public, but at opinion leaders.

"There are huge economic interests at stake here, and the public is almost peripheral to that," she said.

Where the two sides stand depends entirely on where they get their water.

Both depend on Delta water. But Cortopassi diverts directly from the estuary.

Westlands farmers get Delta water under contract with the federal government, which operates one of two major pump and canal systems. The state operates the other.

Both systems have been blamed for killing millions of fish, and are under court order to limit diversions.

Cortopassi has much in common with Westlands farmers. He even buys tomatoes from some Westlands growers for his processing business.

But that affinity may be eroding amid the water crisis.

To oversimplify the conflict, the more water Westlands farmers take from the Delta, the more it harms Cortopassi.

"It is farmer against farmer," Cortopassi said. "But I believe we can get together."

He fears a canal will lead to more water diversions, which could make the Delta too salty to directly irrigate crops and support wildlife.

Both sides want to capture more water in wet years. This water, often in the form of floods, now flows out to sea as a "surplus" that cannot be harnessed for farms or cities.

Cortopassi wants more groundwater storage systems and reservoirs to capture that surplus. Westlands farmers want a canal to capture the surplus and also to separate routine flows from the Delta's environmental problems.

"We all believe it's possible to reach a compromise," Woolf said of her committee. "What it takes to get there, I don't know."#

Krill rebound - key link in ocean food chain

After three lean years, the ocean off California's coast this summer is suddenly rich in nutrients, and creatures - from microscopic krill to humpback whales - are thriving anew.

But whether this abundance will continue in coming seasons or is merely a bright blip in an otherwise discouraging picture year-after-year can't be predicted, say scientists monitoring the sea's productivity. The cycles of life in the Earth's warming climate are changing.

For the time being, many species of sea birds, fish and marine mammals are flourishing, and the reason lies largely in an unexpected change in two features of the ocean: The California current, flowing down the Pacific coast from Canada to Mexico, is colder than it has been in years, and strong northwest winds have increased the upwelling of cold water from just above the sea floor to the surface.

"Cold is good, and when it comes to the ocean ecosystem, the colder that upwelling gets, the better it is for all the animals in the food chain," said Steven Ramp, an oceanographer at the Monterey Aquarium Research Institute at Moss Landing.

Others agree.

"This year there's been a striking resurgence of krill in the waters off Monterey Bay, particularly for one species that has really made a comeback from the past three years," said Baldo Marinovic, a research biologist at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in the life cycles and abundance of krill, a major food source for whales, some seabirds and many species of seals.

"Sea surface temperatures that we monitor have been the coldest since the late 1980s, and that translates all the way up the food chain," he said.

The upwelling of cold water began in March all along the coast, said Bill Peterson of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Newport, Ore., a science agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It's bringing more and more food up into levels of the ocean where fish can feed better than they have in years," Peterson said.

For example, copepods, tiny crustaceans that live on the ocean floor, are prime nutrients for upper levels of the food chain in California's ocean waters. Their upwelling is unbelievable, Peterson said.

Russell Bradley, a biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory who has monitored bird life on the Farallon Islands for 20 years, said the abundance of krill has meant a big difference in the productivity of many birds.

Cassin's auklets, small gray residents of the craggy rocks on the Farallones, failed to breed during the past three summers ago for the first time in 35 years, Bradley said, and failed again the past two years because of "a major disruption of the normal upwelling pattern."

"But this year is very different," he said.

Because of the plentiful krill, the juvenile rockfish that seabirds eat are more abundant. The auklets are having their best reproductive year in a long time - much more in the normal range.

The number of brown pelicans has also increased. The population had crashed due to eggshell thinning before the pesticide DDT was banned in America in 1972, but has been recovering ever since, and this year the number of brown pelicans has reached a new peak, Bradley reported. His census on South Farallon Island alone last month counted 5,856 pelicans roosting there, a new high, he said.

"Still, there are anomalies we can't explain," Bradley said. "The numbers of Brandt's cormorants, for example, which should normally be chowing down on this year's abundant anchovies, haven't recovered. It's really a mystery, and we don't have an answer for it."

From his perch on the Farallones, Bradley can survey the ocean as far as the horizon, and this year, he said, he is seeing far more humpback whales than he has in many years. "They're going where the krill is," he said, "and there's plenty of that this year."#

Delta deadlock A Peripheral Canal, new dams, court interventions and good old conservation. The quarter-century of debate has yielded no progress toward ending the impasse.

California voters rose up by a 3-to-2 margin in 1982 and torpedoed the most contentious water project in state history -- the Peripheral Canal.

The 42-mile ditch would have linked the Sacramento River to pumps near Stockton that send water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to thirsty Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley.

But rejection of Proposition 9 didn't settle anything. Instead, it locked state water politics, which revolve around the delta, into a chronic stalemate.

More than a quarter-century later, advocates for cities, farms and wildlife routinely duke it out in courtrooms and legislative halls. Crops on the San Joaquin Valley's west side die for lack of water. Fishing boats wait out a ban on salmon. No one is winning.

Today, some think only one thing may break the delta deadlock: an epic disaster.

The potential for such an event grows every year. Century-old levees within the delta grow ever weaker, raising prospects of a Hurricane Katrina-like catastrophe -- a flood of salty water that would submerge hundreds of square miles of farmland and historic towns like Isleton and Locke.

It might happen after an earthquake. Or it might happen as a result of erosion as sea levels rise amid global warming. No one knows when the delta will reach that tipping point. That it eventually will is viewed as certain.

"Major changes in the Delta and in California's use of Delta resources are inevitable," said a December report by Delta Vision, a two-year-old task force created by Gov. Schwarzenegger to find ways to avert a water disaster. "Current patterns of use are unsustainable, and catastrophic events, such as an earthquake, could cause dramatic changes in minutes."

The quarter-century of debate over the delta's fate since the Peripheral Canal vote has yielded no discernible progress toward a solution. Farms and urban water users regularly face cuts in their supplies to protect rare fish from the effects of pumping. About 10,000 acres of crops in the Westlands Water District were abandoned this spring after planting.

But the cuts haven't helped. Populations of salmon and delta smelt have crashed despite multiple court interventions. This year's California salmon season was closed even before it started.

The Peripheral Canal succumbed to fears that it would cost a fortune and suck the delta dry. But since its rejection, pumping from the delta to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California has risen more than one-third anyway. In 2004, just as the fish decline became apparent, pumping reached its highest level.

The last effort to solve the delta's problems, called CalFed, took almost a decade and collapsed when Congress and the Legislature balked at writing blank checks for solutions designed to keep everyone happy.

Now, the Delta Vision task force is working on a new effort to repair the broken delta. Its biggest problem could be that every conceivable solution has its avid supporters, but also its bitter critics.

New dams, aggressive water conservation and farmland retirement are all on the table.

So, again, is the Peripheral Canal.

Prime habitat for fish

For almost a century, the central focus of California's development strategy has been moving water from the north, where it is plentiful, to the south, where it is scarce.

Between north and south, at the headwaters of San Francisco Bay, is the delta. Once, it was an inland marsh bigger than Rhode Island. Now, it is a maze of channels and low islands that would be flooded if not for 1,300 miles of levees.

Even in this altered state, the delta remains prime habitat for many fish species and a major migratory route for salmon. Once, their fry could count on being swept to sea by strong river currents. Now, they're as likely to be confused and diverted by suction from the water project pumps.

Water users who rely on those pumps aren't doing much better. Even as overall water exports have risen steadily, supplies for some San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California cities have faced temporary court-ordered curbs to protect threatened fish that can die in the delta pumps.

The Delta Vision task force has begun work on strategies for dual goals of improving the delta ecosystem and making water supplies more reliable.

Hopes are high. But so were hopes for CalFed, a joint state-federal program launched in 1994, when the state was still shaking off its worst drought since the late 1970s.

In 2000, CalFed proposed an $8.6 billion program of water storage and improved conservation. Beset by bureaucratic rivalries and competing interests, the plans languished, even though they avoided the contentious Peripheral Canal.

Now, CalFed's collapse is a rare point of consensus among quarrelling parties.

"There isn't any doubt about the failure of the CalFed program," said Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands Water District, one of the state's biggest farm water users.

No approach perfect

Simple solutions can be hard to resist.

* Courts stepping in because rare species are being harmed? Weaken their protections.

* Too much water being used by farms and cities south of the delta? Make them conserve.

* An inefficient system lets huge amounts of water flow into the sea in wet years? Build more dams to capture and store it.

A closer look reveals that each approach has obstacles.

Farmers and other major water users sometimes question the intrinsic value of a fish, whether it is a prized wild salmon or the lowly minnowlike delta smelt. They talk about balancing the needs of wildlife with those of humans.

To Zeke Grader, the two are the same.

Grader is executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. His members have sat out this year's salmon season, not by choice, but because federal fisheries managers banned salmon fishing off California this year after record low numbers returned to spawn last fall in the Sacramento River.

Some boats that fished for salmon switched to albacore. Others doubled down on crab. Neither is a good alternative.

"They'd rather be fishing for salmon," Grader said. "That's been the anchor fishery for our fleet all along the coast of California."

Diners who want to order wild salmon are paying a high price. So are taxpayers in general. In the farm bill passed by Congress early this year, they ponied up $170 million in disaster assistance for those affected by the ban.

Exactly why salmon populations have collapsed is open to debate. But Grader is convinced that it has to do with the recent rise in water exports from the delta. Flows of fresh water through the delta, he said, are needed to help salmon find their way from their Sacramento River spawning grounds to the ocean and back.

"That fresh water going out to the ocean was the key thing for maintaining the estuary," he said. "If you start reducing the amount of water to that estuary, you're killing it."

The delta smelt is less glamorous than the salmon. But it is officially listed as a threatened species. It appears to be just as sensitive to increased pumping. And its sorry state has led to court-ordered cuts in water exports.

In a series of rulings late last year in cases brought by environmental advocates, a Fresno federal judge required state and federal water project operators to take several steps to protect the smelt. U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger set restrictions on flows in two channels, Old River and Middle River, during months when the pumps tend to pull smelt into their intakes.

Next month, in a second case resulting from an environmental lawsuit, Wanger will hear evidence about water project operations and their effects on two Chinook salmon runs and one type of steelhead.

Some urge conservation

One way to live with reduced pumping is to use less water. Some environmental advocates argue that California's cities and farms could do much more there. In fact, more water could be gleaned from conservation than what is currently pumped from the delta, says Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

"We call it the virtual river," he said.

In recent reports, the Oakland-based Pacific Institute has estimated how much could be conserved. One conclusion: Urban areas could cut use by 30%, saving 2.3 million acre-feet annually. That's about half what the two big projects have pumped in an average year over the past two decades.

"The savings that are available through water conservation and efficiency are as great as some of the water supply projects, and they can be achieved with much lower economic and environmental costs," said Heather Cooley, a senior research associate at the institute.

Most of the institute's work focuses on things like requiring more efficient plumbing fixtures, and using tiered pricing to penalize the biggest water users. A second report will make recommendations for farm water users.

"Those who are wasting water should be sent a very strong price signal," Cooley said.

Some of the institute's proposals represent major changes. Lawn sizes could be limited. Homeowners could be forced to replace inefficient plumbing when they sell. To the extent that such measures aren't widely adopted, the institute's estimates may be high.

Similarly, some farmers question how much room there is for further conservation in their operations.

Westlands grower John Diener has spent nearly a million dollars in the past five years on systems that use less water. He scoffs at the suggestion that he and his fellow farmers could do more.

"If that were the case, they would already have done it," he said. "It's not in our economic interest to waste water."

One large local irrigation supplier, the Israeli firm Netafim, says it has supplied Westlands growers with micro-irrigation and drip systems for 160,000 acres this decade.

In an even more drastic move, Westlands has bought out growers on about 100,000 acres and shifted their water to other land. But having shaky water supplies makes that increasingly difficult.

"At some point, it's unaffordable to retire land," Westlands grower Mark Borba said. "It requires investors who purchase a bond, and they look at the collateral and say that is not a good investment."

Retiring land from farming also harms small towns that rise and fall with the farm economy. And Birmingham says retiring farmland does not even cut delta water exports if the saved water is used elsewhere, as in Westlands.

Others want new dams

Among water users, talk about the delta often turns to increasing the water supply, or at least increasing the reliability of existing supplies. Often, that means new dams.

When it issued its 2000 report, the CalFed program identified a dozen dam sites. Eight years later, Schwarzenegger and Sen. Dianne Feinstein are promoting a $9.3 billion state water bond, of which $3 billion would go to storage and $2 billion to improving efficiency.

If recent history is any guide, new dams will face many obstacles. Since completion of the 2.4 million acre-feet New Melones Dam in 1979 on the Stanislaus River, the only new dams built in California have been smaller, with reservoirs one-third that size or less.

As a result, the water bond faces uncertain prospects despite its bipartisan backers. Since its introduction in July, it has made no progress toward the November ballot, as the Legislature has struggled to pass a state budget.

The long-maligned Peripheral Canal would face similar hurdles.

Once politically radioactive -- Prop. 9 was opposed by more than 90% of voters in some Northern California counties and by more than 70% even in the central San Joaquin Valley -- the canal has gained traction in recent months as a possible solution.

Advocates say it would help fish by separating the pumps from the delta and help water users by creating a direct connection between the pumps and Northern California's rivers. But estimates of its costs range as high as $20 billion, and suspicions linger that it would open the door to further pumping increases without any lasting benefit to the delta's fish or their habitat.

Canal backers such as Birmingham are optimistic anyway. Last month, the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit center based in San Francisco, issued a report endorsing a Peripheral Canal. Among other things, the report gauged the canal's cost to be in the same range as expected damages from a catastrophic failure of delta levees.

Birmingham and other water users embraced the report enthusiastically.

"The handwriting is on the wall," he said. "If we are going to conserve fish in the delta, improve the delta ecology and sustain the economy of California, we're going to have to completely change the way we convey water from north of the delta to south of the delta."

Birmingham said that water users would even be willing to pay for a Peripheral Canal themselves.

Environmental advocates are skeptical of that. In any case, they say any delta fix must deal first with the crash in fish populations and other ecological damage.

"What we've said about a Peripheral Canal is the same thing we've said about more surface storage," Nelson said. "Show us a proposal and we'll look at it carefully."

After the Public Policy Institute report, five congressional Democrats from Northern California -- George Miller, Ellen Tauscher, Doris Matsui, Mike Thompson and Jerry McNerney -- quickly issued a joint statement expressing doubts about the Peripheral Canal's proposed resurrection.

On the other side, the Delta Vision task force's latest draft recommendations say a Peripheral Canal-like "isolated facility" is "the linchpin to managing Delta water supply and ecosystem functions."

Tom Graff, senior counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, was an opponent of the 1982 Peripheral Canal vote. His group still says fisheries must be taken care of first. But he says the institute's report, in particular, has "actually moved the ball somewhat in the direction of a canal."

It's not the first time observers of California's water wars have sensed change. Breakthroughs are forever just around the corner. CalFed was the great hope of the previous decade. Delta Vision is the great hope for this decade.

Will the second succeed where the first and its predecessors failed? What will it take for the warring sides to reach consensus, rescue the delta's ecology, save its beleaguered levees and stabilize supplies for water users?

"That's the great unanswered question," Nelson said. "Is California up to addressing what is clearly the greatest water management challenge of the last half-century in the absence of a disaster? Or is it going to take a catastrophe?" #

Shasta County supervisors passed a lean annual budget Tuesday and agreed to voice opposition to the controversial Delta Vision plan -- which could deny north state water rights to quench Southern Californians' thirst.

The Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to send a letter to the chairman of the plan's Blue Ribbon Task Force, with Supervisor Mark Cibula repeatedly questioning whether the county's four-page letter was worded strongly enough.

He stressed Shasta County's responsibility to protect the north state's enormous water supply from Lake Shasta and Whiskeytown Lake, both for local water users and those in neighboring counties.

"This is one of the most important things we will do," he said.

Supervisor Les Baugh defended the letter's strength, pointing out the start of one of his favorite lines:

"We cannot be more vehemently opposed to this preemption of local government authority. The reason why many counties adopted ordinances to regulate groundwater exports was due to real or perceived failures on the part of the state to manage these problems adequately," it says.

Supervisor David Kehoe abstained from the vote, saying he agreed with many of the letter's concepts, but wanted more information and public comment. Kehoe successfully requested that the board hold a workshop to further discuss the Delta Vision’s implications.

The workshop is tentatively set for Sept. 23 or later, Shasta County Administrative Officer Larry Lees said Tuesday afternoon.

Cibula voted yes on the proposed letter with the understanding that more letters could be sent after the workshop, and visits with state representatives should be planned, he said.

The Delta Vision Strategic Plan aims to fix the poorly functioning Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the west coast’s largest estuary, Public Works Director Pat Minturn told the board. The peat bog’s weak levees are vulnerable to storms and earthquakes, yet they serve as part of a water conveyance system for 23 million Californians, Minturn wrote in a staff report.

However, the plan by the Blue Ribbon Task Force, formed by Gov. Schwarzenegger, “would trump local and regional controls,” including the county’s Groundwater Management Ordinance, Minturn wrote.

The county’s letter opposes the plan to grant the California Delta Ecosystem and Water Council the authority to affect areas outside the delta or to supercede existing water rights. Additionally, it opposes the idea that water would not be purchased, but provided based on “constitutional principles of reasonable use and public trust,” as described in the plan.

Depleting upstream water systems is another concern, the letter states. While understanding that water supplies must be increased, “efforts to reduce the demand for water must equally be advanced,” the letter says.

The board’s letter was drafted in conjunction with Tehama, Butte, Colusa and Glenn counties and based on the Northern California Water Association’s concerns. Voting on it Tuesday means it will be received before the governor’s Oct. 31 deadline for the task force’s management plan.#

The Los Angeles Times- 8/14/08
By Eric Bailey, Staff Writer

SACRAMENTO -- Three common pesticides are helping push the Pacific Coast's prized but imperiled salmon closer to extinction, a new federal report has found.

A 377-page draft study by federal fisheries experts contends there is "overwhelming evidence" that unfettered use of the pesticides is "likely to jeopardize the continued existence" of 28 salmon stocks off the West Coast.

The National Marine Fisheries report says the pesticides interfere with basic functions of the fish: their ability to find food, reproduce, even to swim. The three pesticides -- malathion, diazinon and chloripyrifos -- have been used for decades by farmers and home gardeners.

Joshua Osborne-Klein, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice, said the report pointed to a need to find alternatives to the chemicals.

The fisheries service is expected in coming months to make recommendations on potential remedies to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which governs pesticide use. Agency officials could order restrictions or prohibit use of the pesticides.

Fisheries scientists say the biggest threat comes when the chemicals are washed into small tributaries that contain young salmon.

If the chemicals are in large-enough concentrations, the juveniles can perish. Even if they survive, the salmon can suffer diminished sense of smell, affecting the ability of the young fish to avoid predators and of older fish to mate.

Agricultural officials have long argued that such pesticides rarely reach the nation's waterways at the concentrations that can prove detrimental to fish.

The report was spawned by a lawsuit brought by environmentalists in U.S. District Court in Seattle, where Judge John Coughenour ordered the Fisheries Service to conduct the study.

As part of a legal settlement, fisheries scientists will review 34 additional pesticides to determine if they also are nudging the salmon toward extinction.

Osborne-Klein of Earthjustice, which represented environmentalists in the Seattle lawsuit, said the study underscored the need for independent appraisal of regulatory decisions at a time when the Bush administration is pushing to slash such reviews.#

Albany Democrat Herald- 8/12/08
By Gail Oberst

LACOMB — Lacomb Irrigation District staff and volunteers celebrated the installation last month of an innovative new fish screen, the first of its kind west of the Cascades.

The new screen spits out irrigation water without a hitch, it won’t kill fish and it delivers a continuous stream of trouble-free water to a hydroelectric plant downstream that supplies enough power for 1,000 houses on the Pacific Power grid.

The horizontal fish screen on Crabtree Creek near Lacomb is one of just eight in Oregon and Montana. But its benefits to the pocketbook and to fish have caught the eyes of farmers and fishers at another 20 potential sites in Washington and California.

At a July 25 celebration and tour of the new screen installation, Scott Bruslind, one of four part-time district employees who work for the elected five-member board, said it wasn’t easy for Lacomb folks to let go of the old irrigation set-up with its bucolic metal rotary drum, paddle wheel and settling ponds.

But the old-fashioned system clogged regularly with leaves, requiring staff to halt irrigation for days, haul the heavy parts out of the water, and clean or repair them. The grand water wheel that flipped through the water was worn out, its chains were breaking, and it was responsible for passing fish and eggs into the irrigation lines. The system was going to require expensive repairs, so the board began looking at something entirely new.

“We were pumping fish into fields like you see in those lottery TV ads. We had to fix this,” Bruslind said.

In 2005, the Lacomb district turned to an innovative company that had just been formed by an irrigation district in Hood River County faced with similar needs to update and meet environmental standards. That district patented its new fish screen and sold it through the nonprofit organization Farmers Conservation Alliance, whose broad mission is to benefit “farmers, fish and families,” according to director Les Perkins.

An added bonus for the Lacomb Irrigation District is that the screen has no moving parts to break or maintain. Because it is horizontal and the current sweeps it clean, there’s no place for leaves and debris to clog it. Generally, it is self-cleaning, according to Perkins.

The screen wasn’t cheap, and it took some time to install. It cost $712,000, but several agencies pitched in: $161,000 came from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, $73,000 came from the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service, $50,000 came from the Fish American Foundation and $12,000 came from U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

“The rest came from our pockets,” said Dean Castle, chairman of the board and one of the district’s 292 irrigators. Castle was a Lebanon High School teacher and coach before he retired to his 10 acres in the Lacomb area.

Castle said the board’s portion of the new screen came form money raised in the sale of power and irrigation fees. Those fees are the lowest in the state, he said, at $10 a year per acre, because they are offset by power generation income. The fees are drawn from the district’s 2,400 acres where berries, grass seed, corn and Christmas trees are common crops.

The celebration of the new screen was sort of a new beginning for a historic district, according to Clark Griffith, one of two district staff who call themselves “ditch walkers.” Griffith’s father-in-law, Auldy Ayers, was a founding member of the district in 1935. Ayers was secretary/treasurer of the board in those days, long before Clark married Auldy’s daughter, Anne.

Today Griffith, retired and settled on a piece of the family homestead, walks the irrigation ditches that snake out from the new screen, and keeps them clear.

“My job is to fight with the beavers and keep them out of the ditches,” Clark said, laughing.

How it works

The Farmers Screen works like this: Water diverted from Crabtree Creek’s main channel flows over a flat, horizontal screen, carrying fish, sticks and leaves to Crabtree Creek. Meanwhile, inside the walls of the screen, some of the water drops down, flows over an adjacent weir wall and into a flume. The diverted and fish-free water can then be piped downhill for irrigation or power.

Les Perkins, director of Farmers Conservation Alliance, said the Lacomb screen is one of the larger ones, but smaller projects are also possible. Dozens of other projects are under way in Montana, California and Washington farms and districts.

For more information about the screens, visit www.farmerscreen.org, or call Perkins, (541) 716-6085.#

These salmon are marvelously adapted to the hot Valley climate, with runs entering the rivers in the fall, late fall, winter and spring. With such diversity and abundance, they were mainstays of California fisheries.

Today, Central Valley salmon populations have reached record- low numbers. The spring and winter runs have been listed as threatened or endangered. Commercial fishing for all runs has been shut down.

The causes of the salmon population collapse are multiple and complex, an apparent "perfect storm" of interacting factors, man-made and natural. To supplement the wild populations, hatcheries produce approximately 31 million young salmon per year. Yet today, hatchery fish are part of the problem.

Hatchery fish are less-adapted for survival in the wild, but they can compete with and interbreed with wild salmon in rivers, overwhelming wild fish by their sheer numbers and weakening the offspring.

They are wonderful food, but when it comes to spawning and perpetuating the species, they are no substitute for truly wild salmon.

In previous years, up to 90 percent of salmon caught off California by fishermen were born in a hatchery. Unfortunately, the fishermen have never had an easy way to tell hatchery from wild fish. As a result, wild salmon that are endangered species are caught as well as hatchery fish, with negative effects on their beleaguered populations.

A major step toward solving the problem: Mark all hatchery fish. First, hatcheries could remove a small fatty fin on the back whose loss does not affect survival. Its absence is easy to detect on adult salmon. Second, hatcheries could inject a wire tag into each salmon's snout that encodes their hatchery of origin and other information. This marking technique has a long history of successful use worldwide.

If all hatchery fish have the mark and tag, the currently closed fishery could probably be reopened, albeit in a limited fashion. Fishermen could keep all marked fish. Unmarked fish would be released into the wild.

The inadvertent catching of some wild fish would cause some to die. Yet more would live. The marking and tagging program would also pay large benefits in improved management of salmon populations by providing more information on how salmon use the ocean and on the impacts of the fishery on wild fish.

This is not a new idea. The benefits of marking programs have long been recognized in Washington and Oregon, where over 100 million juvenile Chinook salmon are marked each year. Around the Great Lakes, agencies are beginning to implement the annual marking of all hatchery salmon and trout, about 30 million fish.

It would cost roughly $5.5 million to establish a program to mark and tag all hatchery salmon in the Central Valley, and about $4.5 million per year to run it. Yet this price tag seems small compared with the value gained, particularly if the alternative is to keep the fishery shut down indefinitely.

Marking all salmon released from hatcheries is an important tool for salmon conservation in the Pacific Northwest. We are not using it enough in California. We should.#

The San Francisco Chronicle- 8/10/08
Tom Stienstra, Staff Writer

(08-09) 17:07 PDT -- An 80-pound salmon caught off Rivers Inlet this past week crowned a siege of some of the biggest salmon taken off British Columbia in years. The news could mean great things for the Bay Area coast in the future.

On the same morning the 80-pounder was caught, an angler on a nearby boat caught a 71-pounder. At least one 50-pound salmon has been caught every day this week out of Rivers Inlet Resort, according to Ron Shapland, co-owner of the resort.

"The fish this season are unbelievably huge."

The story of the decline in salmon populations on the Pacific Coast is well documented, but there's a surprise twist this summer. Scientists blamed the fall of salmon stocks primarily on a lack of marine food production, which has also affected the population of some marine birds. This was the result of a change in wind patterns across the ocean that caused poor upwelling and lack of plankton and krill.

But this spring and early summer, powerful winds out of the northwest returned, and with it, upwelling jump-started the marine food chain.

With plenty of food again in the ocean, yet far fewer adult salmon this summer, the fish that are out there are gorging and getting huge.

That is why what is happening now off Canada could presage huge fish in future years along the Bay Area coast. This summer, DFG released more 20.2 million smolts in San Pablo Bay to bypass water diversions and help the fish reach the ocean, and with rich feed conditions, those salmon could grow more than a pound per month. That is why I predict we'll have more than 1 million salmon in the 20 to 25-pound range in the summer of 2010 off the Bay Area coast, with a sprinkling of monsters.

"It's hard to believe how big the salmon are up here right now," said field scout John Beath, who reported the story from Canada and set a line-class world record for landing a 51-pound salmon on 6-pound line. "Seriously, the average salmon at Rivers Inlet is 40 pounds and up, and there's 50, 60 and 70-pounders."

The Los Angeles Times- 8/12/08
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Monday proposed a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects, eliminating the independent scientific reviews that have been required for more than three decades.

The new rules, which will be subject to a 30-day comment period, would use administrative powers to make broad changes in the law that Congress has resisted for years. Under current law, agencies must subject any plans that potentially affect endangered animals and plants to an independent review by scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service. Under the proposed new rules, dam and highway construction and other federal projects could proceed without delay if the agency in charge decides they would not harm vulnerable species.

The Associated Press obtained a draft of the proposal and reported its details.

Afterward, in a telephone call with reporters, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne described the rules as a "narrow regulatory change" that "will provide clarity and certainty to the consultation process under the Endangered Species Act."

But environmentalists and congressional Democrats blasted the proposal as a last-minute attempt by the administration to bring about dramatic changes in the law. For more than a decade, congressional Republicans have been trying unsuccessfully to rewrite the act, which property owners and developers say imposes unreasonable economic costs.

"I am deeply troubled by this proposed rule, which gives federal agencies an unacceptable degree of discretion to decide whether or not to comply with the Endangered Species Act," said Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, who asked for a staff briefing before the proposal was announced but did not receive one. "Eleventh-hour rulemakings rarely, if ever, lead to good government. This is not the type of legacy this Interior Department should be leaving for future generations."

Bob Irvin, senior vice president of conservation programs at the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife, questioned how some federal agencies could make the assessments, when most do not have wildlife biologists on staff.

"Clearly, that's a case of asking the fox to guard the chicken coop," Irvin said, adding that the original law created "a giant caution light that made federal agencies stop and think about the impacts of their actions. What the Bush administration is telling those agencies is they don't have to think about those impacts anymore."

But Dale Hall, who directs the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the move would not apply to major federal projects and would give his agency more time to focus on the most critically endangered species, rather than conducting reviews of projects that pose little threat.

"We have to have the ability to put our efforts where they're needed," Hall said, adding that individual agencies will have to take responsibility if their projects do harm a protected species. "This really says to the agencies, 'This law belongs to all of us. You're responsible to defend it.' "

The new rules would also limit the impact of the administration's decision in May to list the polar bear as threatened with extinction because of shrinking sea ice. At the time of that decision, Kempthorne said he would seek changes to the Endangered Species Act on the grounds that it was inflexible, adding that it had not been modified significantly since 1986.

In a statement Monday, the Interior Department declared that even if a federal action such as the permitting of a power plant would lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions, the decision would not trigger a federal review "because it is not possible to link the emissions to impacts on specific listed species such as polar bears."

The draft rules obtained by the Associated Press would bar agencies from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats.

Kempthorne said the new regulations included that language "so we don't inadvertently have the Endangered Species Act seen as a back door to climate change policy that was never, ever intended."

The new rules were expected to be formally proposed immediately, officials told the Associated Press. That would give the administration enough time to impose the rules before November's presidential election. A new administration could freeze any pending regulations or reverse them, but that process could take months. Congress could overturn the rules through legislation, but that could take even longer.

Tim Coyle, senior vice president for governmental affairs at the California Building Industry Assn., said that while his association would have to read the rules before making a judgment, he welcomed Kempthorne's statement on the polar bear because it offered "clarity on an issue that if it was left broad and ambiguous, could be a serious problem for the home-building industry here in California. . . . For home builders, clarity in the rules is always, always helpful."

Although Kempthorne said he had received "encouragement from both sides of the aisle to see if we couldn't bring about steps that would make the Endangered Species Act more effective," his proposal opened a new front in the ongoing battle between the administration and Congress on the environment.

An aide to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, said she, like Rahall, had requested but not received a briefing. The panel is drafting a letter to the Interior Department and will hold an oversight hearing.

In a statement, Boxer called the rules change "another in a continuing stream of proposals to repeal our landmark environmental laws through the back door. I believe it is illegal, and if this proposed regulation had been in place, it would have undermined our ability to protect the bald eagle, the grizzly bear, and the gray whale."#

The Sacramento Bee- 8/11/08
By Maddalena Jackson

Oil companies, some politicians and commuters paying $4 for a gallon of gas might look at California's coast and think of crude oil pooled below the seafloor.

The state's North Coast, however, holds promise of another energy bounty.

In less time than it would take to fire up new offshore oil drills, waters off our coast could host floating wind turbines and undulating buoys driven by waves, producing abundant electricity for a power-thirsty state.

The Electric Power Research Institute estimates enough wave power can be extracted from coastal waters to account for about 15 percent of California's electricity production. Wind could provide up to 110 percent, according to a Stanford University study published last year.

Wind power off California's coast is now just a thought among power developers, and there are no concrete plans to erect turbines at sea. But optimism is fueled by NASA and university studies indicating wind over waters off picturesque Cape Mendocino is strong and consistent enough to become one of the nation's best sources of electricity.

Offshore wind and wave technologies are promising, but they're untried. They also raise concerns about potential damage to the coast's prized vistas and fish industry.

One proposal to draw electricity from waves off the Mendocino coast already has generated problems for developers, government agencies and coastal residents.

Moreover, the potential for wind and waves depends on someone building transmission lines to connect offshore power to the state's grid.

Northern California's biggest utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., may be that someone.

Power in the waves
Out at sea, the ocean's surface ripples rhythmically, and the up-and-down motion can be harnessed to produce electrical energy, via bobbing buoys, jointed snakes and undulating tubes.

PG&E plans to capture some of that potential. It has preliminary permits for two projects – one off Fort Bragg and one off Eureka.

The Fort Bragg project, expected to yield 40 megawatts of electricity, would be "an undersea power plug," said PG&E project manager Bill Toman. It "would provide about 20 percent of electricity consumption of Mendocino County."

Toman added that wave energy now is "at a state of technological maturity that wind energy was at 20 to 25 years ago when the first wind machines went up in the Altamont hills, between Sacramento and San Francisco."

"They had a lot of problems," he said. "But there were several generations of design evolutions that occurred from that learning experience."

Current wave technology is mature enough for demonstration testing, Toman said.

PG&E would build the expensive transmission lines. The utility would select three or four developers to test their power generators.

Results will lead to "a decision about whether we would build our own wave energy farm," he said.

Mendocino coast residents are examining PG&E's plans with cautious optimism.

"Wave energy sounds like a good idea, as long as it doesn't harm the environment," said Bruce Lewis, a nature photographer and volunteer light-keeper at the Point Cabrillo Light Station. "Using the power of the waves seems like a better way of generating power than building oil platforms off the coast."

Others are wary. "When you first hear about it, you think, 'That's a great idea!' "said Jim Martin, director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance.

He's concerned wave power may interfere with fisheries. He wonders if electrical signatures from the devices also might disturb fish.

His biggest complaint right now, however, is that local fishermen and residents have had no say in the planning.

Martin is also associated with Fishermen Interested in Safe Hydrokinetics, or FISH. With local lawyer Elizabeth Mitchell, FISH is battling for a role in the planning.

A federal deadline has passed for gaining an official voice in the legal planning for the wave projects, alongside PG&E and federal energy regulators.

Mitchell has filed a request for a belated entree with the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission. She argues that an isolated community, with limited high-speed Internet service, and few residents who even know what FERC is, could not have met the deadline.#

Redding Record Searchlight- 8/11/08
By Tim Hearden

RED BLUFF -- Caught in a fight over fish, the diversion dam that creates Lake Red Bluff and enables the irrigation of about 150,000 acres of Northern California cropland is itself an endangered species.

Local recreation enthusiasts, businesspeople and agricultural interests have watched with dread this summer as an environmental lawsuit against the Central Valley Project's water diversion system has proceeded in a Fresno courtroom.

Central in the suit is the fate of the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, which is put in place from mid-May through mid-September to supply water for a 125-mile irrigation canal that runs to Glenn, Colusa and Yolo counties. The city of Red Bluff estimates the resulting high river levels in the heart of town generate $4 million a year in economic activity.

U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger has ruled the dam and other diversions imperil the state's beleaguered salmon population.

Wanger stopped short of ordering the gates removed immediately, but the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority will have to remove the gates Sept. 2 - about two weeks early - if it's determined that at least 5 percent of winter-run salmon have already reached the dam.

"They dodged a bullet this time," Red Bluff City Manager Martin Nichols said of the dam and the lake, home of the popular Nitro Nationals Drag Boat Festival each Memorial Day weekend. "But we're a long way from being out of the woods on this."

Beyond September, the dam's future is very much in doubt. Wanger ordered the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the National Marine Fisheries Service to find ways to protect endangered salmon and steelhead trout, including the winter- and spring-run chinooks at the heart of the Red Bluff controversy.

And the agencies are working on a new biological opinion, due out in March, that will analyze the CVP's impact on the endangered fish.

Irrigators fear the dam could be jettisoned before a $160 million fish screen and pumping system can be put in to feed the canal, perhaps by the 2012 irrigation season.

"We're certainly working with the resource agencies to find ways to help the status of threatened and endangered species, as well as working to maintain operations of the gates in a manner that will continue to protect the viability of the regional economy by permitting us to irrigate our crops," said Jeff Sutton, the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority's general manager.

"In the interim, until we get the fish screen and fish passage improvement project .¤.¤. we'd hate to have the rug pulled out in front of us when we're so close to a solution," he said.

Irrigation from the canal produces about $250 million in crops each year, contributing about $1 billion to the regional economy, Sutton said.

The pump is only the latest in a long series of attempts to address fish problems associated with the 42-year-old diversion dam. Agencies first tried to put a spawning bed at the dam, which didn't work, then built fish ladders, pumps and later, gates, Nichols said.

The latest fish fight began in February 2005, when the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups sued federal authorities over the water diversions' impact on Delta smelt. They challenged a biological opinion for salmon and steelhead a couple of months later, according to published reports.

In April, Wanger invalidated the biological opinion on salmon, ruling that regulators failed to consider the effects of global warming and other environmental issues on the species' decline, published reports said.

Wanger later affirmed that water diversions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have jeopardized the fish, but he denied a request from fishing and environmental groups for emergency injunctive relief.

Tina Swanson, executive director of the Bay Institute, said the dam's gates are a barrier to adult salmon trying to get upstream and to juveniles coming downstream. She said predator fish gather at the dam to feed on the juveniles, further reducing their numbers.

"They've been known to be a hazard for salmon for decades," Swanson said of the gates.

Installing a new pumping system with a proper fish screen would be preferable, she said, but the facility doesn't address how much water should be taken from the river.

"We've been taking too much water," Swanson said. "One of the things we need to do is reevaluate how much we can safely take .¤.¤. That's a larger issue than the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, but the Red Bluff Diversion Dam is part of it."

One of the most vocal advocates for keeping the dam has been the city of Red Bluff, which has considered filing its own lawsuit against the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority to save it. Losing the dam would likely mean losing the Nitro Nationals' $3.1 million economic boost and 49 boat-racing jobs, according to a city report.

But lately, City Council members have discussed working with the canal authority to win funding for projects to offset the economic damage. Such projects could include an amphitheater at Red Bluff River Park, a technology center at Shasta College's satellite campus or a new trails system for Red Bluff, Nichols said.

For Sutton, collaborating with the city beats being adversaries when it comes to the future of the dam.

"Obviously the writing is on the wall that operation of the diversion dam will not remain long into the future," Sutton said. "If we don't look forward to solutions, we'll both be sitting on the side of the river watching the water go downstream."#

The Associated Press- 8/8/08
By STEVE LAWRENCE, Associated Press Writer

PDT Rio Vista, Calif. (AP) --On one side of the gravel road are hundreds of acres of corn. On the other is a different crop that scientists hope will enable farmers to rebuild sinking islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, combat global warming and make a profit at the same time.

The U.S. Geological Survey is growing tules and cattails on about 15 acres on Twitchell Island, about 5.7 square miles of rich but fragile peat soil 30 miles south of Sacramento.

Twitchell and other delta islands are slowing sinking, their soil eaten away by wind, rain and farming. Most are more than 20 feet below the surrounding water. A levee system keeps them from being flooded.

A collapse of the levees would bring in salt water from San Francisco Bay, damaging delta ecosystems and jeopardizing the state and federal programs that pump fresh water out of the delta for farms and cities to the south.

The Geological Survey project started 15 years ago as a small experiment on two 30-foot by 30-foot plots to see if growing mostly tules and cattails would help rebuild the islands' soil.

The plants can grow high enough to dwarf adults. As they die and decay, they slowly build up the peat. The soil under the 15-acre site has risen 1 to 2 feet since the project was moved there in 1996.

"All that soil out there are plants that grew 6,000 years ago and didn't decompose completely," said Robin Miller, a biogeochemist with the Geological Survey. "That's what peat is. So we're just making the same thing happen that happened here for millennia."

About 2 1/2 years ago, scientists noticed that their "big garden," as Miller calls it, was removing carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

"We were capturing a lot of (carbon dioxide) at levels much greater than other systems — marshes and forests, grasslands," said Roger Fujii, the project's director and the bay-delta program chief for the Geological Survey's California Water Science Center.

That revelation persuaded state and federal officials to expand the project. They are now trying to determine whether the tules and cattails could be used to combat global warming through what they call "carbon-capture" farming.

Under that scenario, companies could meet state greenhouse gas limits by paying delta farmers to plant tules and cattails rather than row crops.

"They can just sit back and watch the tules grow, and they should be making money," Fujii said. "That's what the vision is. It's not to do it just on Twitchell Island. It's to see if we can do it throughout the delta on subsided land."

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is at the heart of California's water delivery system. It's the meeting place of some of the state's largest rivers, draining an area stretching from the Cascades in Northern California to the central Sierra Nevada.

The region between the state capital and San Francisco Bay is dotted with dozens of islands, most of them surrounded by narrow canals and many used for farming.

With a three-year, $12.3 million grant from the state Department of Water Resources, the Geological Survey and its research partners at the University of California, Davis plan to move the project to a 300- to 400-acre site somewhere in the delta next year.

The larger size would enable farmers to see how "they could really make a difference," Fujii said.

A series of questions needs to be answered before scientists can conclude that carbon-capture farming is beneficial. Among them is whether turning cornfields into tule-filled wetlands will only replace one type of greenhouse gas with more of another.

Plowing for agriculture oxidizes the soil, creating "perfect banquet conditions" for microbes that eat the peat and release carbon dioxide, Miller said. Flooding the fields with low levels of water to make wetlands limits the oxygen but forces the microbes to turn to other compounds.

"When oxygen is limited, the bugs, the microbes, have to eat and breathe somehow," she said. "They will use sulfate, iron or some other compound. Instead of producing (carbon dioxide) at the end of the pathway ... they end up producing methane," another greenhouse gas.

Scientists also want to be sure that changing cornfields to wetlands won't increase a third greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.

They also are trying to determine how to minimize another potential problem — dissolved organic matter, which leaches out of peat soil and plants when exposed to water.

When delta water containing dissolved organic matter is treated for drinking supplies, it forms something called "disinfection byproducts," compounds that are carcinogenic. Geological Survey scientists want to make sure that creating more wetlands won't increase levels of those compounds.

They also want to be sure that carbon-capture farming won't cause the release of mercury that has been washing into the delta from mining operations going back to the Gold Rush era.

If scientists can work out those problems, they hope to develop a manual showing farmers how to create their own carbon-capturing wetlands and keep them healthy.#

The petition before the state Board of Forestry comes as California salmon are at historic lows, requiring regulators to suspend all salmon fishing on the coast this year – a first.

The request came from California Trout, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Protection Information Center. It targeted coho salmon in coastal streams between Santa Cruz and Humboldt counties.

For several years, the National Marine Fisheries Service has cautioned the board that its forestry rules not only are inadequate to protect salmon, but actually threaten fish. That's because, among other things, state logging rules allow too much erosion into spawning habitat.

The forestry board regulates logging on private land. Last year it required new stream protections if the state Department Fish and Game ruled that a logging plan will kill salmon. But Fish and Game has never made such a ruling.

The petitioners want the stream protections required without such a finding. As justification, they cited new reports by the federal fisheries service, which protects coho under the Endangered Species Act.

The agency reported in February that coastal coho populations plunged 73 percent compared with the previous spawning season. In April it said extinction may be close at hand.

"Emergency action is necessary to prevent the morally unacceptable situation that certain populations of coho may go extinct," said Bill Yeates, attorney for the petitioners.

The nine-member board, appointed by the governor, is weighted toward the logging industry. Most members said there wasn't enough evidence to support more regulation.

"What we're asking of landowners is a huge financial hardship," said board member Doug Piirto, a forestry professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and former Forest Service timber management officer.

Charlotte Ambrose, species recovery coordinator at the National Marine Fisheries Service, said her agency supports additional coho protections.

Piirto and other board members pressed Ambrose for proof that salmon are threatened by in-stream conditions and not just ocean forces.

"Do you honestly feel it's an issue of (in-stream) carrying capacity?" said board member Lloyd Bradshaw, forest manager for Hearst Corp.

"I do," said Ambrose.

The board rejected the petition in a 6-3 vote.#

Capital Ag Press- 8/1/08
By Elizabeth Larson

A federal court judge has ruled that Central Valley Project operations are detrimental to certain fish species, but so far he's made no decisions about what modifications the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation must make to reduce the impact on fish.

Judge Oliver Wanger hasn't instituted any other emergency remedies on behalf of three fish species - winter run chinook, spring run chinook and steelhead.

In a hearing held Wednesday, July 23, Wanger ordered the federal defendant and the California Department of Water Resources to file a status report by Aug. 29 that contains an update on current project operations as well as those proposed through next March, the status of any jeopardy to the fish and an analysis of proposed remedies to protect species and habitat.

"We're evaluating his recommendations right now and putting together our strategy for coming back to the table for a conference with him," Bureau of Reclamation spokesman Pete Lucero said. "We'll be prepared to discuss with the court what we've come up with in the way of meeting his requirements from his bench."

"It's not entirely clear what's going to happen next," said Natural Resources Defense Council spokesman Craig Noble.

However, Noble said, "The status quo is unacceptable."

What will follow has yet to be decided, he said.

Wanger ruled July 18 in Fresno that the project's operations through March 2009 "will appreciably increase jeopardy" of the three fish species.

His 118-page decision is part of a case brought by the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations/Institute for Fisheries Resources and the National Resources Defense Council against Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez.

The suit last month had looked at possible changes to the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, with the defendants asking that it either be removed or closed much earlier in the irrigation season. Wanger ruled against both proposals.

He decided having the dam close a month-and-a-half earlier would provide an insignificant benefit to fish, said Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority General Manager Jeff Sutton, who witnessed the proceedings. However, Wanger retained the right to revisit that issue.

Sutton said the canal authority was relieved by Wanger's decisions, which will allow farmers to get their crops through the harvest this year.

"We certainly avoided an economic catastrophe to the region if the decision had been unfavorable," he said.

In a separate case in April, Wanger found that both the State Water Project and Central Valley Project violated federal law by failing to adequately evaluate impacts on the three fish species.

Wanger also threw out the federal government's biological opinion on the 2004 Operations Criteria and Plan for management of the state and federal water project - which increased water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. He ordered that a new opinion must be completed by March 2009.

Kate Poole, one of the Natural Resources Defense Council attorneys working on the case, said the burden is on the federal and state agencies to show they can manage the water projects without harming fish while a new biological opinion is finalized.

She said Wanger appears most concerned with monitoring the operations from now until March 6, 2009, when the opinion is expected.

The plaintiffs have asked for a status conference on Sept. 4 so they can discuss what happens next, Poole said. If the report from the agencies is adequate, the judge may issue an order; if not, another round of hearings may result.

Lucero said that biological opinion will be critical to any decisions the bureau or the state make regarding how best to operate their respective water projects in the future.

Elizabeth Larson is a staff writer based in Lucerne.#

Redding Record-Searchlight- 8/3/08
By Record Searchlight staff

MANTON -- A 42-mile stretch of Battle Creek near here is about to get nearly $80 million in salmon and steelhead habitat improvements.

In what's been billed as one of the largest cold water anadromous fish restoration efforts in North America, six government agencies will team with a private utility to restore habitat in the creek, a tributary to the Sacramento River that runs through Shasta and Tehama counties.

The project will also restore an additional six miles of habitat in Battle Creek's tributaries. The effort will help restore winter- and spring-run Chinook and Central Valley steelhead, all of which are critically imperiled.

"Given the current salmon emergency, this restoration project demonstrates a commitment by all of the involved

entities to resolving habitat issues directed toward recovery of the various runs of salmon in the Sacramento River system," the agencies said in a news release. "The predominately spring-fed Battle Creek system is a reliable source of abundant cold water for salmon, even in a warming climate."

Teaming to implement the project are the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the California Department of Fish and Game, the California Wildlife Conservation Board, the California Department of Transportation, the Bay Area Toll Authority, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

The first phase of the project will target the removal or retrofitting of dams within the Battle Creek Hydroelectric Project. This will include installing fish screens and ladders at the North Battle Creek Feeder and Eagle Canyon Diversion Dams, removing Wildcat Diversion Dam and North Fork conveyance systems, installing an Eagle Canyon Canal pipeline and modifying Asbury Dam on Baldwin Creek.

The project also will increase cold water flows in Battle Creek to benefit salmon and steelhead, the news release said.

The Battle Creek Hydroelectric Project is a small system owned and operated by PG&E and licensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. PG&E supports the effort even though it will reduce the production of renewable energy, the release said.

The effort is funded with $42.75 million from various state agencies and another $6.5 million from the Iron Mountain Mine Trustee Council, as facilitated by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Bureau of Reclamation had already received $28 million from the CalFed Bay-Delta Program.

The partners hope to award first-phase construction contracts next year and that the work will be done in 2010. Other partners are being sought for additional phases, which would include installing an Inskip Powerhouse tailrace connector and bypass on the South Fork and installing a fish screen and ladder at the Inskip diversion dam.

Other work would include removing Lower Ripley Creek Feeder, Soap Creek Feeder, the Coleman and South diversion dams and various conveyance systems.#

The state Department of Water Resources and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation face a Sept. 15 court deadline to deliver a new biological opinion on their operations to protect the Delta smelt. The document, produced in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sets operating limits for the pumps to minimize harm to fish.

The agencies lost a federal lawsuit over their operations last year, and federal district Judge Oliver Wanger in December ordered them to prepare a new biological opinion.

The two giant pumping systems near Tracy kill millions of fish -- smelt and other species -- every year in the process of exporting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. About 25 million Californians in the Bay Area and Southern California depend on that water.

In a letter to Judge Wanger today, the water agencies asked for three more months to prepare the biological opinion, saying they "no longer believe it will be possible" to meet the Sept. 15 deadline. The Bee reported July 1 that the Fish and Wildlife Service repeatedly pleaded with Reclamation to provide more data to complete the study in time, but got no response.

Kate Poole, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said today her group won't contest the request for a deadline extension to Dec. 15.

"Our primary concern is that they do the biological opinion right, rather than fast," Poole said.#

By Robert Speer
Chico News & Review

Battle Creek is a pristine mountain stream that flows in two forks, North and South, from high country near Lassen Peak down through the Lassen front country, near the towns of Manton and Shingletown, and then into the Sacramento River about halfway between Red Bluff and Redding.

Historically the creek was prime salmon and steelhead spawning ground, but construction of a series of small Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power facilities, with their diversion dams, made it impossible for the fish to migrate, and today the salmon produced in the creek come from the Coleman National Fish Hatchery. It's located just three miles east of where Battle Creek, its two forks now conjoined, runs into the Sacramento River.

Two weeks ago, however, a group of five federal and state agencies, along with PG&E, announced a historic funding transfer agreement that ultimately will provide more than $100 million to restore a full 42 miles of prime Battle Creek spawning habitat, as well as six miles of habitat in its tributary streams.

The project, which is occurring in three phases, includes removal of five hydroelectric diversion dams, the installation of new screens and fish ladders on three other dams, and increased stream flows in both forks of Battle Creek.
"It's a big deal," said John McCamman, chief deputy director of the California Department of Fish and Game, one of the signatory agencies. "This type of project is key to the survival of the species, and we see this as a major effort in that process."

Jim Smith, a project manager in Red Bluff with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, another signatory, described the restoration effort as "really one of the largest comprehensive restoration projects in North America."
Both men, along with everyone else involved with the project, see it as a prototype for how government agencies, private power companies and local residents can work together to resolve their differences, come up with a plan and find the funding to restore salmon and steelhead spawning runs.

The impetus for the restoration project came, interestingly enough, not from local residents, but rather from coastal salmon-fishing groups. They were seeing their catches decline each year and drew the only conclusion that was feasible: Not enough fish were completing the spawning cycle.

In the late 1990s, the salmon fishers approached the USFWS, Smith said, and "asked that all the agencies sit down at the table and talk about what could be done."

Fisheries experts had long known that Battle Creek had great promise for restoration. Because it flows mostly through narrow canyons and is fed by cold-water springs along the way, its water stays cooler than that of any other creek in the Sacramento River watershed and is considered virtually "drought-proof." That makes it ideal for salmon and steelhead spawning, especially as global warming heats up spawning streams elsewhere.

Then as now, however, PG&E was operating under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission licensing agreements signed in the 1970s, at the height of an energy crisis, allowing it to divert nearly all of the creek's water into diversion canals. Today, in many sections of the creek, water runs at only three to five cubic feet per second-a trickle really, and far from sufficient to sustain salmon and steelhead.

Any restoration plan would require PG&E to forgo some of its power generation. To its credit, the giant utility company understood the urgency of the need to restore the fishery and was willing to compromise.

Mary Marshall, who works for the Bureau of Reclamation and for the past 4 years was project manager of the restoration effort, said the initial goal was twofold: to help the fish population and minimize the cost to PG&E. The result is that, while the utility is receiving some compensation in meeting its Endangered Species Act requirements, it is also giving up some of its power.

The power loss is about 15 percent in the first phase and 30 percent altogether, said Liv Imset, PG&E's project manager on the restoration effort.

The utility recognized early on that restoring Battle Creek was a unique opportunity, Imset said. "Everybody's opinion was that it had a very high chance of succeeding. …We understood that it would require a little bit of sacrifice on our part."
Paul Moreno, the spokesman for PG&E in this region, added that PG&E looked upon it as a way "to set an example of corporate responsibility."

There's not enough room here to list all the agencies and other groups involved in this project, nor to describe the sheer complexity of pulling it all together. Sharon Paquin-Gilmore, the coordinator of the Battle Creek Watershed Conservancy, a group of local landowners, said that the parties had to work though major differences of opinion to reach consensus and credits Marshall for her gentle perseverance in bringing people together.

Paquin-Gilmore is a retired Chico State University English instructor who has owned a house in Manton for more than 20 years and lives there now with her husband, Steve Gilmore, an architect who practiced for many years in Chico.
The conservancy was just forming at the time work began on developing the restoration plan, Paquin-Gilmore said, and as the plan evolved the group became increasingly involved, not only to point out potential shortcomings of the plan, but also to soften local resistance to it.

"There was a lot of distrust up here," she explained. "People were concerned about government regulations, that sort of thing." One way the group gained landowners' trust was by doing a watershed-wide assessment that successfully pressured the Coleman hatchery to change some practices that were seen as detrimental.

Paquin now also chairs the Greater Battle Creek Watershed Working Group, a consortium of public and private agencies and nonprofits ranging from the DFG and PG&E to The Nature Conservancy and the Nor-Cal Fishing Guides and Sportsmen's Association. Originally formed to aid in implementing the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, which has funded stream improvements up and down the valley, it now functions as a kind of über-advisory group to the restoration project team.

Paquin-Gilmore's work is typical of the "grassroots" nature of the project, Marshall said. The project began with citizens concerned about the health of fisheries who got various agencies to come up with a memorandum of understanding in 1999 that has led, ultimately, to a final plan, a funding agreement and a probable groundbreaking next summer.

At this point, the only step remaining is to obtain an amendment to PG&E's FERC license, which is expected to take about six months. The two required environmental-impact reports have both been certified, and $42.75 million in funding for the first phase is in the bag. The money comes from a variety of sources, but the bulk is from Proposition 50, an initiative passed in 2002 to pay for improving water sources.

The first phase (Phase 1A) will target the removal or retrofitting of five hydro dams in the area. Specifically, it includes installing fish screens and ladders at the North Battle Creek Feeder and Eagle Canyon Diversion Dams and removing Wildcat Diversion Dam and appurtenant conveyance systems of the North Fork, installing a pipeline in the Eagle Canyon canal and modifying Asbury Dam on Baldwin Creek.

That phase is expected to be completed in 2010.

Subsequent phases (Phases 1B and 2) include installing various tailrace connectors as well as fish screens and ladders and removing three more diversion dams.

Marshall is completely confident that the restoration will work and that within a few years Battle Creek will have a significant population of wild salmon and steelhead.

"The will definitely help the fish," she said. "But it also goes to show what can happen when people make a cooperative effort through the years. All of the parties recognized how valuable each one's contribution was, and all understood the value of their effort to the environment."

San Francisco, July 23, 2008 - California's salmon are teetering on the edge of extinction and the salmon fishing industry is facing economic devastation, but a report released today establishes a framework to help address this crisis. The report concludes that providing a more reliable water supply for the San Francisco Bay Delta Estuary could help save fish, including salmon, while also helping to ensure adequate water for farms, cities, and the 25 million Californians who rely on the Bay-Delta's water.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) report is titled "Finding the Balance: A Vision for Water Supply and Environmental Reliability in California." The report outlines steps that state and federal leaders must take to end a vicious cycle of water shortages and environmental near-disasters, and instead create a stable and reliable water supply. That, in turn, should help guarantee environmental reliability - a condition where all necessary ecological, political and economic systems are in place to ensure the Bay Delta and its fisheries are self-sustaining into the future.

"Our water supplies will remain vulnerable as long as we allow the environment to remain at the brink of disaster," said Laura Harnish, EDF's Regional Director in San Francisco and an author of the report. "For decades, water users have sought to pump additional water out of our Central Valley streams, then species have declined, and ultimately the courts are forced to step in to prevent an environmental catastrophe. This paper outlines a way to break our endless, self-defeating water cycle and improve both water supply and environmental reliability for California's future."

California has been mired in water wars for much of its history, but the situation is now particularly severe. The state's once prolific and profitable salmon fishery is at its lowest ebb in decades, and this year's salmon season was closed for the first time ever, resulting in huge economic losses to the fishing industry. Parts of California's famed agricultural economy also are suffering losses this summer because of severe drought, and courts have been forced to order water cutbacks to protect endangered fish, including salmon and the Delta smelt - the "canary in the coal mine" for the health of the overall Bay-Delta system.

State and policy leaders have launched several efforts to address the crises, including creating the Governor's Blue Ribbon Delta Vision Task Force, supporting an Assembly bill to release emergency funds raised by earlier bonds, and proposing a new $9.3 billion water bond just announced by the governor. A local think tank, the Public Policy Institute of California, also recently released a report supporting the construction of a new peripheral canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

"We have great opportunity right now to create a reliable water supply for future generations of Californians and for salmon as well," said Cynthia Koehler, an environmental lawyer and consultant for EDF, and an author of the report. "If the plans under development can meet the criteria we set out in this report, we can have a system that meets all our environmental and water supply needs in the long term."

The report's recommendations include:

* Provide adequate freshwater flows to restore fisheries and habitat in the Bay-Delta to self-sustaining levels, and make sure the projected levels take into account the looming effects of global warming;

* Guarantee stable and secure funding so that key restoration projects are not merely planned, but executed;

* Create financial incentives that will encourage all Californians to do a far better job of conserving water;

* Create legally mandated performance measures and legal safety nets;

* Improve enforcement so that water managers will be held accountable and promises will be kept.

"We believe that California has enough water for its people, farms, and fish," said Harnish. "If we manage our water better, we can protect our state's economy and our environment. We can have a thriving fishing industry in the future, and we can make sure our farms are able to produce the food and jobs that we need."#

Attorneys representing state and federal water projects said Wednesday that they could prove the massive system of pumps, dams and canals isn't harming three threatened fish species.

U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger gave them until Aug. 29 to submit reports showing that's true.

Wednesday's action was the latest in a long-running fight between environmental groups and the state and federal governments over the projects' effect on winter-run Chinook salmon, spring-run Chinook salmon and Central Valley steelhead, all of which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

On Friday, Wanger issued a written opinion that three fish species are at risk of extinction, and the state and federal water project operations are further jeopardizing them.

Attorneys for the environmental groups who sued to protect the three species will review the reports and, if they are dissatisfied, could press Wanger to take action to protect the fish.

"It's their job to figure out how to fix that," Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Kate Poole said of the coming reports. "It makes sense the first go-around to propose what is sufficient."

Among things they could request are restricting water exports out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta when juveniles of the three species are migrating, and lowering water temperatures in the American River below Folsom Dam to assist spawning. Cooler water from Folsom Lake could be released to change water temperature.

During the hearing Wednesday, the parties participated by telephone. Wanger ordered both sides back in his Fresno courtroom Sept. 4. That's when the environmental groups are expected to say whether they are satisfied with the state and federal government reports that the species are being protected, or whether they believe further action is necessary.

"We'll have to see what it looks like," Poole said. "There are a bunch of different scenarios that could play out. It all depends on the adequacy of the plan."

Attorneys for the state and federal governments and their water-contractor allies could not be reached to comment.

The report would cover Central Valley Project operations through early March, when federal biologists are scheduled to finish a new plan on the operation's effects on the three species.#

San Francisco Chronicle- 7/24/08
Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer

A federal judge in Fresno ordered state and federal water regulators Wednesday to come up with an interim plan by the end of August for protecting migrating salmon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger set a deadline of Aug. 29 for the agencies to spell out how they intend to protect winter- and spring-run chinook and steelhead trout until March, when a more comprehensive plan, known as a biological opinion, is scheduled to be released.

Wanger scheduled a court hearing Sept. 4 to discuss the interim plan.

The order followed Wanger's ruling Friday that blamed pumping and diversion policies by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources for contributing to the demise of the three salmonid species.

The hearings are a response to a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice and several other environmental and fishing organizations accusing the government of endangering salmon and steelhead.

Mike Sherwood, an attorney for Earthjustice, said it is extremely important to have such a plan in place because juvenile salmon pass through the delta on their way back to the ocean in December, January, February and March and are particularly vulnerable to being sucked into the pumps.

"We're hopeful that they will do the right thing, and that what they submit to the court on Aug. 29 will be adequate," Sherwood said. "We will be monitoring that closely, and if it isn't adequate I guess there will be more hearings."

Delta water supplies 25 million Californians with drinking water and irrigates 750,000 acres of cropland. It is also an integral part of the migration pattern of the vast majority of spawning salmon along the West Coast, where there was a near catastrophic decline in ocean salmon this year.#

Chico Enterprise Record- 7/23/08
By LAURA URSENY - Staff Writer

A new injection of money is moving a repair project on the Iron Canyon Fish Ladder in upper Bidwell Park a step closer to completion.

And, in a reversal of an earlier position, blasting can be avoided in the canyon created by Big Chico Creek.

Built in the late 1950s, the fish ladder's ability to move fish in the creek has diminished, both because of the degradation of the structure, helped along by falling basalt boulders, and the structure's poor performance during dry years, actually stranding fish in the pools.

At a meeting Tuesday night, Susan Strachan, environmental projects manager for Chico State University's College of Engineering, Computer Science and Construction Management, provided an update, including news about money and blasting.

Strachan, who also works with the university's Research Foundation, announced the foundation and Big Chico Creek Watershed Alliance have received a $220,068 grant from U.S. Fish and Wildlife for the preliminary work. That includes conducting environmental review, obtaining environmental permits from a variety of agencies, and locating grant funding for the actual work, which is estimated to cost about $1.8 million and take about three months. The repaired ladder's life should be about 50 years.

Strachan said there are several public and private foundations that might provide grants for improving fisheries.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife has said the value of spring-run salmon in Big Chico Creek makes the ladder's repair a priority.

Last year some of the Bidwell Park and Playground Commission members voiced concern over possible damage to upper Bidwell Park.

But the project consultants now say only one rock section, rather than several, needs to be removed so it won't topple onto the repaired ladder. The removal can be done by an excavator and equipment, Strachan said.

The project calls for scraping a road over an existing track and setting up a 400-foot by 100-foot staging area west of Parking Lot P for trucks for hauling supplies; concrete pads for trailers, a generator and water tanks and one or two cranes that would get workers and supplies to the water-level site.

A construction elevator or hoist to access the creek from the canyon top would also have to be installed, as well as a work platform at creek level. The creek would have to be diverted away from the ladder, too.

A host of permits are required from agencies such as Army Corps of Engineers, Regional Water Quality Control Board, state Water Resources Control Board, Reclamation Board and state Fish and Game.

The Bidwell Park and Playground Commission also needs to vote on the project, which also may be reviewed by the City Council.

Strachan said further public input on the project is possible when environmental documents come out in early August. A tour of the site is planned on Aug. 23. Individuals should meet at Parking Lot P at 8 a.m., and be prepared for a rigorous hike.#

San Francisco Chronicle – 7/19/08

By Peter Fimrite, staff writer

A federal judge in Fresno affirmed Friday that water diversions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have jeopardized the existence of California's beleaguered salmon.

It was the latest in a string of rulings ordering state and federal regulators to fix a water system that supplies millions of Californians with water but is all but dysfunctional when it comes to protecting fisheries and the environment.

U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger told the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources to come up with ways to protect salmon and steelhead trout, but declined to order any immediate remedies.

Wanger's 118-page ruling was issued as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and several other environmental organizations accusing the government of endangering salmon and steelhead. The plaintiffs had asked the judge to immediately curtail water diversions.

"We are frustrated that the court denied our requests," said Doug Obegi, a lawyer for the council. "We want to assure that the water projects are operated to sustain fisheries and farming. The court's decision shows that management has not achieved that balance. The system is really out of balance, and the court's opinion recognizes that what's happening right now puts salmon and steelhead in danger of extinction."

The plan now is to hold more court hearings on what to do about the problem before March 2009, when the bureau is required to issue a new "biological opinion" outlining its plans to deliver water and at the same time protect winter- and spring-run chinook and steelhead trout in the Sacramento River.

Wanger had ruled in April that water regulators failed to consider the effects of global warming and other environmental issues related to the decline of California salmon when they approved increased pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

The decision invalidated the original biological opinion that said the salmon would not be adversely affected by pumping.

The report comes amid a statewide fisheries crisis. The number of salmon in the ocean plummeted this year, prompting a ban of fishing all along the California and Oregon coasts.

Some marine biologists claim the problem resulted from a lack of nutrients in the ocean caused by global warming, but most fisheries experts believe the biggest impact is from dams, diversions and development along the Sacramento River system, which is the primary spawning grounds.

However, curtailing water diversions means cutting back on the flow of drinking water for 25 million Californians and irrigation for 750,000 acres of cropland.

California's state and federal water project was established about 100 years ago and is an integral part of the state's infrastructure. Changing it would become a political football up and down the state, affecting the economy as well as the environment.

Still, even those who have interests in water rights and support diversions admit the state's water distribution system is in turmoil.

"Everyone is realizing the delta is broken and there needs to be some kind of fix that will meet the needs of the citizens who receive water as well as for the environment," said Sarah Woolf, spokeswoman for the Westlands Water District, an agricultural area representing farmers who produce 60 commodities, including most of the state's lettuce, almonds, tomatoes, pistachios and grapes.

"We need some sort of conveyance around the delta," Woolf said. "Everything is pointing to a peripheral canal as the solution."

The water fight started in February 2005 when environmentalists sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after the agency issued an opinion saying delta smelt would not be harmed by water diversions. The council and its co-plaintiffs challenged the biological opinion for salmon and steelhead a couple months after the delta smelt lawsuit was filed.

The Natural Resources Defense Council urged Wanger to require the bureau to open the gates of the Red Bluff Diversion Dam earlier than normal. The dam is usually closed on Memorial Day to create a lake for boat racing and other festivities. Water from the lake is then diverted for farmers and other users through an irrigation channel.

Obegi said juvenile salmon heading downstream get caught behind the dam and are eaten by predatory fish.

"When the dam is in, the fish get concentrated," he said. "They go down the fish ladders on the side and the predators know exactly where the fish are coming and wait there. It's like serving them up on a dinner plate."

Environmentalists also wanted Wanger to impose minimum stream flows on Clear Creek to store more water in Lake Shasta to make sure there is adequate flow year-round and to increase the amount of spawning habitat by releasing colder water farther downstream.

The judge apparently decided not to grant the council's requests because the defendants already had agreed to some operational changes, including opening the Red Bluff Diversion Dam slightly earlier than originally planned and increasing flows on Clear Creek, near Red Bluff, to better protect salmon and steelhead.

The latest hubbub comes in the wake of a ruling last year to protect the endangered delta smelt. That decision was attacked by lobbying groups for 400 agencies that deliver the state's water. They claimed cropland would go fallow and cities in the Tri-Valley, Santa Clara County, Los Angeles and other areas of the state would have to institute mandatory rationing programs to deal with the water cutbacks.

Drought conditions have combined with the water situation to make some of those concerns a reality.

"We've abandoned thousands of acres of crops, and hundred of jobs have been lost for farmworkers this year," Woolf said.

The ruling

"Project operations through March 2009 will appreciably increase jeopardy to the three species. ... All three testifying experts ... conclude that the three salmonid species are not viable and are all in jeopardy of extinction. Based on two drought years, with critically dry hydrologic conditions in 2008, and the presently unpredictable risk of a third dry year, the three species are unquestionably in jeopardy."#

Contra Costa Times – 7/18/08
By Mike Taugher, staff writer

A federal judge has concluded that California's water operations are driving some salmon runs toward extinction — but he declined to intervene.

The order, issued late Friday by U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger in Fresno, contained both good news and bad news for environmentalists and commercial salmon fishing advocates, representatives of those groups said.

Although they did not win immediate measures to protect the fish, the judge's conclusions mean regulators will be forced to impose more protective conditions when they issue a new permit in March, lawyers said.

"It's a clear signal that business as usual in the Delta is not going to be acceptable," said Kate Poole, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

At issue is how water is stored in Northern California and delivered through the Delta to parts of the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. Those operations have taken a severe toll on several fish populations.

The order addressed winter-run salmon, spring-run salmon and steelhead. It did not address fall-run salmon, the backbone of the state's commercial salmon fishery that collapsed last year and forced the state's first-ever closure of the salmon season. Fall-run are not covered by endangered species laws.

"The system is badly broken," Poole said. "The record high exports that we've been taking out of the Delta have been crashing fish and killing the fishing industry. These agencies are pretty much incapable of turning that around."

Environmentalists and fishers sought more cold water for Sacramento River salmon, minimum flows on Clear Creek and opening a diversion dam at Red Bluff.

The judge denied those requests but scheduled a hearing next week to chart a course for other requests, if environmentalists decide to pursue them.

"The conflict continues," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies.

The ruling follows Wanger's order in April that, for the second time in a year, struck down an endangered species permit for the state's Delta-centered water system.

A year earlier, Wanger blocked a permit issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that was supposed to implement limitations to prevent Delta smelt from going extinct.

Wanger followed up that order by sharply curtailing Delta pumping.

The April order struck down a similar permit issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service that is meant to protect winter-run salmon, spring-run salmon and steelhead from extinction.

That permit had been issued in 2004 under unusual circumstances.

Although biologists in the federal agency concluded that issuing the permit could push the fish to extinction, that conclusion was overturned by James Lecky, at the time a regional boss but now the Bush administration's top official overseeing marine endangered species.#

Los Angeles Times – 7/19/08

By Eric Bailey, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

SACRAMENTO -- A federal judge struck a largely symbolic blow for imperiled salmon and steelhead Friday, declaring that the state's vast water-export system is putting the fish at risk but rejecting environmentalists' key demands for change.

U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger of Fresno said in a 118-page opinion that the Central Valley's winter- and spring-run salmon as well as the remnants of its once-thriving steelhead population are being threatened by the dams and aqueducts that store and move water around California.

The water projects' operations "appreciably increase jeopardy to the three species," Wanger concluded, saying it is "undisputed" that water exports will in the short term continue to kill eggs, fry and juveniles while reducing the abundance and distribution of the fish and the chances of long-term recovery.

But the judge denied several remedies suggested by environmental attorneys with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice, such as storing more water behind Shasta Dam to be released for migrating salmon and opening a pivotal diversion dam's gates to allow the fish to reach spawning grounds.

Fishermen who have seen this year's salmon season canceled because of a historic slump in returning fish gave the ruling a tepid review.

"It's a mixed bag," said Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns., one of the plaintiffs. "It verified what we've been saying all along -- that the fish are in jeopardy. But he did nothing to fix it."

Wanger's decree stems from a long-running battle over a 2004 biological study by the National Marine Fisheries Service that was used to justify boosted water exports from Northern California.

Citing the threat to salmon and steelhead, environmentalists successfully sued last April. Federal officials plan to wrap up a new biological study by March spelling out operational changes needed to keep the state's water system functioning without endangering the fish.

Wanger, meanwhile, held a series of hearings over five weeks in June and early July, letting both sides argue about whether short-term changes were needed to safeguard the fish in the meantime.

During those hearings, state and federal water agencies voluntarily agreed to some operational changes to better protect the fish, such as earlier opening of a diversion dam and increased water flows down a key tributary. But environmentalists and fishermen wanted more.

The judge's ruling Friday forcefully sided with environmentalists on the peril facing the fish, even spelling out a worst-case scenario in which the entire population of winter-run salmon in 2009 could be wiped out if officials fail to hold back enough cold water in Shasta Dam.

But he said a "scientific and evidentiary dispute" undercut the merits of environmentalists' proposed changes. He set a hearing Wednesday to hear further arguments.

Wanger's latest decision comes nearly a year after he ordered a pivotal shift in water operations because of concerns about Delta smelt, a tiny endangered fish that lives only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. That ruling has resulted in a 30% cutback in Delta water exports this year.#

Sacramento Valley farmers are breathing a sigh of relief now that an immediate threat to their water supply has been resolved. Late last month a federal district judge in Fresno denied an emergency request by environmentalists to lift the gates of the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, which would have sent an estimated 300,000 acre-feet of water down river.

The request was made to help endangered fish migrate upstream to spawn in the Sacramento River and its tributaries.

Testimony revealed, however, that most of the chinook upward spring migration has already concluded and only an incidental number of salmon would benefit from the emergency action.

"We're relieved that farmers who receive water delivered through the Tehama Colusa Canal can continue to receive water during the height of the irrigation season, at least for now," said Chris Scheuring, California Farm Bureau Federation Natural Resources and Environmental Division managing counsel.

"But, the ongoing litigation, as well as the situation in the San Joaquin Valley, are evidence that species laws are colliding with the water needs of both urban and agricultural California," Scheuring said. "The only long-term solution is to ease the underlying water scarcity by bringing new supplies online to match the state's growing needs."

The request for emergency relief came in the middle of an ongoing trial related to the decline of endangered winter and spring chinook salmon and steelhead runs.

During the emergency proceeding, about 18 irrigation districts faced the prospect of an immediate cutoff of water. That action, if it had been approved by the court, would have come at the height of irrigation season in the Sacramento Valley.

Water transported through the canal is delivered to farmers in Tehama, Colusa, Glenn and northern Yolo counties.

"We're breathing a sigh of relief, at least temporarily," said Orland farmer Mike Vereschagin. "This situation has everyone quite worried. The court's denial will help us finish up this season's crops and move toward harvest."

Vereschagin, who is president of the Glenn County Farm Bureau, said farmers who use water supplied through the canal grow crops on about 150,000 acres valued at about $250 million a year. He said the agricultural community remains concerned about what the court might rule for the operation of the dam's gates and diversions in August.

"It looks now like we'll squeak by," he said. "But July is a critical month here for orchard crops."

Unfortunately, Vereschagin said, reliance on well water is becoming more difficult since the water table is dropping and there's a very long wait to have wells lowered or drilled in the four-county area.

"We've had reports of agricultural wells going dry and now we're beginning to hear reports of a few domestic wells going dry too," he said. "Well drillers are telling me that for the big rigs--those that can go down 1,000-plus feet--they've got at least three months worth of drilling ahead of them."

At the conclusion of the late June proceedings, Federal District Judge Oliver Wanger said that while he was denying the emergency motion to immediately lift the gates at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, he is leaning toward ordering the gates open as early as Sept. 2.

That would be about two weeks earlier than normal and would be an effort to ease the down migration of juvenile salmon making their way to the ocean for two years before returning to the Sacramento River. Wanger said he wants to hear more testimony on that matter before issuing a final ruling.

Though irrigation peaks in July and August, if September is a hot month, Vereschagin said opening the gates two weeks early could again threaten growers with a loss of water at a critical time.

Red Bluff Diversion Dam on the Sacramento River was completed in 1964. It's a concrete structure--52 feet high and about 6,000 feet long with 11 gates--located about two miles southeast of Red Bluff.

When the dam's gates are closed, the water level rises behind the dam and water flows by gravity into the 111-mile-long Tehama Colusa Canal to the water districts for distribution. The canal also supplies water for 20,000 acres of Sacramento Valley wildlife refuges.

The National Marine Fisheries Service redesignated the Sacramento River winter-run chinook endangered in December 1993. In April of this year, Wanger invalidated part of the biological opinion aimed at protecting the winter and spring salmon runs from the operational effects of the Central Valley Project, as well as protecting steelhead runs, because it did not adequately protect these three fish species.

Because of the uncertainties about the water supply, Vereschagin said he has been relying on groundwater early in the growing season and counting on surface water deliveries for later.

"We'll continue now as planned," he said. "I've been saving my district water and planned to start using it in July and August, when groundwater will be at the lowest level. If the judge had ruled against us, I would have lost a lot of water.

"Some farmers have purchased supplemental water, at triple the price, to have it transferred in when needed from behind the dam. There was concern about whether we'd even be able to use that purchased water," Vereschagin said.

For nearly a decade, the Tehama Colusa Canal Authority has been trying to get a pump station built that would supply the water conveyance system without drawing on water collected behind the dam.

A $160 million construction project to install adequately sized pumps has completed environmental reviews and is moving toward the permitting stage. There currently is an experimental pump at the head of the canal with a pumping capacity of about 465 cubic feet per second, but peak water demand requires about 1,000 to 1,200 cfs.

"We're moving in the direction of a permanent solution that will provide long-term water supply reliability for farmers while simultaneously providing benefits to the fishery resource," said Jeff Sutton, Tehama Colusa Canal Authority general manager. "The Red Bluff Fish Passage Improvement Project consists of construction of a state-of-the-art, positive barrier fish screen and a pumping plant at the canal's Red Bluff headworks.

"These new facilities will address the issues of species protection and water supply reliability," Sutton said. "The project will follow in the footsteps of success stories we've seen all along the Sacramento River for fish screens and managed diversions. That benefits farmers and gets us out from under the regulatory umbrella of the Endangered Species Act.

"For now, the judge's denial of the request to raise the Red Bluff Diversion Dam gates will allow us to continue water deliveries," he said. "Now we go back to the status-of-the-species phase of the trial. That still could result in operating constraints until the National Marine Fisheries Service issues a new biological opinion in March 2009."

If the court finds during the current proceedings that Central Valley Project operations are causing jeopardy to the endangered fish species, it could impose interim remedies to increase protections.

Proposed interim actions include:

* Modifying Lake Shasta water releases to establish and maintain a water temperature of 56 degrees Fahrenheit at Balls Ferry.

* Modifying Shasta Reservoir releases to conserve water and maximize the amount of stored water--especially cold water-- carried over to the 2009 water year, which would further reduce water supplies for this year. Water years operate from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.

* Open Red Bluff Diversion Dam gates to allow passage of adult salmon and reduce mortality of juveniles. There currently are fish ladders at this location, which experts say may slow migration but does not prevent it.

* Maintain Clear Creek flows at a minimum of 200 cfs in June and a minimum of 150 cfs in July and August.

"The outcome of this case is important to farmers and ranchers throughout the state," Scheuring said. "Until the trial concludes, Farm Bureau will continue to vigorously defend the rights of our members and also work to ensure the court's final ruling takes these rights into consideration."#

Associated Press- 7/8/08
By SAMANTHA YOUNG

MOUNT SHASTA, Calif. -- Reaching more than 14,000 feet above sea level, Mt. Shasta dominates the landscape of high plains and conifer forests in far Northern California.

While it's not California's tallest mountain, the tongues of ice creeping down Shasta's volcanic flanks give the solitary mountain another distinction. Its seven glaciers, referred to by American Indians as the footsteps made by the creator when he descended to Earth, are the only historical glaciers in the continental U.S. known to be growing.

With global warming causing the retreat of glaciers in the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere in the Cascades, Mt. Shasta is actually benefiting from changing weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean.

"When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking," said Slawek Tulaczyk, an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "These glaciers seem to be benefiting from the warming ocean."

Warmer temperatures have cut the number of glaciers at Montana's Glacier National Park from 150 to 26 since 1850, and some scientists project there will be none left within 25 to 30 years. The timeline for the storied snows at Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro is even shorter, while the ice fields of Patagonia in Argentina and Chile also are retreating.

It's a different story at Mt. Shasta, at the southern end of the Cascade Range and about 270 miles north of San Francisco.

Scientists say a warming Pacific Ocean means more moist air sweeping over far Northern California. Because of Shasta's location and 14,162-foot elevation, the precipitation is falling as snow, adding to the mass of the mountain's glaciers.

"It's a bit of an anomaly that they are growing, but it's not to be unexpected," said Ed Josberger, a glaciologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Tacoma, Wash., who is currently studying retreating glaciers in Alaska and the northern Cascades of Washington.

Historical weather records show Mt. Shasta has received 17 percent more precipitation in the last 110 years. The glaciers have soaked up the snowfall and have been adding more snow than is lost through summer melting.

The additional snowfall has been enough to overcome a 1.8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature in the last century, according to a 2003 analysis by Tulaczyk, who led a team studying Shasta's glaciers.

By comparison, the glaciers in the Sierra Nevada, which are about 560 miles south of Mt. Shasta, are exposed to warmer summer temperatures and are retreating.

The Sierra's 498 ice formations - glaciers and ice fields - have shrunk by about half their size over the past 100 years, with those exposed to direct sunlight shrinking fastest, said Andrew Fountain, a geology professor at Portland State University who has inventoried the glaciers in the continental U.S. as part of a federal initiative.

He said Shasta's seven glaciers are the only ones scientists have identified as getting larger, with the exception of a small glacier in the shaded crater of Washington state's Mount St. Helens. It formed after the 1980 eruption blasted away slightly more than half the mountain's ice, and scientists believe it will not grow in area once it stretches outside the shade of the crater.

Glaciologists say most glaciers in Alaska and Canada are retreating, but there are too many to study them all.

Four glaciers at Mt. Rainier in Washington state are staying about the same size. Those glaciers - shielded from the sun on the north and east sides of the mountain - have received just enough snow to keep them from shrinking, Fountain said.

But Shasta's glaciers have been advancing since the end of a drought in the early 20th century. The mountain's smallest glaciers - named Konwakiton, Watkins and Mud Creek - have more than doubled in length since 1950.

Shasta's largest glacier, the Hotlum, grew more than 600 yards between 1944 and 2003 and covers nearly 2 square miles of the mountain's northeastern face. The Whitney glacier grows up to 4 inches a day in winter and is about 2.4 miles long.#

The Sacramento Bee- 7/4/08
By Matt Weiser

SACRAMENTO – Salmon fishing on Central Valley rivers was closed Thursday to protect what's left of the fall-run chinook population.

No chinook may be kept anywhere on the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers or tributaries, including the American and Feather rivers.

The only exception is Nov. 1 to Dec. 31 on the Sacramento River between the Red Bluff Diversion Dam and Knights Landing. Anglers may possess one salmon at a time from this area during the open period.

Catch-and-release salmon fishing is not prohibited, and it is OK to keep other species.

But the California Department of Fish and Game discourages the public from targeting salmon for catch-and-release fishing to avoid stressing the population. If catch-and-release is found to be killing salmon, more restrictions may be ordered.

The closures were approved earlier this year in response to an unprecedented decline in the chinook population. Spawning fish returning to rivers this fall are expected to set historic lows.

Also closed are all ocean waters off California and Oregon. The Smith, Klamath and Trinity rivers remain open to salmon fishing. Those salmon populations are stronger this year.

The new biological opinion, expected early next year from the National Marine Fisheries Service, will be an important part of moving forward, he said.#

Capital Ag Press- 7/4/08
Elizabeth Larson, Capital Press

A federal judge has turned down a request by fishing and environmental groups that could have resulted in the removal of the Red Bluff Diversion Dam.

"We dodged a bullet but we're not out of the woods," said Jeff Sutton, general manager of the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority based in Willows.

Judge Oliver Wanger denied a request for emergency injunctive relief on Friday, June 27, in Fresno. The motion had been filed by the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations/Institute for Fisheries Resources and the National Resources Defense Council, according to court records.

The case looks at the impacts of the Central Valley Project on the Sacramento River winter-run chinook salmon, the Central Valley spring-run chinook salmon and the Central Valley steelhead.

The ruling followed a two-week hearing, said Sutton, who was in the courtroom. Wanger found that some of his conclusions about the project and its impact on fish was based on wrong data, which led him to continue the hearing to allow more evidence to be submitted.

Sutton said Wanger ultimately decided to deny the request for emergency relief to take the dam out, finding there was insignificant harm to the spring chinook salmon if it remains through July.

Wanger also ruled that the dam's gates could stay down until Aug. 1, which poses a concern.

"August 1 does not take us to the end of the irrigation period," Sutton said.

If the diversion dam's gates are lifted mid-season, when peak demand hits between 1,200 and 1,800 cubic feet per second, it would put the entire service area at risk, said Sutton.

The diversion dam serves the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority, which stretches 125 miles from Red Bluff to Dunnigan. The system in turn services 18 districts, all of them Central Valley Project contractors, Sutton said.

The 300,000 acre feet of Central Valley Project water making its way through the canal system supplies $250 million worth of crops on 150,000 acres in Tehama, Colusa, Glenn and Yolo counties, Sutton said.

Sutton said the dam and the water it provides has a $1 billion economic benefit for the region.

"Should an adverse ruling come down the road, it would be an economic disaster to the regional economy," he said.

Hearings are continuing in the trial's species phase, Sutton said.

"We are very glad that that has not been taken down," said Tim Miramontes, president of the Yolo County Farm Bureau.

The northern part of Yolo County gets a lot of its water from the diversion dam, which Miramontes said is used to irrigate 15,000 acres of crops, mostly tree crops such as almonds, as well as alfalfa, grapes, sunflowers and other field crops.

Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, said the lawsuit began by taking issues with Central Valley Project delta pumping operations, then spread north to look at other operations, including Red Bluff.

Grader said he believes Wanger's decision offers some good news.

"The way I read his decision, it certainly does open the door for looking at changes," although maybe not this year, he said.

The decision definitely tells the people in Red Bluff that impounding water has to go, said Grader.#

LIVINGSTON STONE HATCHERY -- A tiny fish at the heart of the big Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water controversy is being bred at a north state hatchery.

The delta smelt -- the 3-inch long subject of lawsuits over water supplies, bellwether of delta health and recipient of federal species protection -- is part of a pilot program at Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery, a small hatchery on the Sacramento River near the base of Shasta Dam.

There hatchery workers are employing techniques on the finger-long fish that long have been used for retrieving sperm and eggs from salmon, said Scott Hamelberg, project leader for the Coleman National Fish Hatchery Complex, which includes Livingston Stone.

“What they have done here is pretty incredible,” he said.

A crash in the number of delta smelt during the last five years led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of California at Davis to start work on the pilot program, which is aimed at developing a system to breed the small fish, which was listed by the federal government as a threatened species in 1993.

“There is a great concern about the numbers of these fish left in the environment,” Hamelberg said.

But that doesn’t mean these fish will be going wild.

Currently there is no plan to reintroduce the 20,000 smelt raised at Livingston Stone into the delta, said John Rueth, assistant hatchery manager. Rather, they are being kept as a safety net in case the ongoing population crash causes extinction of the species in the wild.

“They’ll be held primarily as a back-up population,” he said.

Another emergency stock of smelts is being held by UC Davis scientists in Byron, within the delta itself, Hamelberg said.

Raising a delta smelt isn’t easy. The aggressive little fish doesn’t want cold food — it wants to hunt live microorganisms or won’t eat. So Rueth said he and the hatchery’s other worker have to also raise the rotifers and young brine shrimp that are the smelts’ favorite prey.

“You have to grow your own food to feed a delta smelt,” he said.

In tanks that are small models of those used to raise endangered winter-run Chinook salmon in the hatchery’s main building, workers have reared young smelt — which are microscopic at first, then barely visible to the naked eye as juveniles because of their thin, clear bodies.

The fish prefer murky water, making finding them more difficult early in their life. So hatchery workers need to add algae to achieve the green color that allows them to see their prey, Rueth said.

Once grown, the miniature fish will be part of a tagging experiment. A new system will be developed to tag the tiny smelt — Hamelberg said scientists don’t know what the tags will look like yet, or how they will be fastened to the fish.

The pilot project should continue for about five years, and a permanent smelt-breeding operation could supplant it, Hamelberg said. The project has cost about $100,000 so far, with most of that going to setting up the tanks, tubes and other equipment used to breed the smelt.

Built in 1997, Livingston Stone was chosen as the sight for the pilot project because it is one of only two federal fish hatcheries in the state, Coleman National Fish Hatchery near Anderson being the other.

As a result of the smelt’s population crash, a federal judge ordered water users to draw less water from the delta in recent years.

“Any time you are affecting water supply for a fish it is going to be controversial,” said Kim Webb, project leader at the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Stockton office.#

CHICO, Calif. (AP) -- State Department of Fish and Game crews have rounded up more than 300 stray salmon and returned them to their rightful spawning path.

The migrating spring-run salmon are supposed to swim up Butte Creek Canyon to find cold water in which to spawn in the fall.

But the threatened fish got stuck in two pools just west of Highway 99. Rescue crews on Wednesday used nets to capture the fish one-by-one and drive them to the canyon.

Department of Fish and Game officials say the cold water fish probably would have died in the pools when the water got too warm.

Authorities say they rescued the fish because there are fewer salmon returning to the Central Valley this year.#

The San Francisco Chronicle- 7/3/08
Paul Johnson,Brian J. Johnson

The recipe for bringing back wild salmon is simple - ample cold, clean water; access to spawning and rearing areas; and abundant supplies of food. It's not complicated, but it will require a sustained commitment from everyone who values wild, local salmon.

Those who love to dine on salmon today are faced with a choice: wild-caught salmon harvested by fishermen or farmed salmon grown and harvested in captivity. This year, with the collapse of the West Coast's commercial salmon fishery, locally caught, wild California salmon is not available, but wild-caught Alaskan salmon is. We must continue to choose and demand wild, rather than farmed, salmon - on our plates, in our markets, and in our restaurants.

Why? Wild salmon are better for the environment, our health and for the communities that depend on them. Farmed salmon jeopardize wild salmon populations, directly and indirectly. Even organically, ecologically, or sustainably farmed salmon have a devastating effect on wild Pacific salmon species.

The simple act of choosing wild over farmed salmon sends a message to business and government that we want healthy wild salmon runs and sustainable fisheries. It is a vote to restore habitat, improve water management, take down obsolete dams and manage our salmon runs sustainably.

The salmon crisis affects communities up and down the Pacific Coast: from commercial and recreational fishermen to marina owners, from hotels to restaurants, and fish wholesalers and retailers to consumers. We can't let this year's closed West Coast fishery become the new normal.

As a consumer, you have a big role to play: vote with your fork. By asking for wild salmon at local stores and restaurants, and supporting businesses with a conservation ethic, you use the power of the marketplace to help recover wild and maintain salmon stocks. Wild salmon are a heritage we cannot afford to lose.

Choosing wild over farmed salmon means we can increase the quality of our food, restructure markets for agriculture and food delivery, and usher in a new era of land and water stewardship and fishery health.

Choosing wild salmon supports decision-makers who favor water and land-use policies that protect rivers and the wild salmon and steelhead that swim in them. When economic horsepower and public demand join forces with conservation, wild salmon - and those who love them - will benefit.

It's your choice.#