[env-trinity] Redding Record Serachlight April 14

[Byron]

Diversion to Klamath possible 
Interior officials suggest plan will prevent fish kill 

By Alex Breitler, Record Searchlight 
April 14, 2005 

WEAVERVILLE -- A plan to restore the Trinity River will be undermined if the
river's water is used 
instead to boost flows downstream on the lower Klamath River,
conservationists said this week. 

The Clinton-era plan calls for added water releases into the Trinity in late
spring and early summer, 
flushing juvenile chinook salmon out to the ocean and mimicking the flows
that existed before the 
Trinity Dam was built. 

But Department of Interior officials said this week they'd like to save
those spring flows and use them 
instead in the fall to swell the Klamath below its merger with the Trinity. 

That would aid adult chinook salmon as they swim upstream, and might help
avert another fish kill 
like the one that claimed 33,000 fish in the lower Klamath in 2002, the
government says. The risk 
of a repeat is high this year because of drought conditions in the Klamath
Basin. 

But Trinity River advocates say the strategy ignores years of science
supporting higher spring flows. 

If the restoration plan is "prostituted" for political purposes, then the
government's efforts on the 
Trinity serve no purpose, wrote Byron Leydecker of the conservation group
Friends of the Trinity 
River. 

"Its existence is nothing more than a sham," he wrote this week in a letter
to the Bureau of 
Reclamation. "Ongoing science efforts and 15 years of scientific study would
have no meaning." 

Kirk Rodgers, regional director for the Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento,
and U.S. Fish and 
Wildlife Service regional manager Steve Thompson sent a letter earlier this
week to the Trinity River 
Restoration Program suggesting some Trinity water be saved for the Klamath
this fall. 

Many fish killed in 2002 were Trinity River fish attempting to return to the
stream in which they 
were born, Rodgers and Thompson wrote. 

"We would like to consider options for reducing the potential for a serious
die-off ... by releasing an 
appropriate volume of water ... at the most effective time," they wrote. 

While precipitation in the Trinity Basin is normal, the snowpack in the
Klamath area has dwindled 
to as low as 30 percent of the norm, "significantly" increasing the chance
of another fish kill, they 
wrote. Such a disaster could cause delays in meeting restoration goals on
the Trinity. 

Leydecker wrote back, saying the Trinity shouldn't serve as a Band-Aid to
solve major problems in 
the Klamath Basin. The region has been under scrutiny since 2001, when many
farmers went 
without water deliveries to preserve fish in Upper Klamath Lake and the
Klamath River. 

Rather, the solution lies in retiring some irrigation land in the upper
basin, thereby reducing 
demand, Leydecker said. 

The Trinity flows into the Klamath just 40 miles from the ocean and cannot
be expected to fix the 
entire basin's plight, said conservationist Steve Pedery of the Oregon
Natural Resources Council. 

"You could pipe the Amazon down the Trinity and it's not going to make a bit
of difference for most of 
the (Klamath) river," he said Wednesday. "All you're doing is moving the
problem further upstream." 
  

Bureau spokesman Jeff McCracken said Wednesday that no decision on flows had
been made. The 
multiagency Trinity Management Council was expected to meet today to send a
flow 
recommendation to the bureau, and the Department of Interior will make the
ultimate decision. 

"We're just looking for the best use of this water," McCracken said. "This
is not an attempt to do 
anything that would overly modify" the restoration plan. 

For decades, up to 90 percent of the Trinity's flow had been diverted to
farms in the Central Valley. 
The restoration plan calls for closer to a 50-50 split. 

The plan was tied up in court after irrigators sued, but the 9th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals sided 
with conservationists and American Indians last July, ending a four-year
legal battle. 

 

Byron Leydecker, 

Chair, Friends of Trinity River

Consultant, California Trout, Inc.

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810 ph

415 383 9562 fx

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://www.fotr.org

http://caltrout.org

 

 

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