In what is being touted as the world's biggest dam-removal project, an agreement was reached Tuesday to remove four dams on the Klamath River and restore a 300-mile migratory route for California's beleaguered salmon.

The tentative agreement was reached after a decade of negotiations among 28 parties, including American Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen and the hydroelectric company that operates the dams and distributes the water. The plan would set in motion one of the most ambitious efforts in U.S. history to restore the habitat of a federally protected species if it receives final approval by the parties in December, as expected.

The dams - Iron Gate, Copco 1, Copco 2 and J.C. Boyle - have blocked salmon migration for a century along the California-Oregon border and have been blamed for much of the historic decline of chinook and coho salmon and steelhead trout in the Klamath. Under the plan, the dams operated by the utility, PacificCorp, would be dismantled beginning in 2020.

The ultimate goal of the so-called Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement is to restore what has historically been the third-largest source of salmon in the lower 48 states, behind the Columbia and Sacramento rivers. Chinook once swam all the way up to Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon, providing crucial sustenance to American Indians, including the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath and Hoopa Valley tribes.

"This is the deal that we have all been working on for 10 years," said Steve Rothert, the California director of American Rivers, a national nonprofit river conservation group. "There were a lot of people who didn't think we could do this, and some groups that worked actively to prevent it. It's fantastic that we've reached this spot."

The groups involved in the negotiations agreed Tuesday to take the proposal to their various boards and commissions for approval and then have everybody sign the final document in December.

The project, which would cost an estimated $450 million, is then expected to go through nearly three years of study and cost analysis before it lands on the desk of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in 2012. "This agreement marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Klamath River and for the communities whose health and way of life depend on it," Salazar said Tuesday in a written statement.

"This agreement would establish an open, scientifically grounded process that will help me make a fully informed decision about whether dam removal is in the public interest."

Serious talk of removing the dams began in 2002 after a federally ordered change in water flow led to the death of 33,000 salmon in the river.

The effort picked up momentum over the past few years after devastating declines in the number of spawning salmon in both the Klamath and Sacramento river basins. The paltry number of fish forced regulators to ban virtually all ocean fishing of chinook salmon in California and Oregon over the past two years.

The four midsize dams were built along the Klamath's main stem starting in 1909, blocking off about 300 miles of salmon-spawning habitat. The dams warmed the river water, allowing destructive parasites and blooms of toxic, blue-green algae to contaminate the water. Water diversions to cities and for agriculture exacerbated the problem, according to fishery biologists.

The various tribes with rights to the river have been battling for years to get the dams removed. Fishermen and environmentalists rallied to their side, but PacifiCorp and farmers along the Upper Klamath Basin fought the effort and even sought to extend the hydropower lease.

Some agricultural groups still oppose the plan out of fear that it would limit irrigation and raise the cost of energy, and a few claim it is little more than a giveaway to environmental interests, but most of the stakeholders now at least support moving forward.

"I cannot adequately say how impressed I am by everyone's ability to put aside their differences," said Craig Tucker, spokesman for the Karuk Tribe. "There is a long history of not getting along, of fighting over water rights. Now we are optimistic."

PacifiCorp has pledged to raise $200 million of the cost of removing the dams by implementing a surcharge on its customers in California and Oregon, but the bulk of the money would come from Oregon.

Tearing down the dams is expected to cost less than making the improvements necessary to comply with the federal Clean Water Act and Fish and Wildlife Agency regulations, which would require, among other things, the construction of fish ladders and screens. The utility would have to get certification from both states under the Clean Water Act to continue operating the dams, a potentially difficult proposition given the algae problems.

"We've really looked at this as a business deal, and we believe it is in the best interests of our customers," said Dean Brockbank, vice president and general counsel for PacifiCorp. "The agreement we have now is a collaborative effort, and we believe it beats all of the alternatives."

California would raise another $250 million from voter-approved general obligation bonds.#

"Where has all the water gone?" is most certainly a hot topic among our aquatic co-inhabitants of the North State, particularly after three straight years of drought.

As a human dweller on Mill Creek I am struck as a waterway spanning more than 50 feet wide and several feet deep slows to a trickle from early summer to mid-fall. I dread the day when the flow might cease entirely, leaving only a stagnant cesspool for mosquitoes to spawn, where a wonderful community swimming hole now exists.

While my interests are primarily visual and recreational, I can only wonder what the fish and wildlife must be thinking as they are blocked from migrating up and down stream, and experience dramatic and lethal changes in water temperature. I realize that this is cattle country where agricultural needs reign supreme, but I can't ignore the impact these industries have on our local environment.

Diverting all of the surface water for irrigation has nearly killed off the local salmon population, in spite of herculean efforts to assist their migration and spawning.

Quite simply we are realizing that we can't engineer our way around this problem. These creatures deserve free passage, yet have no voice. It is incumbent upon those with an appreciation for the necessity of ecological diversity to speak on their behalf.

In Washington State, from whence I came, the U.S. Congress instituted the Northwest Power Planning Council to assess and balance the

multiple uses of the Columbia and Snake Rivers and tributaries. This council was implemented in 1984 to prevent another WPPSS debacle, that some of you may remember as the largest public bond default in the country at the time. Industry was so bent on profiting from growth that five nuclear power plants were started by an association of small public utilities, to only see one come to completion.

Hydroelectric projects constructed during the Depression era put people to work, provide flood control, irrigation, electrical power, and recreational benefits. Operation and management of hydroelectric facilities, and all development within 100 feet of any salmon passages are regulated by this council to ensure environmental protection.

It became necessary to incorporate the environmental impacts associated with human development and diversions of the regional water system in a deliberate and quantifiable way to quantify the true costs of hydroelectric power. But what is the value of a species of fish that man cannot replace? Some argued that we can live without salmon, but the harbor seals and other aquatic dwellers would beg to differ.

In the final analysis, we can only conclude that all the earth's creatures must get along with one another, because tampering with God's creation in irreversible ways carries many known and unknown adverse consequences.

In addition to wild salmon one might also consider the plight of California bighorn sheep, polar and grizzly bears, the grey wolf, jaguars, Hawaiian monk seals, whooping cranes, black-footed ferrets, bald eagles, the American alligator, Florida panthers and Canadian Lynx whose livelihoods are either at-risk, threatened, or endangered. For more information see www.sierraclub.org.

What I believe these adversely affected species desire is a respect for their contribution to the ecosystem and careful consideration of the impacts of our development activities on their livelihood.

They provide us with their own unique contributions to our delicately balanced universe, be it as a part of the food chain, habitat maintenance, or any myriad of complex interactions with our ecology.

So rather than blindly focus on engineering fixes to solve our water management issues with dams, pumps, or canals, I would hope we give more weight to maintain and restore the natural flow of our rivers, streams, and creeks by reducing human demands upon our precious natural resources.

Instead of bullying the environment to satisfy every personal and economic self interest, we should plan our endeavors without affecting the environment to the extent possible.

I know many readers might consider this consciousness to be a luxury that we can't afford when eking out one's existence, but I would argue that nearly all of us have progressed far beyond our basic needs for food and shelter and should be expected to demonstrate a greater appreciation for the voiceless members of our ecosystem.

Please join me in letting our elected officials in the North State know of your concern for the impacts we have on our environment and to carefully evaluate any projects that propose to alter it.

We should look first to see if there are things we can do that reduce our human "needs" and environmental impacts rather than increase them.

To do less would be an irresponsible commitment of financial resources and abuse of our moral authority.#

Richard Mazzucchi is a retired research engineer specializing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. He has travelled extensively and now makes his home in Los Molinos, where he is striving to manifest a sustainable and spiritual lifestyle.

A heavy run of chinook salmon into a parched Klamath River tributary have fishery managers watching for signs of a possible fish kill and working to get additional water into the river.

Since Sept. 4, at least 1,200 fall chinook have passed through the Shasta River weir, with another 100 per day expected. Radio tags on some of the fish have shown that all of the fish are packed into pools in a 1.5- to 2-mile section of the river, said California Department of Fish and Game biologist Mark Pisano.

The Shasta River has seen very low flows this year, at least partly because of an ongoing drought. But conservation groups have also pointed to regular irrigation withdrawals as depleting flows, and Fish and Game has worked out agreements with irrigators to cut back on the amount of water they use before the end of the season on Oct. 1.

”We're very near a tipping point,” Pisano said.

The concern is that if warm-water-related diseases were to break out, crowded conditions could spread the diseases through the fish rapidly and devastate a strong run of salmon. Pisano said that cool mornings have helped prevent the water from being unbearable for fish. He said that a handful of fish have died -- but not more than what is typically associated with natural mortality from the rigors of the migration from the ocean into the middle Klamath River.

California Department of Water Resources Shasta Valley Water Master Ira Alexander said that his hands are tied

by court adjudication over water rights in the basin, called the Shasta River Decree.

”We only have the authority to enforce the decree,” Alexander said.

Shasta Valley Resource Conservation District Administrator Adriane Garayalde said that some irrigators are scaling back their diversions, which is easier with new systems than old systems. She said that another diverter shut off last night, and the water reduction should begin to show in the lower river soon.

”We've been trying to do more,” Garayalde said, “but the problem is we're just in a really, really dry year.”

There are about 30,000 irrigated acres in the Shasta River Valley, most of which are planted with alfalfa and grain.

Agreements brokered by Fish and Game with irrigators to leave more water in the river may now be beginning to take effect, Pisano said, and the department will continue to seek more water. Pisano said that those actions should help improve conditions.

”As conditions are right now, we're at the higher end of what they can deal with,” said Malena Marvin with Klamath Riverkeeper, a conservation group monitoring the situation.

The group raised concerns about extremely low flows in the Shasta and Scott rivers in late summer before salmon began moving into the Klamath tributaries. Marvin said that it's critical to do something before a fish kill starts.

Marvin said that such a strong run of fish should not be squandered by poor water management, especially in light of the recent restrictions on ocean salmon fishing over the past two years.

Biologists have been on higher alert for the possibility of a fish kill in the Klamath River basin since 2002, when low flows and warm water kept a big run of salmon packed into cold-water pools. A disease outbreak that followed killed at least 68,000 chinook salmon that year.#

The Obama environmental team is playing it safe in its first encounter with plight of endangered salmon in the Northwest. In a high-pressure legal fight over the fish's survival, the White House is asking for more time, money and judicial patience.

At issue are the low numbers of salmon and steelhead on the Snake River, dotted with four power dams in Washington state. The Obama answer: a request to a federal judge to spend nearly $1 billion on watershed improvements, controls on predators and invasive species, and a close watch on fish populations. If the problem worsens, there would be triggers for additional steps, the White House team promised.

The result is clearly the most expedient available in the court battle that dates back to the Clinton era. The Obama pledge builds on a Bush administration opinion that was judged too tame by the federal court in boosting salmon numbers.

But it stops short of much bolder options to order more water flows, which would anger wheat farmers in western Washington, and take down the dams, a position favored by environmentalists. Also, this fall's salmon counts are way up, making drastic steps a hard sell.

In this case, California is more than a near-neighbor on the map. The ocean salmon season here has ended because of puny fish stocks. Earlier this year, this downward trend led to major breakthrough: an agreement to dismantle four dams on the Klamath River along the Oregon border.

This plan will need assistance from the White House. If it remains guided by science, not politics, then salmon may flourish again in the Klamath and Snake waters. President Obama shouldn't dodge the hard choices that may lie ahead.#

Our view: The Salmon Festival once celebrated the bounty of the fishery. Let's hope that things will return to normal.

It's fall and the rivers are quiet. For so many people in the north valley, that just doesn't make sense. Fall brings salmon, and salmon bring the Feather and Sacramento rivers to life.

In Oroville, that means residents go for a walk along the Feather River and watch salmon jump in the pools or cruise in the riffles with their fins out of the water. That means a walk to the fish barrier dam just upstream from the hatchery to watch salmon try to make the impossible leap before deciding the hatchery's fish ladder is much easier to navigate.

It means anglers line up elbow to elbow at the afterbay outlet, where it wasn't uncommon to see 50 shore anglers and two dozen boats on one small stretch of river, pursuing the abundant salmon.

The fishery was so good that anglers were allowed to keep three adult salmon. The hatchery had more fish than it could handle and the river's spawning beds had reached their carrying capacity.

On the Sacramento, the fall appearance of the salmon felt the same. Hundreds of boats launched every day at Colusa, Ord Bend, Hamilton City, Corning, Red Bluff and Anderson. The river teemed with big kings. Every deep hole had boats trying their luck.

Plenty of fish escaped the gauntlet and made it upriver to spawn in the river near Redding, in tributaries, or at the hatchery on Battle Creek east of Anderson.

Just seven years ago, three-quarters of a million adult salmon returned to spawn. Now that number is under 100,000.

For the second straight fall, anglers are limited in chasing the scarce salmon. The Feather River — once the bright spot of the Sacramento River system — is closed entirely. The Sacramento River will open in mid-November for a token short season through the end of the year.

Despite that backdrop, the Salmon Festival will run for the 15th year in Oroville, as it has become about more than just the fish. It's about the human community too.

The festival starts with a kickoff barbecue and dance on Friday, followed by events all day Saturday. The Feather River Hatchery will host tours from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

But the most interesting part of the day, in light of the salmon decline, is a panel discussion at 1 p.m. at the State Theatre on Myers and Robinson streets. There, three fisheries experts will talk about "Fact, Fate and Future of the Feather River."

There are signs of hope. First, everyone is aware of the problem and making changes to aid in the salmon recovery. Second, there's history. At the end of the drought in the early 1990s, salmon were dwindling on the Sacramento and Klamath systems.

A lack of water makes all other environmental problems worse. When the rain started falling again, the stocks recovered. Certainly some extreme winters would help again.

But there's much more in the mix than just a lack of water. Let's hope everybody is resolved to fixing the problem, or the Salmon Festival could become as endangered as the fish.#

Workers are piecing together a 100-foot dredge set to clear heavy metal-laden sediment from the Spring Creek arm of Keswick Lake west of Redding.

Hauled to the lake by eight trucks, the 900-horsepower electric dredge will start pulling up sediment left from the Iron Mountain Mine early next month, contractors for the Environmental Protection Agency said.

Spurred by $20.7 million in economic stimulus funds on top of $10 million already planned for the work, the dredging will clear 350,000 tons of sediment.

Once in operation, the dredge will clear 100 cubic yards — or 10 dump truckloads — per hour, said John Childs, an engineer with CH2M Hill, the project’s lead contractor.

An EPA open house about the work is set for 6 p.m. today at the Redding Library, 1100 Parkview Ave.#

Lake Shasta's water level is better this year than last fall when it hit a 16-year low, but a continuing drought is keeping the state's largest reservoir far from full.

The lake level was just over 121 feet below its crest Monday - the last day of summer - and it's expected to bottom out at 140 feet down by the end of November, said Sheri Harral, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation at Shasta Dam.

"We are actually 25 feet higher than last year," Harral said Monday.

As last year marked the second year of a drought, the lake dropped to its lowest level since 1991 - hitting almost 158 feet below the crest on Oct. 31, according to Bureau of Reclamation records.

Harral said near- average rainfall between July 2008 and the end of June improved the lake's condition. In those 12 months, 55 inches of rain fell at Shasta Dam. The average is 62 inches.

An above-average year of rainfall could bring the 4.5 million acre-foot capacity reservoir, which was 40 percent full Monday, to its brim. An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre with water 1 foot deep.

The reservoir is much more reliant on rain clouds than snowpack, so how well it recharges over fall, winter and spring depends on rainfall, Harral said.

She said the last time it was close to full was in 2006, when the lake level came just under 3 feet from the crest after heavy winter and spring rains.

Whether the rainfall will be below or above average this year depends on El Nino, said Kelly Redmond, regional climatologist for the Desert Research Institute in Reno.

Triggered by a shift in winds and warming of water in the Pacific Ocean, Redmond said Peruvian fisherman named the meteorologic phenomenon "el nino," Spanish for "the boy," because it typically causes rainstorms that peak around Christmas.

But El Nino results can vary, making it difficult to predict, Redmond said.

He said this year's El Nino, which started in June, likely will cause below-average rainfall in the Pacific Northwest and above-average rainfall in Southern California.

In between is the north state, putting it in a transition zone where it could either be below or above average, Redmond said.

"So odds are about equal either way," Redmond said.

Of late, rain seems like the last thing the north state's weather will produce, although today marks the first day of fall. Temperatures are expected to hit 102 degrees today and 100 Wednesday, with clear, sunny skies, according to the National Weather Service.

"It's like summer never quit," Redmond said.#

A wayward river otter found an expensive fish feast this week almost a mile from the Sacramento River in Redding's Enterprise neighborhood.

How the hungry otter made its way to the koi pond at Jose Antonio's Fine Gifts and Gardens at 870 Hartnell Ave. is a mystery, said Alberta Mathewson, the store's owner.

"We don't know where it came from," she said. "It went on quite a fishing expedition."

The shop is about a mile from the river, and Interstate 5 runs between the two.

Mathewson said she first suspected some sort of fish-eating animal had made its way past her store's chain-link fence Monday when she found a mangled decorative carp next to the pond. Between Monday and Wednesday morning, she said the otter ate eight to 10 koi, which can cost thousands of dollars each. The fish weigh between 10 to 15 pounds each.

"He was only doing what he was designed to do," Mathewson said, "but how he got here - I don't know."

The otter eluded capture, hiding among the many yard decorations, until Wednesday morning when Mathewson found it inside one of the shop's showrooms. She said she locked the otter in the room and called Redding Animal Regulation.

Having dealt with stubborn skunks, feral ferrets and other nuisance animals, Capt. Lee Anne Smith of Redding Animal Regulation said she was surprised to find a river otter so far from a river.

She also said it was difficult to capture the ornery otter because the room in which it was locked held fragile antiques. Mathewson said some of the antiques are worth as much as $25,000.

But Smith was able to snatch the 30-pound otter with a snare on the end of a pole and place it in a cage. Later Wednesday, she released the otter at Rooster's Landing along the Sacramento River.

After the otter sleekly swam over to a collection of rocks along the riverbank and began inspecting its new surroundings, Smith joked that the otter must miss its koi smorgasbord.

"They were pretty much sitting ducks in that pond," Smith said.

Taking a tip from Ray John, CEO of Haven Humane Center, Smith put the trap partially in the water before releasing the otter. She said it seemed to spur the otter into swimming away, unlike the last otter she tried to release about two years ago.

That animal was hiding under a hot tub about 50 yards from the Sacramento River in downtown Redding. When she went to set it free, the otter charged out of the trap and tried to bite her.

"They have a little feistiness to them," Smith said.#

Calling it an "insurance policy" for salmon, the Obama administration has developed a tougher conservation plan for the Pacific Northwest that includes monitoring for climate change and possible dam removal.

But a top official also said the original plan drafted during the Bush administration and completed last year was "biologically and legally sound" when combined with measures added by the Obama administration.

Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the plan submitted Tuesday to a federal judge for approval sets specific triggers for taking quick action to save salmon if conditions change in the Columbia River Basin.

"The key to this insurance plan are contingency measures that will be implemented in case of a significant decline in fish abundance," Lubchenco said.

One of those contingency measures would be possible removal of four lower Snake River dams, a measure that she said would be a "last resort."

The plan drew immediate criticism from both sides of the long debate over Northwest rivers that provide fish, hydroelectricity, irrigation and cargo routes.

"The Obama administration has put dam removal back on the table and delivered just what dam removal extremists have been demanding," said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

Breaching the four Snake River dams would take a "terrible economic toll" on the Northwest, including higher energy prices and thousands of lost jobs, without any assurance it would lead to fish recovery, Hastings said.

But Nicole Cordan, legal and policy director of the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition, said the revised Obama administration plan simply repeats what the coalition believes are the same mistakes made by the Bush administration.

"They adopted Bush-era science and politics," Cordan said.

U.S. District Judge James Redden rejected plans in 2003 and 2005, threatening at one point to take control of salmon recovery efforts.

The new plan would immediately boost mitigation programs to help salmon survival, expand research and monitoring, and set specific biological triggers for even stronger measures, if numbers of threatened fish fail to reach certain benchmarks.#

Fisheries managers announced Tuesday that they would enhance but not significantly alter the government's current strategy for saving salmon from extinction in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest, drawing criticism from conservationists.

The long-awaited review left intact key components of the George W. Bush administration's controversial 2008 "biological opinion," which concluded that salmon could be kept alive on the Columbia and Snake rivers without removing dams or significantly increasing water flows.

But the plan submitted Tuesday for a federal judge's approval calls for extra measures to protect the fish -- including an additional $940 million in habitat improvements and expanded efforts to control predators and invasive species.

It also proposes rigorous scientific monitoring that would automatically put into play a broad range of additional protection measures -- even removal of four dams in Washington as a "last resort" -- if salmon and steelhead trout numbers plunged.

The four small dams on the lower Snake River stand between the salmon and millions of acres of pristine wilderness habitat.

The new plan orders the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin outlining the studies that would be needed to demolish them.

"We took a very good, hard look at all aspects of the biological opinion," said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"We determined that the science . . . was fundamentally sound, but that there were considerable uncertainties in how all of the parts of that would play out. . . . As a result, we have brought to the table a more aggressive -- a more enhanced -- plan that is much more precautionary."

The plan was endorsed by a coalition of farmers, utilities, ports and businesses that support maximum economic development of the rivers and their hydropower systems.

"The plan, while expensive, holds the most promise for the region to move forward collectively to do things that actually benefit fish," said Terry Flores, executive director of Northwest River Partners, who put an estimated $10-billion price tag on the salmon restoration measures.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which operates the biggest dams on the Columbia River, said that the bulk of the costs would be paid by $100 million a year in electricity rate hikes scheduled to take effect Oct. 1.

Conservationists, however, expressed misgivings Tuesday over what they saw as the Obama administration's failure to make the substantial changes needed to protect the fish.

Todd True of Earthjustice, who represented fishing and conservation groups that sued over the Bush-era plan, said:

"The government has failed completely to use the last four months of review for a serious, substantive or cooperative effort to build a revised plan that follows the law and the science and leads to salmon recovery. Instead . . . they are offering a plan for more planning and a study for more studying."

The Northwest's 13 stocks of endangered or threatened salmon and steelhead are a symbol of the West's once wild, free-flowing rivers and a backbone for the region's $3-billion-a-year sport and commercial fishing industry.

But taking the steps conservationists say are crucial to their survival -- funneling more water into the river instead of through electricity turbines, and removing some dams upstream -- poses formidable political hurdles.

Hydropower dams provide nearly half of the region's electricity and are a crucial navigation link for barges that ferry wheat and other production from eastern Washington and Idaho to the Pacific.

Although some salmon stocks are at unusually robust numbers this year, at least one was unexpectedly low.

Conservationists said the healthy returns resulted from U.S. District Judge James A. Redden's 2007 order that federal officials allow more water to spill into the rivers to help juvenile fish during their crucial migration to the sea.

That strategy, environmentalists said, would be rolled back under the government's latest plan.

However, Brian Gorman, spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said that there was no evidence that increased flows affected salmon survival, which he said was more dependent on ocean conditions.

Nicole Cordan, legal director for the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition, said that conservationists also were concerned about the Obama administration's decision to adopt the current standard for measuring success -- which requires only that the fish be "trending toward recovery."

"If nothing else, this is a unique and new way of interpreting the [Endangered Species Act]," she said. "That low benchmark has never been applied before."

But Lubchenco said that the plan meets federal requirements by providing a means for the fish to survive with "an adequate potential" for recovery.#

The Klamath Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) workshop at Friday’s meeting of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board (NCRWQCB) began with a staff presentation of common themes of the written comments received as well as some misconceptions that had been identified.

TMDLs are set levels of contaminants that are discharged into a river, as well as naturally occurring contaminants, which act as a regulatory tool on those who discharge into rivers and their tributaries.

After the presentation from David Leland of the NCRWQCB, the organization’s board members had time to ask questions about the process. One board member asked how the model was developed for the TMDLs on the Klamath.

Matt St. John, a staff member with the NCRWQCB, said that with respect to the Klamath TMDL model, an agreement was reached between the Environmental Protection Agency and PacifiCorp to utilize a model created by a consultant for PacifiCorp.

St. John said that the consulting firm Tetratech was used to make modifications to the model based on comments from the United States Bureau of Reclamation, as well as various professionals in watershed science.

“We take the concerns about the model seriously,”?St. John said. He also explained that recently the United States Geological Survey had expressed concerns about the model.

Another board question was whether or not the Klamath TMDL would change or affect the TMDLs already in place on tributaries such as the Shasta and Scott rivers.

Leland said that the current TMDLs will remain in place until the end of their term in about five years. A follow-up question was asked if there would need to be a new public process if any changes were to be made to those TMDLs, and Leland said that there would be.

The first public commenters to speak were members of the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors, with board chair Michael Kobseff stating that he believes “the current draft does not recognize the achievements of landowners on the Scott and Shasta.”?

Kobseff claimed that the draft TMDL?does not take into account the contaminants flowing into California from Oregon. He also expressed his desire to see the deadline for commenting extended due to the “uncertainty”?surrounding the model.

Supervisors Jim Cook, Marcia Armstrong and Grace Bennett also spoke, voicing concerns about the addition of regulations on agriculture and timber harvest, flooding and the way the draft TMDL is written.

Tom Guarino, Siskiyou County counsel, stated that Siskiyou County objects to the representation of John W. Corbett on the board because of Corbett’s affiliation with the Yurok Tribe, which is one of the groups advocating for dam removal, as the group’s senior legal counsel.

The legal counsel for the NCRWQCB said that a review of Corbett’s affiliation did not find any evidence that he would have a conflict of interest.

Guarino also contested that staff from the NCRWQCB have been involved in the closed-door negotiations regarding the proposed removal of four PacifiCorp dams along the Klamath River.

The NCRWQCB’s counsel responded by saying that staff has had limited participation in the meetings, but the agency is not a lead negotiator.

Asked by the board to clarify his statements, Guarino said, “I?am leveling the charge that board and staff are inappropriately involved with dam negotiations.”

A number of comments were presented regarding the perceived effects that the speakers believed would come about from implementation of the Klamath TMDL. Mirroring the written comments Leland had summed up, comments were divided between those who wanted to see the TMDLs implemented and those who were opposed.

Jeff Fowle, a member of the Siskiyou County Farm Bureau as well as the Siskiyou County Planning Commission, said, “What this TMDL?implies with basin-wide regulation of agriculture activities is unreasonable.”

Fowle stated that a flaw he sees in the model is that it treats the Klamath as a cold water fishery. He said that he believes the Klamath is a “conduit to the ocean and cold water tributaries.” He said that treating the Shasta as a cold water fishery has increased the targeted Coho populations, but Chinook populations in that tributary have decreased.

Fowle also said that he believes that the setting back of international fish boundaries in the 1970s adversely impacted the number of salmon available to spawn, stating that he believes there should be a study to find an accurate ratio of outbound juveniles to incoming spawners.

“Until we get the adults to spawn, we will not have a healthy fishery,”?Fowle said.

Kevin Collins, a commercial fisherman, said that up until the mid-1970s the port at Eureka was filled with boats, but now there are none. He claimed that four out of five fishermen in that area had gone out of business due to declining fish numbers.

Collins also disputed Fowle’s claim that international waters had been opened to other nations for fishing.

Collins said, “We should not have to sacrifice for upriver benefit.”?However, he said that fishermen appreciate the food provided by farmers, but “we feel we should be able to produce food too.”

The next steps, according to Leland, are to review all comments and prepare written responses, in most cases according to common themes. NCRWQCB staff will also prepare their recommendations for changes to the draft TMDL, which will then be presented to the board.#

Spring-run chinook salmon and steelhead soon will have new waters to swim in along Battle Creek near Anderson when a nearly century-old dam is removed.

Workers with Contractor Services Group Inc. of West Sacramento are set to start tearing out Wildcat Dam, about 13 miles upstream from Coleman National Fish Hatchery, in November, said Pete Lucero, a spokesman with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has awarded a contract for removal of Wildcat Dam on Battle Creek near Manton. The work should begin in November and open upper reaches of the creek to spring salmon and steelhead runs.

"It's just another blockade to anadromous fish," Lucero said.

The bureau - along with five other agencies and Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which owns the dam - aims to open 42 miles of spawning and rearing habitat for salmon and steelhead along the upper reaches of Battle Creek, a tributary to the Sacramento River.

"The Wildcat is the first step in that," said Jim Smith, project leader at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Red Bluff office.

The cost of the overall project is nearly $80 million, with five small dams set to be removed. Along with the removal of Wildcat Dam, the initial phase of the project includes the addition of fish ladders and screens at two other dams along the creek.

Among other agencies working on the project are the California Department of Fish and Game, the California Wildlife Conservation Board, the California Department of Transportation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A temporary diversion at Coleman will still be used to channel winter and fall-run chinook into the hatchery between August and March, Smith said.

The bureau awarded Contractor Services Group the $2 million contract for dam removal earlier this month, Lucero said. The work should take a year to complete.

Built in 1912, Wildcat Dam is part of a cluster of small dams on the north and south forks of Battle Creek. The dams divert water from springs near Lassen Peak to three small powerhouses that produce 28 megawatts, or enough power for 21,000 homes. Once Wildcat and the other dams are removed, the project will produce only about 20 megawatts, or enough for 15,000 homes.

The last dam removed in California was also in the north state, Lucero said. Workers tore out the Saeltzer Dam on Clear Creek in 2000, also to clear the way for ocean-bound fish.#

The Bureau of Reclamation has awarded the first construction contract for the Battle Creek Salmon and Steelhead Restoration Project the removal of Wildcat Diversion Dam and associated conveyance systems on the North Fork of Battle Creek, located within 5 miles of Manton.

The contract was awarded on Sept. 1 in the amount of $2,062,555, to Contractor Services Group, Inc., of West Sacramento.

The principal work under this first contract includes removing Wildcat Diversion Dam and Pipeline to allow for flows to remain in the creek and not be diverted for hydropower production.

Construction is planned to begin in November.

Additional Restoration Project contracts, including a contract to install fish screens and ladders on the North Battle Creek Feeder and Eagle Canyon Diversion Dams, are scheduled to be awarded in 2010.

The CALFED Bay- Delta Program-supported Restoration Project will enable naturally produced salmonids to safely access high quality spawning grounds thereby contributing to their population growth and recovery.

The species that will benefit include threatened and endangered chinook salmon and Central Valley steelhead trout.

At the same time, the project will minimize the loss of renewable energy produced by the Battle Creek Hydroelectric Project owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

The Restoration Project will be accomplished through the modification of PG&E's Hydroelectric Project facilities and operations, including instream flow releases.

Battle Creek offers an extraordinary restoration opportunity because of its geology, hydrology, and habitat suitability for several anadromous species, said Reclamation Commissioner Michael Connor.

The overall project will be among the largest cold water anadromous fish restoration efforts in North America, restoring approximately 42 miles of habitat in Battle Creek, and an additional 6 miles of habitat in tributaries of Battle Creek.

Reclamation, in cooperation with the National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Game, and PG, began work on this project in June 1999.#

The key spawning grounds for what was once the greatest run of salmon on the North Coast are close to being as dry as they have ever been, according to biologists and the U.S. Geological Survey.

As California bakes under a third year of drought, the Scott and Shasta rivers, near the California-Oregon border, have become little more than dry beds of rock and dirt.

Recent measurements showed the water volume in both rivers approaching record lows for this time of year. The two tributaries of the Klamath River are historic breeding grounds for salmon and are considered critical to the recovery of the species.

"Large areas of the (Scott) River have gone completely dry, stranding endangered coho salmon as well as chinook and steelhead in shallow, disconnected pools of water," said Greg King, president of the nonprofit Siskiyou Land Conservancy, which has fought to protect the salmon runs in the Klamath River system.

"This could be the year that causes the coho to go extinct if they can't get upstream in the Scott and Shasta."

The Klamath River system, historically the third-largest source of salmon in the lower 48 states behind the Columbia and Sacramento rivers, once supported hundreds of thousands of wriggling chinook salmon, coho salmon and steelhead trout. Chinook once swam all the way up to Klamath Lake in Oregon, providing crucial sustenance to American Indians, including the Yurok, Karuk and Klamath tribes.

The teeming salmon runs were so abundant that old-timers remember being awakened at night by the sound of thrashing fish. Legend has it the big spawners were so crowded together that they could be harvested with a pitch fork during peak season.

Their numbers began declining in the mid-20th century as a result of dams, agricultural irrigation and logging. By the mid-1980s, only a few thousand fish were left - mostly on the Scott and Shasta.

The number of salmon now in the river is a tiny fraction of what it was a century ago, and California coho are listed as endangered - which is why the water level in their breeding grounds is so important.

The U.S. Geological Survey gauge on the Scott River near Snow Creek measured an average water volume of only 5.1 cubic feet per second on Aug. 30, with a low that day of 3.5 cfs.

That's compared to the median flow of 47 cfs on that date based on 67 years of measurements. The lowest average volume recorded in one day on the Scott was 3.4 cfs on Sept. 20, 2001. Measurements are recorded 96 times a day.

A flow of 3 cubic feet per second is the equivalent of 22.44 gallons of water rolling between the banks. In an average-size riverbed, it is barely a trickle.

The Shasta River hit a low daily average of 5.0 cfs on July 29, dipping that day to 3.0 cfs near where it empties into the Klamath.

The record low for the Shasta was 1.5 cubic feet on Aug 24, 1981. The normal flow on the Shasta at this time of year is between 25 and 30 cfs based on more than 70 years of data.

Al Caldwell, the geological survey's deputy chief of California's hydrologic monitoring program, said river volumes fluctuate wildly, so it is impossible to get a complete picture until the season averages are calculated. Although the flows increased slightly this past week - possibly as a result of less irrigation by farmers along the banks - Caldwell said water levels overall are still abysmally low.

"The important thing here is that we are very close to a minimum of record at the Scott River," Caldwell said. "We're practically at the minimum on the Shasta River and if it continues to go down we'll break the record."

The situation is particularly troubling for anglers, Indian tribes and environmentalists given the dismal state of the California fishery. Devastating declines in the number of spawning salmon in both the Klamath and Sacramento river basins forced regulators to ban almost all ocean fishing of chinook salmon in California and Oregon for the past two years.

The Scott and Shasta rivers are important not just as spawning grounds, but because the two tributaries are a main source of cold water for the Klamath, which is having terrible problems with algae blooms associated with warm, pooling water.

Low water isn't just a problem on the far North Coast. A declining snowpack has meant the Russian, Eel, Napa, Salinas and Gualala rivers and many tributaries around the state are hurting for water. But it is a particular problem along the Klamath, where the consequences are comparatively dire.

Environmentalists and local Indian tribes have been fighting for years to stop water diversions for irrigation. In 2002, 33,000 fish went belly-up after the Bush administration slashed releases to the river.

Still, ranchers exercising water rights adjudicated in the 1930s typically lower the rivers by sucking up groundwater during the summer.

"It's been a chronically bad problem," said Pat Higgins, a fisheries biologist who works for five lower basin Indian tribes on water- and dam-related issues. "It's worse this year than it has been in the last 10 years."

But there has been progress. Over the past decade, many ranchers have joined efforts to screen agricultural pump intakes to avoid sucking in baby fish. They've also made efforts to stop soil erosion, which can silt up rocky spawning grounds, and restore shady riverside forests that help lower water temperatures. Some help transport fish trapped in "dewatered" streambeds.

Negotiations are under way between U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the various stakeholders to remove four small dams - Iron Gate, Copco I, Copco II and J.C. Boyle - built on the Klamath starting in 1909. The enormously complicated deal would restore 300 miles of spawning habitat.

But the dams probably won't be removed for another 12 years. With the expectation of at least one more month of hot, dry conditions, time may be running out.

"Until you fix the passage problem and take out the four dams, it's those tributaries where we really ought to be focusing our restoration efforts," said Chuck Bonham, the senior attorney for Trout Unlimited in Berkeley. "We're going to have to round the corner here and start doing the tough stuff."#

The Klamath River is back, with fishermen from all over hoping to catch a big fall-run chinook.

After a couple of years of lower-than-expected catches, the Klamath is once again full of salmon.

The run is so strong that the Yurok tribe has already pulled its allocation of 30,900 fish.

“Fishing on the river hasn’t been this good in a long time,” said Rick Nielsen, of Sacramento, who has been fishing the mouth of the Klamath for the last 30 years.

Oh, and there are steelhead trout to be caught in the Klamath as well.

“Today hasn’t been as good as this weekend,” Nielsen said. “I haven’t seen anyone even get a bite.”

The fish were coming upriver in droves over the weekend, he said, with anglers hooking 150 fish Saturday and 125 Sunday.

That number dropped to only seven fish Monday, according to officials.

But Nielsen isn’t worried because the salmon were expected to start running again within a day or two.

According to California Department of Fish and Game fisheries biologist Sara Borok, 1,409 adult fall-run chinook salmon and 749 2-year-olds (jacks) had been harvested by sport fishermen as of Wednesday.

“Jacks are not counted as part of the quota,” Borok said. “We keep track because they predict next year’s returning 3-year-olds.”

Last year the adult harvest for the same time period was much lower, with only 662 fall-run chinook caught as of Sep. 9.?

The jack catch was 1,292 by the same point, a predictor of this year’s higher catch of 3-year-olds. But Borok said that despite the jack total being down, it is “still a good number, very promising.”

Borok does not believe that the in-river sport fishing quota of 30,800 fish is going to be caught by the time the season is over Dec. 31.

That is not because people aren’t trying.

The parking area that fishermen use to make the half-hour soft-sand trudge to the mouth of the Klamath was packed Tuesday with cars and trucks sporting license plates from all three West Coast states and beyond.

The “bankies” (a nickname given by charter boat companies to shore-bound anglers) aren’t the only fishermen vying for salmon.

Numerous charter companies are also operating, and according to Fish and Game officials, catching 15-20 fish a day.

“The reason that you are seeing people from all over is that the Klamath/Trinity drainage is it in California right now for salmon fishing,”? Borok said.

The Smith River is also open for fall-run fishing, but until a good rainfall raises the flow rate, fish won’t be starting upriver.

Little Ray’s Tackle Box owner Tommy Chew said that this is the best season he has seen since 2002.

“It’s going really well,” Chew said from his Klamath Glen store. “This is sort of like my Christmas.”

Chew agrees with Borok that “there is no way the quota will be caught.”

“Not because it’s a bad run, or that we don’t have a lot of fishermen, 30,800 salmon is just a lot of fish,” Chew said. “To be honest we have a lot more fishermen here than in years past.”

Aaron Funk, owner of the Kamp Klamath RV park near the mouth of the Klamath, has seen a “tremendous amount of fish coming through.”

Despite the fact that salmon fishing helps to extend the tourist season past Labor Day and even into October, Funk feels that the area isn’t taking full advantage of having the only fishable salmon river in California.

“We need to get the word out that we are the only river in California where people can fish,” Funk said. “We definitely get people from all over, I have one guest from Germany that is here specifically for the salmon, but we need to advertise that we are the only game in town.”#

The second phase of a project to improve salmon spawning areas along the lower American River will begin this week.

Old mine tailings removed from the river during the Gold Rush will be sorted, washed and trucked from U.S. Bureau of Reclamation land at Mississippi Bar, north of Lake Natoma, to Sailor Bar, along the American River Parkway in Fair Oaks.

The processed gravel will be placed in the river just upstream from the Sailor Bar boat ramp, according to a bureau news release.

The work will begin Thursday and is expected to be completed by Sept. 25. Work hours will be from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Dump trucks will haul gravel on public roads from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

This is the second year of a five-year program of restoration projects to improve spawning and rearing habitat for steelhead trout and chinook salmon.

Existing spawning areas are full of large rocks and fine sediment that reduce the ability of fish to construct redds, or nests of eggs, that will produce a large number of juvenile fish, according to the news release.

Approximately 9,000 tons of spawning gravel will be added to the American River during this phase.

The Bureau of Reclamation is conducting the work in partnership with the Water Forum, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Game, California State Parks and Sacramento County Regional Parks.#

San Jose Mercury News (Associated Press)-9/6/09

California's third year of drought has worsened the already dire outlook for endangered coho salmon, as coastal creeks used for spawning dwindle into disconnected pools where fish get trapped and die.

On a hot summer afternoon about 40 miles north of San Francisco, a group armed with fishing nets and buckets was on a rescue mission. They slogged through muddy pools, the last vestiges of once-flowing Arroyo Creek, trying to find stranded coho and threatened steelhead trout.

So far this summer, these fish rescuers in Marin County have found no coho, an ominous sign for a species struggling to survive on the West Coast.

"Every year it's like ahhh! Where are they?," said biologist Chris Pincetich, who organizes the rescues for the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, or SPAWN.

California's drought has increased wildfires, caused an economic crisis in the state's agriculture industry and a shrinking water supply. But experts say three years of arid weather may also be the final blow for coho, already reeling from pollution and population growth.

Federal fisheries regulators say the disappearance of coho salmon in Marin County is not an isolated incident, and that studies find they are vanishing along the state's central and northern coast. Coho live in coastal streams where they mature before moving to the ocean, and then back to freshwater to reproduce.

"There are definitely alarmingly low numbers of adult returns and spawning decreases," National Marine Fisheries Service fishery biologist Jeffrey Jahn said. "And the fish that are produced by the few coho who do make it back have to deal with these drought conditions, which is affecting the status of the species."

In 2004, SPAWN fish rescuers saved 120 coho from the small tributaries that feed Marin County's Lagunitas Creek. The numbers rescued have been declining ever since to zero.

Coho salmon, known for their hooked mouths and bright red sides, usually live for a year or two in these coastal creeks and streams before moving out to sea.

But Pincetich and other biologists who study coho say scale samples taken from the salmon returning to the ocean from Lagunitas Creek in recent years tell a startling tale. The scales aged the coho at two-and-a-half years old.

"It means the coho didn't go out after that first year, and instead resided in freshwater for another year," said Jahn. "When the fish wanted to leave, they couldn't because the creek wasn't connected."

Because coho are endangered, federal regulators are tasked with devising a plan to help the fish rebound. The recovery plan for coho is overdue, but the Fisheries Service said it should be completed by the end of September. The coho "draft recovery plan" will show how overdevelopment, a warming ocean, pollution and other factors all play a part in the decline of coho, steelhead and other fish that for centuries were a mainstay in coastal waters.

Meanwhile, the fish rescuers at SPAWN continue trying to save as many fish as they can.

One recent afternoon men, women and children volunteers used nets to gently snatch steelhead smolts out of disconnected pools created by drying creeks and streams. They moved the fish down to a freely flowing waterway to give them a better chance at survival.

Ayden and Rachel Nathan of San Jose brought their sons, Michael, 11, and Benjamin, 8, to help. The boys waded in the cool, shin-deep water, swaying their nets back and forth.

"I got one!" an excited Benjamin exclaimed.

It was a steelhead. Paola Bouley, SPAWN's conservation director, palmed the small fish and set it into a bucket with a buzzing air pump clipped to the side.

While no coho were found, the group netted about 20 young steelheads, which also spawn in these waters and are a federally threatened species.

They released the small fish into San Geronimo Creek, which flows to the sea.#

The stalemate over water reform in California these days swirls around a single word that for decades has ignited conflict among ideological opposites: dams.

Conservatives, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, insist on building new dams, believing that pooling water in a canyon will end California's thirst.

Liberals first want legal assurances that California will make better use of the water it has – a plea for more regulation that seems pointless to the thirsty.

The age-old conflict remains a key barrier to a water reform package now being tossed around the state Legislature.

Water experts believe there's a solution somewhere in the middle: more water storage and tighter control of that stored water.

There's one proposed dam that tries to fill that middle ground as something more than idle storage. This one is not your traditional dam.

The proposed Sites Reservoir would flood the remote Antelope Valley, which lies northwest of Sacramento near the Colusa County town of Maxwell.

To farmer Mary Wells, the project represents nothing less than the future of agriculture in California.

Wells manages both the Maxwell Irrigation District and Westside Water District, both of which stand to benefit from the project. It would also help her own rice and almond business.

On the other hand, the reservoir would flood the scenic cattle ranch that's been her home for 37 years.

"It's really tough to think about, at this point in my life, losing my ranch," said Wells, 64, who runs the business with her husband, Chuck. "But with most of the family still in agriculture, I want them to have the opportunity to continue. I cannot see how that can occur unless there is another reservoir."

Sites would be an "off-stream" reservoir. That means it would not block a river, which for environmentalists is the chief strike against most dams.

Instead, the V-shaped valley would be turned into a bowl by building two large earthen dams on its east side and nine smaller dams on its north end.

This bowl would be filled by pumping Sacramento River water from three different sources: the existing Tehama-Colusa and Glenn-Colusa canals, and a new pipeline running due west from the Sacramento River.

This new pipeline would also release water from the reservoir back into the river when it can best alleviate drought and help fisheries. As much as 90 megawatts of electricity could be generated at the same time, though Sites would be a net energy consumer because of the pumping power required to fill it.

Operated in concert with Shasta, Oroville and Folsom dams, Sites could help share Northern California's water delivery burden, allowing existing reservoirs to provide more water for fish habitat.

For instance, Sites could meet water demand normally provided by Folsom in summer, allowing Folsom to save its limited cold water supply for fall salmon and steelhead runs in the American River. This could have a side-effect of stretching summer recreation access on Folsom Lake.

"It's not a traditional reservoir, and it irks me when people think of it as a traditional dam," said Stephen Roberts, manager of surface storage investigations at the state Department of Water Resources, which is studying the project with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. "This is really an important tool to provide benefits across California."

Three other new dams are being studied in California: one to enlarge Shasta Lake on the Sacramento River; another to enlarge Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County; and a new dam on the San Joaquin River above Friant Dam.

Sites may be the most promising because of its relatively large size and potentially smaller environmental footprint. No major threats to wildlife or habitat have been identified in the reservoir footprint.

"I believe it provides the most diverse set of benefits between the four projects," Roberts said.

Some environmental groups acknowledge the project's potential.

"It could provide additional flexibility," said Laura Harnish, regional director of the Environmental Defense Fund. However, "the focus on it is unwarranted in terms of the range of solutions available. It's not going to fix California's water problems on its own."

Her group is among dozens on both sides of the issue closely following the legislative debate. But what's more important than new dams, Harnish said, is new rules to ensure best possible uses for water now stored behind dams.

That means new conservation mandates, water guaranteed to serve the environment and rules that prevent powerful water interests from controlling the flow.

So far, bills being debated in the Legislature don't include language about specific dams.

Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he supports funding for the project with the greatest public benefits, based on a competitive review, whether it's groundwater storage or a new dam.

"I know the issue of storage has been a major priority of the administration and the Republicans for many years," he said. "I don't want the debate to focus on just one particular issue."

Mary Wells' property is part of the original ranch, settled in 1887 by John H. Sites, namesake for the crossroads hamlet that would be flooded by the reservoir.

There are just 15 families living in the reservoir's proposed footprint, and Wells said their opinions are probably evenly split on the project.

Her two grandchildren learned to ride horses on her 550-acre ranch, and they're now raising about two-dozen Angus heifers to breed next year's herd of beef cattle.

"I love my ranch very much. It's a beautiful place," she said.

The ranch seemed to define California's "Golden State" nickname: Shimmering yellow grasses cropped close by cattle, dotted by mature oak trees, carpet the valley rim on every side.

"I think I'm doing what a lot of Californians need to do, and that's to say, 'Do I want my daughter to continue in agriculture?' " she said. "If it means leaving this place that I've built for 30-plus years, I'll do it. I'm also a Californian, and it's time we started looking at the big picture."

Sites would store 1.8 million acre-feet of water in the Antelope Valley, becoming the state's seventh-biggest reservoir. It would be broad and relatively shallow, averaging about 300 feet deep across 14,000 acres.

Despite its size, the project would yield far less "new" stored water for potential buyers: 622,000 acre-feet on average and 523,000 in drought years, according to DWR estimates. One acre-foot is enough to meet the needs of an average family of five for a year.

The reason for Sites' limited storage prospects is that much of the water it would hold is already contractually held by someone else. The water would just be parked in a new place before delivery.

Because there is so little water left to capture, many water experts say new dams don't belong at the top of the state's wish list. For more storage, they favor novel ways to capture and manage groundwater, starting with simple monitoring and regulation.

California is the only state that does not regulate or even monitor groundwater use. Those with a well can pump all they they want, whenever they want, without regard for how it affects a neighbor – even if the neighbor happens to be an entire city that depends on groundwater.

"I would be happy to accept a bond measure that asks for money for surface storage if this legislative package included comprehensive groundwater monitoring and management," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan water-policy think tank in Oakland.

As good as the Sites project might be, Gleick said, the state also needs new rules to ensure it delivers those public benefits, especially if the public is asked to share the estimated $3.8 billion cost.

For instance, DWR planners say Sites water deliveries could be timed to benefit fish. They also say water would be pumped into Sites when energy cost is cheap, then released to generate power when it's expensive – all to help the project pencil out.

But Gleick said these goals could spark new conflict. What if fish need water when energy is cheap? Who decides which is more important?

And if Sites lifts the burden from other reservoirs, what assurances do Californians have that those other reservoirs will operate differently?

In short, they argue, California's water problems can't be solved merely by pooling more water behind dams. New rules for the pool, however, could make dams a better solution.

"It's very unlikely that the way we operate our water systems in California today is going to be valid in the future," said DWR's Roberts. "There's going to be some major policy decisions. People need to start to think about that so they can be in place when we get to 2050."#

The popular American River Salmon Festival has been canceled, and a number of causes are to blame.

The event, held the past 12 years at the Nimbus Fish Hatchery and Lake Natoma, will be on hiatus this year.

"Last year, it cost about $120,000," said Dana Michaels, a public information officer with the state Department of Fish and Game.

Much of that money was raised by sponsoring organizations, and that kind of giving is down this year, she said.

Fish and Game employees also staffed booths and oversaw the work of hundreds of volunteers. With budget cuts and furloughs, Michaels said, the department doesn't have the staff to handle the event along with its regular duties.

The other concern, she said, is "the guest of honor's population is not high enough to show up."

The two-day festival, held in late September or early October, in recent years drew about 20,000 people eager to see salmon jumping the fish ladder at the hatchery, making their way upstream to spawn. Last year, however, the ladder was closed because of concern over the small salmon run.

Warren Truitt, president of the Save the American River Association, one of several festival participants, said work on the Hazel Avenue bridge also was a consideration this year.

Construction equipment occupies much of the hatchery property that had been used for festival parking.

Truitt said he hopes the festival will be revived when the bridge work is complete and a new weir is built.

The event featured entertainment, educational activities, food and music, all centered on the theme of river preservation and environmental responsibility.

It also served as a fundraising opportunity for groups like the American River Natural History Association, which helps support the Effie Yeaw Nature Center in Carmichael. Marilee Flannery, the center's director, said the association raised $8,000 for Effie Yeaw programs through last year's festival.

Although the public will miss out this year, fourth-graders in Sacramento County's 14 school districts will have an opportunity to participate in Salmon School Days.

Typically held the Friday before the festival, the educational program will be expanded this year, said Lesa Johnston, outdoor education coordinator with Fish and Game.

Students will learn about salmon and salmon habitat through nature walks along the river, art projects and interactive games, including Hooks and Ladders and Salmon Jeopardy.

Salmon School Days will be Oct. 9 and 23 at Effie Yeaw Nature Center; Hagan Community Park, River Bend Park and the Nimbus Fish Hatchery in Rancho Cordova; and Discovery Park in Sacramento.

Teachers may register their classes through the Web site at www.dfg.ca.gov/education/SalmonSchool.#

Redding Record Searchlight-8/27/09
By Dylan Darling

From the dock at one of Anderson River Park's fishing ponds, Rollie Gippert looked down last weekend and saw familiar blobs dancing in the water.

"Sure as heck they are jellyfish," said Gippert, 24, who moved from Crescent City to Anderson a couple of months ago.

Surprised to see what he thought of as an ocean creature swimming in the freshwater pond, Gippert scooped up a pair of the jellyfish with the help of his 6-year-old nephew, Nathaniel Gippert, and a Mason jar. On Monday, he took the tiny animals - they're about the size of a nickle - to Marianne Dickison at Shasta Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation.

Dickison said she was amazed to see the tiny fish in the jar.

"They do the whole jellyfish blob thing," she said.

While most people associate jellyfish with the ocean, there is one species that lives in standing freshwater and is found around the world, said Steve Baumgartner, an environmental scientist for the state Department of Fish and Game in Redding. Although they grow only to about the size of a quarter, he said the fish have a big name - craspedacusta sowerbyi.

Anglers have brought in samples of the fish found in coves on Lake Shasta before, but Baumgartner said this is the first time he's seen ones from the ponds at Anderson River Park. He said he doesn't know how the jellyfish ended up there.

Small and nearly translucent, the jellyfish are difficult to spot.

"They are kind of hard to see because they are so clear," he said.

The jellyfish are originally from China and likely came to the United States on ornamental plants - like those used in aquariums - as cysts early in their life cycles, said Jim Smith, project leader at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Red Bluff office.

"They are not native species," Smith said.

The jellyfish have been found in waters around the U.S. for about 100 years, said Scott Flaherty, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman.

Three encounters with freshwater jellyfish have been reported in the north state in the past decade, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. They were at Lake Shasta in 1999, Turtle Bay Exploration Park in 2006 and a pond near Palo Cedro in 2006. All had likely made it into the waters by hitchhiking with stocked fish, USGS scientists determined.

Like their seafaring cousins, freshwater jellyfish use venom to sting their prey - macro invertebrate and small fish, Baumgartner said.

"They can paralyze tiny little food items," he said.

But the sting isn't enough to stun or harm a human, Baumgartner added.

Having lived in Crescent City for about 15 years, Rollie Gippert said he was used to seeing jellyfish the size of dinner plates washed ashore on the beach after a storm. His father, Roll Gippert, 54, said when the family lived in Crescent City, he often saw huge jellyfish when deep-sea fishing, but he never expected to see small versions of the animal bobbing around a pond.

Roll Gippert has been coming to the ponds at Anderson River Park for about a year and a half, and last weekend was the first time he'd seen jellyfish.

"It's freshwater, so you don't look for it," he said.#

Eureka Times-Standard-8/27/09
By Leonard Masten
Opinion

California's water bank is running dry and the Trinity River can't afford to issue any more loans.

California water contracts exceed the amount of water available by more than eight times. Our state's crisis pits stakeholders against each other and leaves water regulators baffled over how to solve the problems their agencies created decades ago.

But the real burden doesn't fall in the laps of Sacramento or Washington D.C. bureaucrats. It churns in the algae ridden pools of shallow rivers. It multiplies with columnaris bacteria in the gills of salmon, as witnessed by our people during the 2002 fish kill. It aches in the hearts of the people who have lived in these communities since time immemorial.

Everybody on the North Coast needs to know that the future of the Trinity River is being written today. Big plans for California water are in the works. The Bay Delta Plan and the Klamath River deals both affect the Trinity River.

We refuse to be left high and dry so Central Valley agriculture interests to the south and power companies to the north can continue to siphon more water away from the North Coast.

For decades, the government diverted up to 90 percent of the Trinity River to quench the mounting thirst of Central Valley agriculture. Mandated protections for the Trinity River were largely ignored, depleting the Klamath-Trinity fishery.

Within 10 years after the Trinity River Division began operation, 80 percent of the Trinity River's fishery resources were destroyed. We have been at the forefront working to restore them ever since.

Commercial fishermen, tribal fishermen and recreational fishermen rely on the Trinity River's production of salmon, but the Trinity River watershed will continue to ail until the 2000 Record of Decision (ROD) is fully implemented.

The ROD is a document that provides assurances for adequate flows and the restoration of the Trinity River. It was signed in 2000 by then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. Water interests in the Central Valley challenged the ROD, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it in 2004, saying that Trinity River restoration is “unlawfully long overdue.” Reclamation then released prescribed flows down the river, but never fully funded restoration efforts.

While the Trinity now gets the flows called for in the ROD, the North Coast is still entitled to an additional 50,000 acre feet guaranteed by Congress back in 1955, water the county fought tooth and nail for when the Trinity River Division Act was passed.

Bureau of Reclamation officials say Humboldt County's water contract is subsumed in the ROD flows. But, the 1955 congressional act authorizing the Trinity River Division mandates separate flows for fish, wildlife and the future growth of Humboldt County and other downstream water users.

Humboldt County and the tribes deserve the water that is guaranteed to the North Coast.

The Trinity River produces more than 50 percent of the fall Chinook salmon stocks and the lion's share of steelhead stocks that make up the Klamath River's once world famous fishery. The two rivers cannot be treated separately.

Three weeks ago, we joined Klamath Hydropower Settlement Agreement negotiations. The KHA talks coincide with Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement (KBRA) talks. Together, the two deals, if passed by legislators, could pave the way for the removal of four dams on the Klamath River.

We support dam removal. But, we will continue to dispute the KBRA until adequate provisions are included to protect the Trinity River and its fish runs. Moreover, no dam removal agreement can come at the price of a waiver of our fishing rights. We also demand that sufficient interim measures be taken to protect the fishery until the dams come down. As it stands now, the deal guarantees water for irrigators, but fails to guarantee water for fish.

Even if the Klamath River dams come down, pressure on the North Coast's valuable water will continue.

As 'guardians' of the Trinity River, our efforts benefit the entire basin. Humboldt and Trinity Counties benefit, as well as ocean, recreational and commercial fisheries, not to mention the small businesses -- from rafting companies to restaurants -- that span the Trinity and Klamath Rivers from Weaverville to Klamath.

The communities of the North Coast need to work together to protect these rivers. This issue should not be simmered down to a tribal problem. Algae and fish diseases do not discriminate. We are in this together.

We remain optimistic, but the clock is ticking. We support healthy fish as well as healthy local economies and government accountability.#

Leonard Masten is an avid salmon and steelhead fisherman and a former law enforcement officer. He currently serves as the Chairman of the Hoopa Valley Tribe.

Crescent City Triplicate-8/22/09
By Kurt Madar

The North Coast is gearing up for a recreational ocean salmon fishing season for the first time in two years.

Starting next Saturday, Aug. 29, and running through Monday, Sept. 7, recreational ocean salmon fishermen will be allowed to catch two salmon daily of any species other than coho.

According to the California Department of Fish and Game Web site, the minimum size fish is 24 inches.

Local officials and fishing-related business owners are already seeing a little more action as the season nears.

“Harbors all along the North Coast are experiencing an increase in calls for slips,” said Crescent City Harbormaster Richard Young. “We are definitely expecting larger numbers than last year at this time.”

Young said the 10-day season is “a lot better than no season.”

He can thank a larger-than-average Klamath River chinook run, according to California Fish and Game biologists.

“We are predicting 131,000 to 139,000 3-year-olds in the Klamath,” said fisheries biologist Sara BorokBorok. “If you consider that the average for the last 29 years was 121,000, this is a slightly higher run than normal.”

Even the Coast Guard is ramping up for the upcoming short season.

“Group Humboldt Bay is prepared for a large increase in maritime activity in the area due to the salmon season bringing in many boats from outside the immediate area,” a Coast Guard press release states.

The Coast Guard requests that boaters file a float plan with a family member or friend who is ashore.

“A good float plan includes a description of the vessel, names of the crew, a list of safety equipment on board, your destination and time of arrival at the fishing grounds and your ultimate destination,” the Coast Guard advises.

Added to the recreational ocean fishing is a large allocation of adult salmon for in-river sport fishing. Sport fishermen are allowed to take 3-year-old fish.

“We have a record level allocation for this season on the Klamath,” said Fish and game senior biologist Larry Hanson. “The in-river sport fishery has been allocated 30,800 fish and the tribes have been allocated 30,900.”

According to Leonard Carter of Englund Marine Supply Co, recreational fishermen have just starting getting salmon in local rivers.

Carter said that river fishing is currently allowed on the whole Klamath River and just in the mouth of the Smith River.#

Sacramento Bee-8/25/09
By Matt Weiser

Another of Northern California's native fish could become contraband for anglers next year as officials mull over more drastic steps to protect wildlife amid a growing water crisis.

The California Department of Fish and Game proposes a ban on sturgeon fishing in more than 80 miles of the Sacramento River, between Redding and Butte City.

This has never been done before, and the prohibition appears likely to join the ongoing ban on salmon fishing as another unfortunate first.

Sturgeon don't enjoy the celebrity status of salmon but are a major sporting attraction because no other freshwater fish matches their size: Some sturgeon exceed 6 feet in length and 300 pounds.

The goal of the closure is to protect green sturgeon, one of the world's oldest living fish species. A distinct subpopulation that breeds in the Central Valley joined the federal Endangered Species List in 2006 as "threatened."

Since then, green sturgeon fishing has been allowed only for catch-and-release. It has remained legal to keep white sturgeon – an even bigger relative that's not imperiled.

Because anglers use similar gear and tactics for both species, the state now proposes to ban all sturgeon fishing on a stretch of the Sacramento River that is important habitat for green sturgeon.

"I think it's pretty asinine," said Richard Peeples, owner of the Tackle Box fishing store in Chico. "It's going to hurt us just like every little thing they take from us hurts us. They make a closure and they never open anything up."

The problem, said Fish and Game environmental scientist Steve Baumgartner, is some anglers continue to target green sturgeon simply for thrills. He and other experts fear this will harm the species.

"You can definitely harm a big species like that by repeatedly catching and releasing it, exhausting it and so forth," Baumgartner said. "It's more and more evident our protections have been inadequate to this point."

The proposed closure area contains habitat believed to be more important for green sturgeon than for white sturgeon. It contains a number of deep holes, known to fishermen, where green sturgeon rest on their upstream spawning run.

The goal, said Baumgartner, is to create a refuge for green sturgeon. Other species could still be caught in the closed area, such as striped bass. Elsewhere, white sturgeon could still be caught, and catch-and-release of green sturgeon would still be allowed.

In data gathered from survey cards returned by anglers last year, about half of all green sturgeon caught in the Central Valley were caught in the proposed closure area.

"We're trying not to impact the white sturgeon anglers while protecting the green sturgeon," Baumgartner said.

Sturgeon are one of numerous species harmed by the state's water infrastructure.

The giant fish once spawned far up into the Pit River on the flanks of Mount Shasta. Completion of Shasta Dam ended that in 1945. Yet legal battles continue as regulators walk a tightrope to protect wildlife and simultaneously provide enough water for a thirsty state.

The National Marine Fisheries Service this year imposed new flow rules in the Sacramento River to protect sturgeon and salmon. Water agencies promptly challenged these rules in federal court.

Anglers like Peeples say white sturgeon are common in the proposed closure area, and being unable to catch them will be a hardship.

A better strategy, he said, would be to close fishing only when green sturgeon are usually present – typically late summer and fall. White sturgeon, in contrast, are usually in the river in late winter.

Lots of his customers want to keep catching white sturgeon because it's great to eat. Many also make their own caviar from sturgeon roe.

In comparison, Peeples called green sturgeon a "trash fish" no one wants to keep because it isn't as tasty. Yet he agreed that some anglers continue to fish green sturgeon just for the thrill.

"I've heard of people going out and hammering the green sturgeon," Peeples said.

Bob Boucke, owner of Johnson's Bait & Tackle in Yuba City, said Fish and Game should simply step up its enforcement to prevent anglers from targeting green sturgeon. This could also help control sturgeon poaching for a caviar black market that has proliferated in recent years.

"It's because a few people insist on catching the green sturgeon," Boucke said. "They've been told not to do that and they just keep on doing it. They're catching great big fish and having a good ol' time."#

Redding Searchlight-8/22/09
By David Benda

For the second time in as many weeks, Forbes has cast the spotlight on Redding.

Redding was named among "North America's Top 10 Trout-Fishing Towns" by the popular business publication's online edition on Wednesday.

"Redding has a diverse trout fishery. The Lower Sacramento is the largest trout river in California, and has some of the most powerful rainbows in the world. Anglers can also fish the McCloud River for its famous strain of leaping rainbows. Hat Creek and the Fall River are two expert-only spring creeks that have very big and very demanding trout," Forbes writer Monte Burke noted.

A week ago, Forbes' online edition listed Redding among the 10 most likely areas in the country to quickly recover from the nationwide housing bust.

Ironically, the glowing reviews come four months after Forbes named Redding as one of the worst areas in the country in which to find work.

Redding was the only community on the West Coast to make Forbes' top fishing list. Communities were ranked in no particular order, Burke said.

Joining Redding were Calgary, Alberta; Asheville, N.C.; Glenwood Springs, Colo.; State College, Pa.; Mountain Home, Ark.; Grayling, Mich.; Roscoe, N.Y.; Missoula, Mont.; and West Yellowstone, Mont.

"We do leisure activities as well in the name of people who have money and want to find things to do with that money," Burke said Friday by phone from his office in New York. "So the criteria was talking to a lot of folks out there, talking to folks in the industry, talking to fishermen, guides."

Burke wrote in the article, "Admittedly, identifying the best trout towns in North America is a subjective exercise. Most of the time, the best trout fishing is wherever you can do it, and people tend to favor their home streams."

An avid fly angler, Burke has fished in every town on the list except Redding and Mountain Home, Ark.

A big advocate for Redding was noted fishing photographer Val Atkinson, Burke said.

In February, Field & Stream magazine listed Redding as the 19th best town for anglers to live. The magazine polled the nation's top angling professionals to develop the list and narrowed it down to communities with total populations of 100,000 or less. Glenwood Springs, Colo., came in first.

Bob Warren, the city of Redding's tourism officer, estimated that trout fishing brings between $500,000 to $1 million annually to the community.

"I have been saying for years we're one of the best fishing towns in America and people tell me, 'Oh yeah, you are just saying that,' " Warren said. "So when some other organization says it, that gives you some additional credibility."

Many out-of-area trout anglers who come to Redding hook up with The Fly Shop, one of the top fishing retailers in the world. Some 200 days a year, The Fly Shop will have about 15 guides a day taking clients to waters like the Sacramento, McCloud and Fall rivers.

"We probably qualify as the largest fly-fishing guide service in the country," said Mike Michalak, CEO of The Fly Shop. "The reason that has developed is the temperate climate and the fact that the Sacramento River - below the dam - is a phenomenal angling resource that is much better fished with a drift boat than any other method."

Michalak figures his guide service helps fill about 3,100 hotel beds a year.

"The Forbes article, added with everything else that is done and has to be done to improve positive exposure of our area, means Redding - and The Fly Shop - are getting some pretty good press out there," Michalak said.#

Fresno Bee-8/22/09
By Bill McEwen

With salmon on the California coast disappearing, I wonder how many billions of dollars will be spent on hatcheries, habitat restoration, fish ladders and even trucks in an attempt to save the species.

I also wonder how long government will rely on these failing approaches until confronting the obvious: the dam in Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley must come down if salmon are to thrive again in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Environmentalists fought -- and won -- a long legal fight to reintroduce salmon to the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam. Indeed, the river will flow year-round for the first time since the 1940s after restoration begins in October.

But if the goal is to create better habitat for salmon spawning, rearing, and migration to the ocean, I question why environmentalists focused on the San Joaquin and the dam at Friant, instead of the Tuolumne River and the dam at Hetch Hetchy.

The Tuolumne, a tributary of the San Joaquin, is "the keystone" to bringing back California's salmon fishery, according to Dale Mitchell, a former state Department of Fish and Game biologist and regional manager.

"If we want to make salmon in the [San Joaquin River] basin, one really big step would be to take out Hetch Hetchy -- or at least condition the amount of water it can divert in critical times," Mitchell says.

"It would produce many more salmon than the Friant tributary restoration can accomplish, and much faster and cheaper."

Mitchell, who worked 40 years for the department, says that increased flows on the Tuolumne from February to July "would be a huge benefit for salmon."

But, with O'Shaughnessy Dam in place -- its cold Sierra water covering Hetch Hetchy, the smaller twin to Yosemite Valley -- the Tuolumne's flows are inadequate and its water too warm to protect juvenile salmon.

Many people -- including me -- have said that the dam at Hetch Hetchy should come down.

But we've been tilting at a dam protected by powerful politicians such as U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Bay Area residents who get their drinking water from the reservoir and 1913 federal legislation known as the Raker Act.

The Raker Act -- which allowed the the city of San Francisco to dip a straw into a national park for its water -- is generally thought to provide an invincible legal shield for the dam.

But federal courts have vigilantly stood behind endangered salmon, too.

River by river, old dams contributing to the salmon demise are going down. Two years ago, a 47-foot tall dam on Oregon's Sandy River was dynamited, and its water flowed unrestrained from Mount Hood to the Columbia River for the first time in 94 years.

Over the past 10 years, 430 dams have come down, according to American Rivers, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for dam removal. There are plans to demolish four aging dams on the upper Klamath River, and the fate of four old, salmon-killing dams on the lower Snake River now is being decided.

The problem with all dams is that they age and become expensive to maintain. The problem with some dams is that they create environmental problems unforeseen or shrugged off at the time of construction.

Hetch Hetchy Valley restoration advocates have shown that the dam has outlived its usefulness. Water could be stored at a lower reservoir such as Don Pedro or even moved via canal to the mammoth New Melones Reservoir on the Stanislaus River.

But the facts haven't prevailed in the Hetch Hetchy debate. Not with San Franciscans fiercely protective of their federally created water source.

Now, there's a new player in the picture.

It's the salmon, fewer in numbers, but mightier than ever in the courts.

The salmon are felling dams and restoring rivers all over the West.

Could the dam on the Tuolumne at Hetch Hetchy be among them?#

The Times-Standard-8/22/09
By John Driscoll

Three years of drought has drawn Klamath River tributaries like the Scott and Shasta rivers to precariously low levels for salmon, sparking concern from conservation groups over continued irrigation withdrawals.

Areas of the important tributaries are bone dry, which would be a concern for chinook salmon returning to spawn if conditions don't improve. It's not an infrequent phenomenon, and groups like Klamath Riverkeeper say that recovery of salmon runs on the river depends on increasing the amount and quality of water in them quickly.

”We're really at the point where we can't wait,” said Erica Terence with Klamath Riverkeeper.

Terence said state and federal agencies aren't asserting their authority to keep irrigators from pumping the rivers dry. Chinook salmon now entering the Klamath River from the ocean will in a few weeks arrive at the Scott and Shasta rivers, the two big tributaries between the Salmon River and Iron Gate Dam.

The flow in the Scott River at Fort Jones is the lowest on record at around 5 cfs. The Shasta River is especially low, also, with flows at Yreka around 10 to 20 cubic feet per second.

The recently formed Scott River Water Trust began in 2007 leasing water from farmers with the aim or releasing what was purchased into the river -- some during summer to help young salmon and some in the fall to assist in adult salmon migration.

Manager Sari Sommarstrom said the leases are meant to relieve stress on the salmon. But she said that precipitation in the Scott River basin was between 40 to 50 percent this year, and that follows dry conditions in 2007 and 2008.

”We've got the worst case on top of two dry years,” Sommarstrom said.

Sommarstrom said that many water diversions on the 30,000 acres of irrigated land in the basin are already dry, and that key crops like alfalfa and grain aren't being pushed for production by irrigating.

The water trust this year has leased 203 to 290 acre feet of water, which can be used to improve conditions in tributaries to help salmon and steelhead.

Terence said that programs like the water trust are welcome -- but so far not enough. She said that the basin, whose water is parceled out through state water rights, may need an overhaul of inefficient water systems, but in the meantime state and federal agencies need to act to protect fish.

The Klamath National Forest has existing water rights on the Scott River, and spokeswoman Pam Bierce said its hydrologist is looking into just what those rights entitle the forest to.

”We do share the concerns about the low flows,” Bierce said. “We know that is an issue.”

Dan Torquemada with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's enforcement division said that the problem has existed for some time.

”As long as water quality remains an issue, there will always be a risk of harm to salmon, especially when flows are down or habitat is dewatered,” Torquemada said.

He said NOAA law enforcement has been understaffed in the area, but said the agency takes the matter seriously and is trying to dedicate more time to it.

About 130,000 chinook salmon are expected to run up the Klamath River this fall, a portion of those running into the Scott and the Shasta. Troy Fletcher, a Yurok Tribe policy analyst working on negotiations to remove four hydropower dams on the Klamath, said there should be enough water in the Klamath for those fish.

But he said that that the tribe has raised concerns for more than a decade about conditions on the Scott and Shasta during the summer and fall. Fletcher said he hopes the California Department of Water Resources and the Department of Fish and Game take a hard look at water issues in the basins.

”We're always concerned when river systems are on the verge of, or are, drying up,” Fletcher said.#

YubaNet.com – 8/19/09
By Karuk Tribe

Today, the Klamath Blue Green Algae Working Group, chaired by US EPA, posted the Klamath River from Iron Gate Dam to the town of Happy Camp, nearly 90 miles downstream, with warnings against recreational contact with the water due to the dangers associated with blooms of Microcystis aeruginosa. The postings are based on observation of algal scums and laboratory analyses of water samples from the river.

Since 2001, water quality officials have observed blooms of the toxic blue green algae Microcystis aeruginosa in Iron Gate and Copco reservoirs as well as the Klamath River downstream. Microcystis aeruginosa produces the toxin microcystin which is known to cause liver failure and promote tumor growth. In high doses microcystin exposure can lead to organ failure and death. Although to date no known deaths can be attributed to blooms in the Klamath, health officials consider toxin levels a threat to human health.

Children and pets are most susceptible to the toxin because of their likelihood of ingesting river water during play. Activities such as swimming and water skiing are the most dangerous because there is the greatest chance of swallowing the algal toxin.

Fishing is considered a low-risk activity. However, it is hazardous to stand in algal-filled waters for long periods, especially in waterlogged boots or waders. If the algae enters boots or waders, sloshing around can break open live cells exposing the toxin to bare skin.

There are no warnings against the consumption of fish from the Klamath River; however it is recommended that no fish organs be consumed and that all fillets are rinsed with drinking water.

The blooms occur in the summer as the shallow, nutrient rich water trapped behind dams heats up and provides an optimal environment for the algae to bloom. Blooms spread down river and are concentrated in eddies and slow moving water; however the toxin can be present in all parts of the river.

“The annual blooms of toxic algae are just one of the many reasons the Klamath dams should be removed,” according to Craig Tucker, Klamath Coordinator for the Karuk Tribe. Tucker adds, “talks aimed at resolving the fate of the dams are making steady progress and we are working collaboratively with PacifiCorp, Upper Basin Irrigators, and other Basin stakeholders on a restoration agreement that can benefit all of our interests.” #

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Scientists have detected mercury contamination in every one of hundreds of fish sampled from 291 freshwater streams, according to a U.S. government study released on Wednesday.

More than a quarter of those fish contained concentrations of mercury exceeding levels set by the Environmental Protection Agency for the protection of people who eat average amounts of fish, the U.S. Geological Survey report said.

More than two-thirds exceeded the EPA-set level of concern for fish-eating mammals.

"This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds, and many of our fish in freshwater streams," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. The USGS is part of the Interior Department.

The neurotoxin enters the environment chiefly as an air pollutant spewed into the atmosphere by industrial emissions, then falls back to the surface in precipitation and particulate matter carried over long distances.

The main source of atmospheric mercury, according to the EPA, is coal-fired power plants.

Conducted from 1998 through 2005, the USGS study is the first comprehensive survey of mercury contamination in the water, sediments and fish of rivers and creeks throughout the United States.

Most previous studies have focused on lakes, reservoirs and wetlands. Mercury contamination in ocean species such as tuna has also received widespread attention.

'BLACKWATER STREAMS'

Some of the highest levels of mercury in the latest study were found in the coastal "blackwater" streams of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana -- relatively undeveloped areas marked by abundant pine forests and wooded wetlands.

USGS hydrologist Barbara Scudder said those characteristics somehow enhance the conversion of mercury from its inorganic form in the atmosphere to a more toxic organic form, methylmercury, which accounts for at least 95 percent of the mercury found in fish.

"Just as there are members of the human population, such as children and developing babies, that are sensitive to the mercury that they get, there are some ecosystems that are also more susceptible to producing methylmercury," she said.

High concentrations also were found in some streams in the West fed by areas where mining had taken place, Scudder said.

As with many pollutants, mercury concentrates as it moves up the food chain, from algae, to insects to small fish and larger predators. The main source of mercury poisoning in humans is from eating fish and shellfish.

Scudder said researchers typically sampled about five fish from each of the 291 streams surveyed. They focused on bigger species such as largemouth bass because they are at the top of the in-stream food chain.

She suggested that people concerned about mercury contamination in stream-caught fish should eat more of the smaller pan species, such as perch, bluegill or crappie.

The EPA said this year that it intends to issue new rules under the Clean Air Act to control air emissions of mercury from coal-fired power plants. #

Los Angeles Times Column – 8/20/09
By George Skelton, Capitol Journal
From Sacramento

The "water buffaloes" like to frame their fight as farmers vs. fish. It is not. It's about farmers and fishermen.

A California water buffalo is someone who instinctively battles to develop water -- so named, I'm told, after the beast that reputedly can smell water from 200 miles away.

The fight isn't necessarily about "versus" either because farmers and fishermen often are in the same boat, dry-docked for lack of water.

Up and down the San Joaquin Valley, farm fields have been fallowed and field hands can't find work because there isn't enough water to irrigate crops.

"I represent communities that are threatened to be blown away like tumbleweeds," Assemblyman Juan Arambula (I-Fresno) complained at a legislative water hearing Tuesday.

Along California's central and northern coasts, salmon season has been closed for the second straight year because, in large part, water conditions have become so mucked up in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that baby fish can't survive before heading to sea.

Commercial fishermen and their crews can't work. Recreational anglers can't fish, hurting charter boat owners.

"The delta is a black hole" for salmon, legislators were told by Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin river system -- encompassing California's Central Valley -- historically has been the second-largest salmon producer on the West Coast, second only to the Columbia River. And Columbia salmon tend to migrate north to British Columbia and Alaska. Salmon that make it through the delta and out the Golden Gate have supplied 90% of the catch off California, and 50% off Oregon.

The delta also is the largest estuary on the West Coast of America, north and south, Grader said in an interview.

"Estuaries are places where salmon gain strength before going to sea," he continued. "We've been seeing salmon actually losing weight in the delta. They become weakened, get lost because of [reverse river] flows, become entrained in pumps or wind up in forebays where they're easy prey to predator fish."

What Grader describes is pretty much the fault of water management in the delta during the past half-century -- something all sides currently are trying to fix.

In 1950, more than 1 million chinook salmon -- also called king salmon -- returned during the fall to spawn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin system. Last fall, only 66,000 returned.

There also have been some good spawning runs -- notably in 2002, after a few wet winters, when 880,000 salmon showed up. But generally, there has been a gradual decline in Central Valley salmon over the last 60 years.

Blame construction of dams that blocked access to ancestral spawning streams and the introduction of giant fish-chomping delta pumps that reverse river flows while diverting water south to irrigate San Joaquin Valley fields and fill Southern California reservoirs. Pour in a toxic brew of pesticide runoff from farm fields and inadequately treated waste water from cities such as Sacramento and you've got a fish death trap.

So it's not just about cotton, cherries and citrus. It's about chinooks. Also huge sturgeon and striped bass. They've gotten sick on delta water too.

Some water buffaloes belittle the striped bass because they're not a native species. But they've lived in the delta for 130 years, which makes them a native by California standards. And let's not even get into which crops are native to California.

And, oh yes, there's the pesky delta smelt -- called the "canary in the coal mine," or, more aptly, "black hole" -- that water buffaloes love to hate.

The tiny fish is officially listed as endangered. So federal courts have cut back on delta water exports to save the critter. That has San Joaquin Valley farmers and farm workers marching and protesting during this third year of drought. They've found a sympathetic listener in the governor's office.

"We have to go to the federal government and get this judge off our backs so that we can open the pumps and give water to the farmers," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told me in April. "If I have a choice between the fish and the farmer, I choose the farmer. I choose the food that feeds the world."

As if salmon weren't worth eating.

Schwarzenegger sounded like a buffalo again on Tuesday when he denounced federal judges who "make decisions based on what's best for the fish rather than what's best for people."

Fishermen aren't people, presumably, in the governor's definition.

But fishermen these days bear a striking resemblance to fallowing farmers -- as delta salmon go the way of smelt.

Schwarzenegger talked about fish vs. people as he vowed not to sign any delta-fix legislation that doesn't include bonds for dams. The governor has lobbied unsuccessfully in recent years for a water bond issue of roughly $10 billion.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) told me he could perhaps support a water bond in the $3-billion to $4-billion range.

Democrats have proposed a legislative package that, among other things, would create a powerful, independent council to decide how to repair and replumb the delta, making it more fish-friendly and more reliable as a water deliverer.

The delta is now dangerously vulnerable to floods or an earthquake that could topple levees, cutting off drinking water for 24 million people and irrigation for 3 million acres.

If that catastrophe occurs, you'll see the return of the fish -- but an estimated $40 billion loss to the California economy, buffaloes included. #

The Washington Times – 8/20/09
By Valerie Richardson

Supporters of California agriculture called on the Obama administration and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday to lift water restrictions that were imposed to protect the endangered delta smelt, saying the fish is putting farmers out of business.

The Pacific Legal Foundation presented a "Save Our Water" petition with 12,000 signatures at a Sacramento news conference, calling on Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, to request that the Obama administration convene the federal Endangered Species Committee, also known as the "God Squad," to remove the water curbs.

"California should be known for the Rose Bowl, not a dust bowl. But there's a danger of a dust bowl being created in the Central Valley by extreme [Endangered Species Act] regulations," said foundation President Rob Rivett. "Instead of stimulating jobs, federal environmental officials are turning recession into depression and stimulating economic hardship for businesses, farms and families."

State Rep. George Radanovich, a Republican from the hard-hit San Joaquin Valley, said that"when it comes to water policy, humans come before fish."

The God Squad is a rarely invoked but potentially powerful provision within the Endangered Species Act that lets the committee override species protections in cases of economic emergency.

During a trip to the Central Valley in June, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar appeared to reject the idea.

Convening the committee, Mr. Salazar said, "would be to admit failure, it would defeat ecosystem restoration efforts. It has been rarely invoked and usually leads to litigation," according to Aquafornia.com, a Web site on the state's water issues.

As a result, proponents of emergency action are urging Mr. Schwarzenegger to throw his clout behind the idea and make the request to the Interior Department on behalf of the state.

Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said the governor had sent requests for reconsultation on the smelt and chinook salmon to the Interior and Commerce departments.

"The governor would look at the God Squad as indication that the federal government isn't responding. It's an action of last resort," Mr. Snow said. "It rarely works the way anyone wants it to. What the governor wants is a strong federal partner."

Nobody doubts the economic devastation to the Central Valley. The unemployment rate in agriculture communities ranges from 20 percent to 40 percent, while 250,000 acres of farmland are lying fallow or dying. The region's agricultural output is expected to decline by between $1 billion and $3 billion this year over last, according to estimates by agricultural and business groups.

Whether the delta smelt is to blame lies at the heart of the debate. While some blame the fish for the severe reductions in pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, others argue that the region's three-year drought is primarily to blame.

Some environmentalists say the agriculture industry needs to adapt to the reduced water supply and live within its means.

"Big Ag must now learn to do more with less," campaigner Brian Smith wrote on Earthjustice.org. "The days of copious taxpayer-subsidized water exports from the Delta are coming to an end. And the idea of killing off numerous native fish species, decimating Northern California fishing communities and turning the Delta into a fetid swamp is simply not allowed under federal law."

The situation for farmers is likely to get worse before it gets better. Federal regulators are poised to enact more water restrictions to protect the chinook salmon, the steelhead and other fish. Estimates are that the cutbacks could result in the removal of 500,000 acre-feet of water.

Scaling back the Central Valley agriculture industry, also known as America's fruit basket, would have an economic impact that stretches beyond California. Americans undoubtedly would find themselves buying more fruits, vegetables and nuts from foreign sources, Mr. Rivett said.

"It's certainly going to impact our food security. We know our farmers here produce a product that's safe and healthy; we don't know what will happen if we're importing those products," he said.

Others supporting the "Save Our Water" petition include the California Chamber of Commerce, which urged state and federal officials to protect agricultural water supplies "from measures that will inflict serious economic and social harm on millions of Californians."

In May, the foundation filed a lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife Service on behalf of several Central Valley farmers challenging the agency's authority to issue regulations on behalf of the delta smelt. #

NPR-8/12/09
by Richard Harris

When we burn fossil fuels, we are not just putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A lot of it goes into the sea. There, carbon dioxide turns into carbonic acid. And that turns ocean water corrosive, particularly to shellfish and corals.

Biologists are now coming to realize that rising acid levels in the ocean can affect many other forms of sea life as well.

Visit Moss Landing, Calif., in the spring and at first blush it seems marine life is flourishing. Sea lions, weighing in at 600 pounds or more, jostle for space and spar with one another as they try to cram themselves onto docks that groan under their weight.

Marine biologist Eric Pane looks on approvingly at what seems to be part of a Pacific success story. Up and down the coast, biologists see healthy populations of marine mammals, fish and other wildlife.

But as we cross the street and head into his laboratory at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Pane's outlook about the future of life in the sea takes a dark turn. His budding career as a marine biologist is framed by an ominous trend: civilization is venting carbon dioxide from tailpipes, smokestacks and chimneys at a prodigious rate.

"And at least a third of it so far, has actually ended up in our oceans," Pane says. "(That's) sort of good and bad news because it has prevented more CO2 from accumulating in the atmosphere but it comes at a price. More CO2 in the ocean leads to it being acidified."

Acidity is measured on the pH scale. Already, the oceans are a tenth of a unit more acidic. And by the end of the century, the pH is expected to change by half a unit. But don't be fooled by these modest-sounding numbers.

"So we say 'only' — 'only' half a unit. What's the big deal about that? Well, that's a tripling of acidity," Pane says. "That's a three-fold increase.

That's because the pH scale is logarithmic, so each unit increase actually represents a ten-fold increase in acidity.

Over the past half-dozen years, marine biologists studying ocean acidification have focused mostly on the animals they assume will be the most vulnerable, such as coral reefs and shellfish. If acid levels in the ocean get too high, their shells can literally dissolve.

Pane is part of a second wave of research on ocean acidification as biologists try to understand the consequences for all the life in the sea.

Enlarge Richard Harris/NPRA researcher examines a neptunia snail that was collected in some of the deepest waters of Monterey Canyon.

Richard Harris/NPRA researcher examines a neptunia snail that was collected in some of the deepest waters of Monterey Canyon.

"Right now we're scrambling and we're trying to get our feet beneath us," he says.

The simplest issue, he says, is to understand how organisms respond to acidification — as well as how the ecosystem responds.

"We're trying at this point to get as many animals as we can across a spectrum of invertebrates [and] vertebrates," he says. "All we can get to, basically so we can get them into the lab and expose them to these different scenarios of CO2."

Pane's lab is focusing on animals that live in relatively deep water. Many live nearby. There's an enormous underwater canyon just offshore, slicing through Monterey Bay.

"We've got gastropods, marine snails. We've had brachiopods," he says. "We've worked with decapod crabs, basic crustacea. We're hoping to get some smaller fish in, down in our seawater lab facility."

At a lab bench inside the facility, three-inch-long marine snails sit in a glass dish. They came from 700 meters offshore. The snails have holes drilled in the top of their shells to make it easier for researchers to draw frequent blood samples.

Each animal they want to study presents different challenges — whether it's getting a blood sample from a snail or figuring out how to keep deep sea fish alive in the lab. It's also not always so obvious what effects to look for.

A change in acid can actually impose a subtle "energy tax" on marine animals. They already use some energy pumping acid out of their cells to maintain a healthy pH. As the oceans get more acidic, Pane says, the animals will be forced to expend more energy to maintain that balance.

That means less energy for such things as growing and reproducing, Pane says.

"So we're going to be looking at growth rates of organisms over a long time," he says. "We're going to be looking at fecundity, amount of offspring produced. The health of offspring produced. And then try to extrapolate in a long term approach into what's going to happen to these ecosystems that we know."

It's too early to say, just yet, what this portends for life at sea — up to and including the fat and happy sea lions down on the dock.

"I think the least we can say is there's going to be profound changes to ocean ecosystems. From there, where we go and the judgments we make about that is an issue for further on."

Marine biology sounds to most people like an exciting career, but Pane says his work is actually a bit depressing. "Within a few years there's going to be change basically, and I'm not sure how it's going to work out."

There are just a few people in the world who have actually been thinking about ocean acidification for decades. And one of those is down the hall from Pane. Peter Brewer realized that something was amiss with the ocean's chemistry back in the 1960s, and he's seen the problem grow much, much worse.

"The quantity of carbon dioxide we've put in the ocean is now well over 500 billion tons," he says. "And you can't just transfer that much mass without making changes to the physical properties as well as the biological properties."

Brewer says the carbon dioxide has already altered ocean chemistry in such a way that it affects the way sound travels through the ocean. That effect will grow, as more and more carbon dioxide ends up in the sea.

"One assumes that whales, which communicate at these frequencies, will sense this effect," Brewer says. "Whether they will adapt their communication patterns, one does not know."

Scientists may simply have to wait and watch to see how that unintentional human experiment evolves. But they won't have to wait much longer to see what rising acid levels will do to ecosystems at the bottom of the sea.

Brewer takes us to a lab where scientists are working on an instrument that will eventually study carbon dioxide increases right on the sea floor.

Enlarge Richard Harris/NPRWhen deployed underwater, this large device will increase carbon dioxide levels in a test area, allowing scientists to observe and measure any changes that take place.

Richard Harris/NPRWhen deployed underwater, this large device will increase carbon dioxide levels in a test area, allowing scientists to observe and measure any changes that take place.

It has a green metal frame, bigger than a car, with Plexiglas wings that can unfurl underwater. One of the technicians is sitting right in the middle of the machine... where a test chamber will be.

"We can put some animals in there, add some carbon dioxide," Brewer explains. "It will flow through the chamber. We can create a change and we can observe behavior and make measurements."

Studying animals on the ocean bottom would, after all, be a more realistic experiment than a lab study — presuming they can get the test chamber to do a good job of simulating future ocean conditions. It'll probably take another year to sort out the technical challenges of getting this instrument to work well.

And while those problems seem solvable, Brewer ponders the enormous societal problems that created the acidity problem in the first place.

"We're all in a bind here," he says. "It's going to be very hard to maintain this number of people on the planet and not have these problems. It worries me that scientists sound the alarm but don't come up with solutions. We're going to have to try."

Technology has revolutionized ocean science during his career. He can only hope that it will also revolutionize the way we produce energy — before the oceans suffer irreparable harm.#

Monterey County Herald-8/12/09
By Daniel Lopez

A swarm of jellyfish are causing plumbing problems at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Hundreds of thousands of Chrysaora jellyfish feeding in the bay waters Monday damaged a filter screen on the aquarium's water intakes, said Eric Quamen the aquarium's facilities systems supervisor.

"From an operations standpoint, it's a big deal. From the aquarium standpoint, it's a minor inconvenience," Quamen said. "The public would never notice."

A four-person dive team spent part of Tuesday repairing the damaged screen on the end of the quarter-mile-long intake system, he said.

The pipes pump about 2,000 gallons of water per minute from the bay into the aquarium for the exhibit tanks. Quamen said the screens on the ends of the pipes are designed to act as filters, but there has been a recent explosion in the number of jellyfish in the bay and the creatures are sometimes drawn to the screens.

When the jellyfish, some of which are up to four feet long, get caught in the system's current, the mass can crush or otherwise damage the screens, Quamen said.

Some jellyfish have been ground up in the water pumps after being pulled through the screen. Workers must use nets to remove the remains that wash into the discharge pool, Quamen said.

"We have had this happen before, although it is rare," he said.

The jellyfish forced the aquarium to cancel its Ocean Explorers program Tuesday for fear that children participating could be stung, said aquarium spokeswoman Karen

Jeffries.

"It's like a bee sting and everyone reacts to it differently," she said.

Jeffries said the large bloom of jellyfish in Monterey Bay could be a result of ideal feeding conditions. Jellyfish enjoy high nitrate levels which can be naturally occurring or be caused by agricultural water runoff.

Quamen said replacing damaged screens costs a few hundred dollars and the problem should be resolved when the jellyfish migrate out of the bay.

Until then, "we are going to be dealing with this for a while," he said.#

This week, Castaic Lake Water Agency announced they have filed litigation to challenge the Federal National Marine Fisheries Agency Opinion for Delta fish species.

Among other things, the opinion found the pumps in the Delta that feed the State Water Project were pumping so much water that migrating fish could not move upstream to the spawning grounds.

Instead the fish are pulled into the pumps and destroyed.

In some cases, so much water is pumped from the Delta that the Old River runs backwards, misleading fish into thinking that the spawning grounds lie in the wrong direction.

Again the fish end up at the pumps.

Those who don’t want to face the reality of a finite water supply have complained that it is really not the pumping that has caused the severe decline in the fish populations.

It is the discharge released into the Sacramento River from a sewage treatment plant or the amount of pesticides that run into the Sacramento River from the adjacent farm fields.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I hear that we really shouldn’t worry about the fish because it’s the sewage and pesticides that are killing them, I have to wonder, “What were they thinking?”

Isn’t this the same water we are drinking ourselves after it travels through another 400 miles of aqueducts next to more farm fields?

Others have argued that we should just let the fish go extinct. We don’t agree.

SCOPE has stated in many previous articles that the fish are our proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” the warning signal to miners of a life-threatening release of toxic killer gas that they could not see or smell.

To us, the crashing fish population is a life-threatening warning that we must not ignore.

Beginning in 2000, at the height of a building spurt and massive water demand from Southern California, it is a clear indication that this precious and finite resource is over-extended.

So here we are, in the midst of a statewide fiscal crisis with many people out of work, and both Castaic and Santa Clarita Water Co. telling the public they will substantially raise water rates next month. And then Castaic decides to spend public money to file an expensive lawsuit?

They are worried because over 50 percent of our water now comes from Northern California through the State Water Project aqueduct.

Every new housing approval must be supplied with state water because we have fully utilized our groundwater sources.

Perhaps they believe that somehow shaking their fists at a scientific biological opinion will force nature to produce more water in the future.

As far as SCOPE is concerned, the important issue is not whether the fish are dying from sewage in the Sacramento River water or because of over pumping. It is undoubtedly a combination of both.

So why spend public money arguing about it? It is obvious that we must work together to fix the problems.

If sewage and pesticides are the cause of the decline in the fish populations, why aren’t the water agencies working with the sanitation plants and farmers to reduce this pollution instead of spending the money on $500 an hour attorneys? How will killing the fish clean up this pollution?

It is also obvious that our state cannot afford a $10 billion peripheral canal right now, (that’s just a little less than half the amount of the entire budget deficit), especially one that would add no new water to the system.

One quick fix is the “no regrets” policies suggested by several environmental groups.

These include conservation and land-use policies that reduce water usage. They also promote enhancement of local supplies in novel ways from watering landscaping with gray water from the kitchen sink to capturing rainfall on roofs and storing it in cisterns under the house.

They believe that enhancing ground water recharge by leaving streams in a natural state or removing concrete will increase our local supplies.

SCOPE’s Integrated Water Resource Plan, approved by the city and water agencies, promoted such ideas.

But it has ground to a halt for lack of state funding in the budget crisis.

We urge the Castaic Lake Water Agency and other water districts to fund answers rather than lawsuits that will not produced any increased water supply.#

Cam Noltemeyer is a Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and the Environment (SCOPE) board member and a Santa Clarita resident. Her column reflects her own views and not necessarily those of The Signal. “Environmentally Speaking” appears Thursdays in The Signal and rotates among local environmentalists.

Red Bluff Daily News-8/12/09
By Geoff Johnson

The counting of fall run chinook salmon will not begin until late September, but concerns are already floating among Tehama County Fish and Game Commissioners that salmon fishing in the Sacramento River may be prohibited for the fourth year in a row.

Fishing seasons are determined a year in advance by estimating the number of two-year-old salmon, or jacks, because 3-year-old fish make up the bulk of the salmon run.

Because of those estimates, fishing during the fall chinook run has been banned since 2007.

In 2007 and 2008, there were 93,224 and 71,803 fish counted, compared to 280,152 in 2006, according to DFG.

With winter run chinook on the endangered species list and spring run chinook on the threatened species list, only the late-fall run chinook are open to fishing.

As the DFG moves to estimate the salmon count through tagging, marking dead fish and pooling information between fish hatcheries and tributaries, it expects to find less than 122,000 in the 2009 fall run, said Randy Benthin, a senior fishery biologist for the DFG.

Of those, as few as 5 percent may be jacks, which help the department forecast the 2010 fall run and determine whether fishing will be allowed.

Fish counts may pick up when the Red Bluff Diversion Dam's system of diverting water is replaced by a water pumping station, but abrupt drops in salmon populations can also come from changes in water temperature.

Because of a drought in the late 70s, during which water was distributed without regard to the fish, winter run chinook salmon passing through the diversion dam dropped from 24,735 in 1977-78 to 2,339 the next year, Benthin said.

They went ahead and gave full (water) deliveries to all their customers, and so the river really heated up when the eggs were in the gravel, and that killed off most of them, he said.

The species has remained on the endangered species list since.

County Fish and Game Commissioner Scott Ferris said no one thing can account for struggling native salmon populations, but a broken food chain and an increased demand for water are at least in part responsible.

Because California's population is growing even in the third year of drought, some biologists fear a full comeback may be impossible, Ferris said.

The dwindling fish population marks a sharp change from 1951, when Ferris moved to the north state. Back then, he would catch salmon 12 months a year.

I thought I'd never see the day you couldn't catch a salmon, Ferris said.#

Mercury News-8/5/09
By Cathy Kelly

Salmon fishing may just materialize here next year, regulators say, for recreational fishermen anyway.

The state Department of Fish and Game recently posted an April 3, 2010 opening date for recreational salmon fishing south of Humboldt County's Horse Mountain, which would allow Monterey Bay anglers to catch two fish per day of any salmon species other than coho.

The statement comes with a definite caveat, however, which is that a final decision will not be made until March, once the final fish counts roll in.

But Dana Michaels, a spokeswoman for the Department of Fish and Game, said there is cause for some optimism, calling the announcement of the planned season "an educated guess."

"It is based on several indicators, including reports from commercial and recreational anglers and others who spend a lot of time on the ocean," Michaels said. "Apparently, they say they've seen more salmon this year than last."

Michael Mohr of the National Marine Fisheries Service, who heads the agency's Santa Cruz-based Salmon Assessment Team, agreed, while cautioning it's too early to tell for sure.

"There are some encouraging signs, but it really depends on the number of fish returning to rivers in September," Mohr said.

Sacramento River salmon are the ones local fisherman pray for most fervently, and that population largely failed last year. The poor showing resulted in the largest fishery closure on record.

This year,

California salmon fishing was banned commercially and largely banned for sports fishing too, except for a 10-day opening later this month in the Crescent City area.

But hope persists.

Mike Baxter, a longtime Santa Cruz fisherman and sometimes charter captain of the Velocity, said most people he speaks to are thinking there will be some limited recreational fishing of salmon next year.

"It's kind of good news," Baxter said. "It's not all gloom and doom."

In May, regulators opened recreational salmon fishing from Humbug Mountain in Oregon to Horse Mountain in Humboldt County, from Aug. 29 to Sept. 7.

Some area fishermen are heading up north for that, Baxter said.

At the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor Wednesday, the current targets were cod, halibut or albacore.

Longtime fisherman Bill Schuette was buying bait at Bayside Marine in a plan to hook some halibut.

"I think they're optimistic for some salmon next year," he said. "We're hopeful. But they shouldn't open it unless it's the right thing for the resource."

Tom Faulk of the Paloma, a commercial salmon boat, said the lack of salmon has taken a big chunk out of his wallet.

"But we might have a season too next year," he said. "We usually don't hear until late fall. It's just another uncertainty."

Commercial Fisherman Greg Ambiel said he was heading to Oregon to catch albacore and that sports fisherman seem to be "luckier" than their commercial brethren as far as getting a green light on salmon fishing.

Ambiel said some good years should be coming, as a lot of salmon were planted last year.

And ocean conditions are "incredible" for salmon this year, he added, it's the water use in the Central Valley that is killing them. A large system to keep the salmon out of deadly San Joaquin River pumps was recently installed, though, he said.

The Central Valley problem was echoed in May by the Santa Cruz-based director of the Fisheries Ecology Division of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Churchill Grimes. According to the agency's Web site, Grimes gave a presentation stating that the poor showing of Sacramento River fall Chinook fishery last year was due to poor ocean conditions in the 2004 and 2005 brood years, but that the big problem is found onshore.

"Ultimate blame was attributed to longstanding and ongoing degradation of freshwater and estuarine habitats and the subsequent heavy reliance on hatchery production," Grimes stated.

"Degradation and simplification of freshwater and estuary habitats over a century and a half of development have changed the Central Valley Chinook salmon complex from a highly diverse collection of numerous wild populations to one dominated by fall Chinook salmon from four large hatcheries."

The state Department of Fish and Game gives recommendations on salmon season, but the final determination is made by vote of the 14-member Pacific Fisheries Management Council.#

Contra Costa Times-8/5/09
By Mike Taugher

State regulators sharply restricted fishing off more than 20 percent of the coast from the San Francisco Peninsula to Mendocino County, turning back pleas to allow more abalone diving and delay the new measures due to budgetary concerns.

In a 3-2 vote, the state Fish and Game Commission on Wednesday moved forward with a historic ocean protection plan by putting into place the second of five planned complexes of reserves and conservation areas.

The protected areas are intended to form a network along the state's 1,100-mile coast to allow dwindling stocks — including rockfish, abalone and Dungeness crab — to rebound.

"I am committed to returning California to the sustainable abundance it once enjoyed," commissioner Richard Rogers said in announcing his intention to vote for the plan.

With that vote, which followed nearly six hours of occasionally heated testimony, the commission rejected pleas from fishermen to adopt a slightly less restrictive alternative, saying the final design already was the result of extensive negotiations and accommodations.

The alternative favored by fishermen still would have affected 18 percent of the water from the Bay Area to Mendocino, but it would have left more access for abalone divers.

"All of the proposals are going to hurt and all of them achieve all of the conservation goals," said Dan Wolford, of Los Gatos, the science director for the Coastside Fishing

Club and vice chairman of the federal panel that regulates fishing off the West Coast.

But environmentalists supported the plan, saying it was essential to maintaining and restoring marine life off the coast.

"We created national parks decades ago. It is certainly time to protect the Yosemites of the sea," said Karen Garrison, an oceans policy advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The new rules ban fishing in newly created marine reserves, including state water around the Farallon Islands, and areas near Point Reyes National Seashore, portions of Sonoma County, and parts of Bodega Head.

Marine conservation areas, which make up about half of the water in the plan, were created with exceptions to allow for limited recreational fishing.

Like underwater parks, the idea is to put certain underwater rock formations, kelp beds and other areas off limits to fishing to allow those ecosystems to rebound and thrive.

A representative of the state's game wardens urged the board to delay action on the plan because California already has fewer game wardens per capita than any other state, and because state employee furloughs are making the situation worse.

"The current (marine life protected areas) are not afforded adequate protection. How can we possibly consider more?" asked Todd Tognazzini, president of the California Fish and Game Wardens Association.

"The game wardens are the ones trying to keep people out of those areas. We're pretty upset by what's going on," Tognazzini said.

Lawmakers directed the commission in 1999 to organize marine protection zones into a network that stretches throughout state waters, which extend three miles off the entire 1,100-mile coast.

The Central Coast plan, which was adopted in 2007, covers waters from Point Conception in Santa Barbara County to Pigeon Point in San Mateo County. The regulations adopted Wednesday extend that network north to Mendocino County.

The commission is still expected to pass new rules for the South Coast, from Point Conception to the Mexico border, and the North Coast, from Point Arena in Mendocino County to the Oregon border. The final zone to be considered is expected to be the Bay, which is expected to be completed in 2011.#

A suite of projects designed to protect the health, economy and water supply while restoring the fisheries of the North Coast Region are back on track after payment was received for over $3.2 million in invoices that have been outstanding since the December 2008 bond freeze.

On December 17, 2008 the Pooled Money Investment Board (PMIB) suspended work on over 5,000 bond-funded projects in response to the State’s budget woes. This suspension had catastrophic effects on North Coast communities - some of the most economically disadvantaged in the state. The interruption in state funding increased the project costs, caused a wave of layoffs in small rural agencies and non-profits, and resulted in impacts to drinking water supplies and loss of water due to leaking, unfinished pipelines.

The North Coast IRWMP was developed by a coalition of cities, counties, special districts, non-governmental organizations, tribes, watershed groups and interested stakeholders from Del Norte, Siskiyou, Modoc, Humboldt, Trinity, Mendocino and Sonoma counties. The North Coast’s Proposition 50 grant proposal was the top-ranked proposal in the State and resulted in the award of $25 million in grants to projects throughout the region. The funding is supporting projects that provide greater water supply reliability, clean water, water recycling, habitat restoration and watershed planning.

In Siskiyou County, the Resource Conservation District worked for years building relationships with local landowners to remove an irrigation supply dam to benefit coho salmon. The dam was successfully removed, but the development of new alternative irrigation pipelines was interrupted by the bond freeze, leaving these farmers without irrigation water and the RCD and its contractors in dire financial circumstances.

In the Mattole River watershed, where bond funds are facilitating erosion control, stream flow enhancement, wildfire hazard reduction, and other projects critical to the survival of the river’s native coho and Chinook salmon runs, Executive Director Jeremy Wheeler of the Mattole Restoration Council expressed appreciation for the substantial support from his local community during these challenging times, “to navigate these straits, we have been supported by the local community and the patience of our contractors, and have realized how deep is the backing we can count on from the people we serve in promoting the cause of watershed recovery. In the last days of June, the State came through with what it owed us. We have now repaid our community bridge loans in full, and realize that through all of these struggles, we have become stronger together.”

North Coast Integrated Regional Water Management Plan (NCIRWMP) leaders, North Coast legislators and project proponents have worked diligently for the last six months to assure payment to non-profits, RCDs and local agencies implementing water supply, flood protection, and restoration projects.

Humboldt County Supervisor Jimmy Smith, Chair of the NCIRWMP’s Policy Review Panel, the governance body of the seven county, multi-jurisdictional collaboration, said “We have tracked this process since day one. We engaged every agency and received strong support from Senator Wiggins and her staff Zuey Goosby, Assemblymember Chesbro and his staff John Woolley, and from dedicated staff at DWR and Scott Couch at the State Water Resources Control Board. Their advice and willingness to help was instrumental in tracking our funds through this challenging process. We worked hard to convey the hardships placed on our contractors and their families. Throughout the ordeal our regional team was cohesive and determined. I am very proud of their strength and their political prowess.” Smith went on to say, “We look forward to continuing projects that provide vital services to residents in North Coast communities, including clean drinking water, fisheries restoration and reliable water supplies.”

For a complete list of impacted projects and for more information about the North Coast IRWMP and its projects, visit www.northcoastirwmp.net. #

Sacramento Bee – 7/29/09
By Jeff Barnard

The California Department of Fish and Game has stopped issuing permits for gold miners to use suction dredges in rivers until it develops new rules to protect salmon.

The moratorium announced Tuesday stems from an injunction out of Alameda County Superior Court barring the department from spending state general funds to issue the permits after it missed a June 2008 deadline to develop new rules protecting threatened and endangered salmon.

Department spokeswoman Kirsten Macintyre said that rulemaking process has now begun.

Meanwhile, a bill that would go even farther and stop suction dredge mining until a scientific review is conducted is awaiting the governor's signature.

The injunction stems from continuing efforts by the Karuk Tribe, salmon fishermen and conservationists to force Fish and Game to enforce regulations barring suction dredge mining where it harms fish.

"It is morally reprehensible and illegal for California Fish and Game to continue to use tax dollars to subsidize the destruction of our salmon fisheries, especially so in the midst of a budget crisis," said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, which represents California salmon fishermen and was a plaintiff in the latest lawsuit.

Since 1994, state regulations have barred suction dredge mining unless it can be shown it does not harm fish. About 3,500 permits are issued each year.

A 2005 lawsuit from the Karuk tribe argued that the department was violating that regulation, and a judge ordered Fish and Game to conduct an environmental review and write new rules, if necessary, to protect fish listed as threatened or endangered by June 20, 2008. But it was not done.

Arguing there was no line item in their budget concerning the mining permits, the department did not stop issuing them after the injunction was originally issued July 10. The moratorium was imposed after Judge Frank Roesch told the department that the injunction covered any expenditure of state funds, including turning on the office lights, in conjunction with the permits.

Telephone calls and an e-mail to the New 49'ers gold mining club in Happy Camp, Calif., and a telephone call to their attorney in Portland, Ore., were not immediately returned. #

Redding Record Searchlight – 7/27/09
By Record Searchlight staff

An Almeda County Superior Court judge reaffirmed his ban on suction dredges in state rivers and threatened to hold the state Department of Fish and Game in contempt of court if it continued issuing dredge permits.

Judge Frank Roesch issued a preliminary injunction against dredge permits on July 10 after a lawsuit was brought against the Department of Fish and Game, said a spokesman for Klamath Riverkeeper, a river advocacy group and one of the 11 groups suing DFG.

The lawsuit alleges that the fish and game department is using public funds illegally to issue permits.

Currently, a bill banning suction dredging passed by the state Legislature is being considered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But the governor is holding off on approving any new laws until the budget crisis is resolved, a spokeswoman in his office has said. #

S.F. Chronicle-7/14/09
By Jeff Barnard

The state of Oregon will finance most of the cost of removing four Klamath River dams to help salmon under a bill signed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski Tuesday.

Meanwhile, federal officials met in Klamath Falls with representatives of Pacificorp and the states of California and Oregon. The parties must have a binding agreement by September to restore 300 miles of spawning habitat on what was once the third biggest salmon producer on the West Coast.

A preliminary agreement that serves as a framework for the negotiations both guarantees and limits the amount of irrigation water that will be available to farmers in the Klamath Basin, and offers hundreds of millions of dollars for salmon restoration work and research.

In recent decades, the needs of farms and fish in the area have been pitted against each other while declining salmon runs have triggered cutbacks in commercial and recreational fishing.

"Signing this bill into law is a critical step in ensuring that all of the Klamath's diverse rural communities have an economically viable future," Kulongoski said in a release. "Every farmer and fisherman whose livelihood depends on a healthy river system will benefit from the restoration of the Klamath Basin."

Long an opponent of dam removal, PacifiCorp shifted after it became clear the idea had strong public support and the utility could end up paying far more to continue trying to relicense the aged dams.

"We said all along if public policy dictates dam removal, we need to do everything we can to provide our customers with legal and financial protection," Pacificorp spokesman Art Sasse said.

Sasse, as well as representatives of Indian tribes, farmers, and salmon fishermen, who have long battled over balancing scarce water in the Klamath Basin between fish and farms, all praised the governor for his work to make dam removal a reality.

Oregon Wild, however, continues to oppose the deal. The conservation group argues that it gives too much to farmers and too little to fish and wildlife.

Water wars have long simmered in the Klamath Basin, where the first of the dams and a federal irrigation project built in the early 20th century turned the natural water distribution upside down, draining marshes and lakes and tapping rivers for electricity to put water on dry farmland that grows potatoes, horseradish, grain, alfalfa and cattle.

A drought in 2001 forced a shut-off of irrigation water to sustain threatened and endangered fish, and when the irrigation was restored the next year, tens of thousands of salmon died trying to spawn in the Klamath River, which was too low and too warm to sustain them.

Besides blocking salmon from the upper basin, the dams raise water temperatures to levels unhealthy for fish. Their reservoirs produce toxic algae. The fish are beset by parasites.

The law calls for building up a trust fund of $180 million over the next 10 years through a surcharge on PacifiCorp costumers in Oregon, which amounts to about $1.50 a month for a residential customer. California pays $20 million. If dam removal falls through, the money goes back to ratepayers.

If a federal feasibility study shows the dams can be safely torn down, work begins around 2020.#

Sacramento Bee-7/14/09
By Matt Weiser

The state Legislature has approved a bill to temporarily ban suction dredge mining in the state's rivers, a largely recreational practice blamed for harming salmon spawning habitat.

The state Senate on Monday voted 28-7 to approve the bill, SB 670 by Sen. Patricial Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa. It was approved by an even wider margin in the Assembly last week.

The bill contains an urgency clause, meaning it becomes law immediately upon signing by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It would ban suction dredge mining until the Department of Fish and Game completes a court-ordered update of regulations governing the practice.

"In addition to being essential to saving salmon and steelhead fisheries," Wiggins said in a statement, "this bill will save the department an estimated $1 million in costs to administer a program that does not pay for itself."

The regulatory review was supposed to be finished by July 2008, but Wiggins said the department has yet to begin. As a result, a new court order last week prevents the department from using general fund money to operate the dredge permitting program.

Supporters say the bill includes language negotiated with the Schwarzenegger administration, so they expect him to sign it. Those negotiations followed a February confirmation hearing for Fish and Game Director Don Koch, during which the administration's handling of suction dredge mining came under attack.#

Redding Record Searchlight-7/12/09
By Dylan Darling and Michael Woodward

Fires last summer, combined with thunderstorms early this June, turned Cottonwood Creek into a thick, muddy mocha while making the 50-mile waterway inhospitable for fish.

"The destruction of habitat is phenomenal," said Doug Killam, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game in Red Bluff. "It's like nothing I've ever seen."

The same fires near Platina that threatened the small town also exposed hillsides. In early June, a thunderstorm dropped 3 to 6 inches of rain onto the creek's watershed, pushing tons of sediment into its flow. Carried by the current, the mud has piled up over gravel used by salmon and steelhead for spawning.

Over the past decade, pools that are 10 feet deep are filled with sediment in Beegum Creek, which feeds into Cottonwood Creek, Killam said. Culverts were plugged, causing washouts and closures on Beegum Road. Anywhere from 2 inches to 3 feet of sediment flowed into the creek, Killam said. Duncan Creek, which flows into Cottonwood Creek, also was inundated with sediment,

"Fill the Anderson Cottonwood Irrigation District canal for at least seven miles with dirt," he said. "That's the kind of volume we're seeing."

Killam said it will take at least another year to flush it all out.

While such storm surges and color changes are a common occurrence in winter, Killam said the June storm came at a time crucial for fish and darkened the water more than normal.

A mile of the creek crosses over rangeland 10 miles west of Cottonwood where Bill Gibson has run cattle for 20 years. Gibson said the creek became a chocolate brown last month that he'd never seen before.

"It gets muddy, but never this color," Gibson said.

While the creek has returned to normal for this time of year - low and clear - the fish situation still concerns Killam.

Last week, he swam stretches of the creek with a snorkel in his mouth and an eye out for fish, but said he didn't see any salmon, steelhead or trout.

"It either killed them or drove them downstream," he said.

Killam said the creek provides salmon habitats all the way up into the mountains and that the sea-going fish often spend much of the year in its highest reaches.

As many as 400 spring-run salmon have been counted by scientists like Killam, but this year there have been none.

But the washout might not be to blame. Killam said there weren't any salmon found in the creek last year when its water was clear.

He blames that on a string of poor ocean years that have led to an overall crash in salmon numbers around the state.

"I believe it was just lousy conditions out in the ocean," Killam said.

Any creek repairs will have to wait until after the state funding crisis passes, Killam said.#

USA Today-7/8/09
By Jeff DeLong

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Department of Fish and Game are moving forward with a plan to restore one of the country's rarest trout to its native habitat by poisoning a remote Sierra stream, despite ongoing criticism.

An environmental impact report — ordered by a federal judge in 2005 — is in the comment period and expected to be finalized by October. The project, at Silver King Creek, a wilderness area south of Lake Tahoe, is scheduled for next summer.

Since 2002, protests and legal action have delayed the project to restore the rare Paiute cutthroat trout.

"They want to put an agent in the water that kills everything," says Patty Clary of Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, an opponent of the project. "That's not OK. This is a very precious area." Another lawsuit could be filed if the final impact report fails to adequately address concerns over the proposed fish poisoning, Clary says.

"It's still a very exciting project, and it's very viable," counters Bob Williams, field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Reno.

The Paiute cutthroat trout, listed as endangered in 1967 and upgraded to threatened status in 1975, has become hybridized with other trout in the stream, he says.

The plan calls for the poison rotenone to be used along 11 miles of Silver King Creek, its tributaries and Tamarack Lake Creek. Williams says hybridized trout could then be removed and the stream restocked with pure Paiute cutthroats from hatcheries.

Williams says rotenone would have no long-lasting impact on aquatic life and that macro invertebrates would recolonize the treated area within a few years.

California biologists have twice before used rotenone to rid Lake Davis, a Northern California trout fishing lake, of invading northern pike that they feared would escape into the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta.

The first attempt in 1997 failed, and pike returned two years later.

The California Department of Fish and Game poisoned the lake in September 2007, and no pike have been found since, spokeswoman Carol Singleton says.

Stafford Lehr, senior environmental scientist and project manager for California Fish and Game, says report comments are being responded to carefully.

"Our intent is to address those controversies up front," he says. "It's going to be a matter of opinion as to whether we have done that."

The "vast majority" of comments are favorable, Lehr says. Critics remain dissatisfied.

A June 12 comment written to California water officials by attorney Julia Olson for Californians for Alternatives to Toxics and Wilderness Watch describes the report as "unreliable."#

Chico Enterprise-Record-7/2/09
By Larry Mitchell

The state Department of Fish and Game wants PG&E to put more water in Butte Creek to benefit salmon.

The stream has one of the last remaining runs of naturally spawning spring-run salmon in California.

It's believed more water would contribute to keeping the run viable, and it might help prevent fish from being stranded downstream, said Joe Johnson, a senior environmental scientist with Fish and Game.

On Tuesday, 26 salmon were rescued by Fish and Game workers from the creek below Highway 99. The fish were caught with nets and trucked upstream.

If they had been left in the creek, they would have died once the water warmed up, Johnson said.

Spring-run salmon in Butte Creek and other waters of the Sacramento River system are classified as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. Special efforts have been made to restore them, such as removing dams and increasing water flows.

These seem to have helped. The Butte Creek run, which once numbered only a few fish, has grown to several thousand in recent years.

This year, however, the numbers of salmon generally have been down. Johnson said it's impossible to say exactly why because there are so many potential factors.

PG&E, which operates the DeSabla-Centerville power project in Butte Creek Canyon, is applying for a new federal license for the operation. In connection with that application, Fish and Game has recommended the utility leave more water in the creek at certain times rather than using

it to generate power.

Paul Moreno, a spokesman for PG&E, said the company doesn't oppose the Fish and Game proposals.

According to a Fish and Game report, in 1992 it was agreed PG&E would release at least 40 cfs (cubic feet per second) of water into the creek between June 1 and Sept. 14.

In a new proposal, Fish and Game recommends that minimum flows vary between 40 and 100 cfs depending on the time of year and whether rainfall has been light or normal.

Clint Garman, a fisheries biologist who works out of Fish and Game's Chico office, said one pressing problem is warm water that comes into Butte Creek from DeSabla Reservoir. There are several proposals for fixing that, including piping cold water directly into the creek rather than letting it sit in the reservoir.

He said PG&E has practiced good environmental stewardship in the canyon, and that the spring run has flourished over the last decade. Changes should be made in "baby steps" to avoid causing setbacks for the run, he said.

In Tuesday's salmon rescue, tiny radio transmitters were put in the stomachs of the 26 fish. Crews from Fish and Game and UC Davis will try to track movements of the fish by the radio signals. The goal is to try to learn how many of the rescued fish survive to spawn in the fall, Johnson said. That will suggest whether such rescue operations are worth the money they cost the state.

Christin Polen, who lives near where the fish were rescued, said he's watched salmon gather in that spot in each of the last five years.

There used to be a number of deep holes, and salmon actually survived the summer in them and spawned in that section of the creek. But then a levee reconstruction project eliminated the holes, he said, and there hasn't been enough water to sustain the fish.

This year, the salmon arrived in February, he said. Each year, their arrival has been preceded by the appearance of predators that feed on the fish, such as eagles, osprey and otters.#