[env-trinity] PCFFA Alert: Rivers Need Help Now to Save Fisheries!

[Daniel Bacher]

RIVERS NEED HELP NOW TO SAVE FISHERIES

SALMON, CRAB, OTHER RIVER AND ESTUARY DEPENDENT FISH THREATENED BY ASSAULTS 
ON THE COLUMBIA, KLAMATH AND SACRAMENTO

By: By Glen Spain, Allison Gordon, Zeke Grader
Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations
June 21, 2005


Three of the West Coast’s major river systems – the Columbia, Klamath and 
Central Valley (Sacramento, San Joaquin) are under siege and fishermen need 
to act now to save these rivers and the fisheries they support. We have 
provided you the addresses of the Governors fishermen need to contact 
immediately to protect these critical waterways and the fishing industry 
jobs they generate.

It’s not just salmon fishing that’s threatened. As most crab fishermen know, 
the best Dungeness crab fishing tends to be around the mouths of major 
rivers, since juveniles use these estuaries as nursery grounds.

It’s no coincidence, for example, that the record Dungeness crab landings in 
the Gulf of the Farallones, outside of the Golden Gate, occurred at a time 
of high salmon production. Both owed their abundance to good water 
conditions in the river (in other words, the inflows of fresh water to 
theestuary), as well as good oceanic conditions. The Sacramento, and what 
remains of the San Joaquin, are not simply a passageway for large runs of 
fall chinook salmon between Sierra streams and San Francisco Bay and the 
ocean, they supply the freshwater inflow to the whole delta and bay to 
create the most important estuary on the west coast of North and South 
America. This bay/estuary ecosystem supports the nation’s only remaining 
urban commercial fishery (for herring), and provides critical habitat for 
California halibut, English sole and other economically important fish 
stocks.

The Columbia, too, supports a $50 million/year Dungeness crab fishery 
outside its mouth and, besides being the largest salmon river on the 
continent, there is still a sturgeon fishery taking place in the river. The 
Klamath, whose fish kills in 2002 are the cause of the draconian salmon 
season cutbacks this year offshore Oregon and California, also supports a 
large Dungeness crab fishery off its mouth between Eureka and Crescent City. 
So what is the nature of these assaults? Why should you be mad as hell and 
decide to do something about it? Let’s take a look as you sit down to call 
or write the Governors.

Delta Ecosystem Collapses Due to Water Grabs

California’s Governor Needs to Terminate
New Pumping Plans

The San Francisco Bay-Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta that supplies most of the 
king salmon harvested in the ocean fisheries offshore California, Oregon and 
Washington is far short of its necessary freshwater inflow to maintain its 
estuarine function -- on average now short about 1.6 million acre-feet (MAF) 
of water annually. In fact, in some years as much as half of its inflow is 
diverted, mostly by the State and Federal pumps in the Delta, to San Joaquin 
Valley growers and municipal water users. This inflow shortfall has been 
known about (although the scientific report documenting it was later buried) 
since 1988 when the California State Water Resources Control Board prepared 
a draft order to increase inflow by that amount. That draft order, however, 
was quickly killed by the Legislature and Governor at that time once the 
state’s powerful water buffaloes got wind of it and began applying their 
political pressure.

In 1992, Congress recognized the shortage to the Bay and Delta and voted in 
the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) to provide the Federal 
share of that amount by allocating an additional 800,000 acre-feet of yield 
from the Central Valley Project for fish and wildlife. Unfortunately, the 
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, charged with implementing the CVPIA, subscribes 
to a culture that worships dams and views water diversions as a holy 
sacrament. It was not about to let Congress undo what man had created. So, 
instead of allowing the allotted water to flow downstream through the Delta 
and to the Bay, it devised plans to use the fish and wildlife water upstream 
and then divert it, conveniently at times when irrigators wanted it most, 
when it hit the Delta pumps. In fact, since the passage 13 years ago of the 
CVPIA, which formally made the protection of fish and wildlife a Project 
purpose, pumping in the Delta has actually increased, further exacerbating 
the inflow shortfall of the Delta and Bay and creating a huge salt water 
backup. It was not surprising therefore when State and Federal biologists 
announced a month ago the collapse of the Delta ecosystem. In the past four 
years, four species of Delta fish have gone into severe decline, as have 
copepods, the important base of the Delta’s complex food web.

Yet even in the face of the sudden collapse of the whole Delta ecosystem, 
the California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) is proposing to increase 
pumping rates, reducing inflow even more and shipping even more water south. 
Its plans are to increase pumping maximums from 6680 cubic feet per second 
(cfs) to 8500cfs, an increase of 25 percent.

Fisheries biologists point to three suspected causes of the Delta collapse. 
Degraded water quality, exotic species and massive water diversions. The 
collapse of the Delta species over the last four years has in fact coincided 
with the highest annual rates of water diversions from the Bay-Delta. 
According to State and Federal fisheries documents, increasing diversions 
will make the ecosystem collapse even worse.

Even more disturbing is that this increased stress on the Delta is not even 
necessary. California is not in a water crisis. In fact, according to the 
State’s own California Water Plan Update Public Review Draft, California can 
meet water needs well into the future without taking more water out of the 
Bay-Delta Estuary. This Water Plan Update even shows that water demand in 
California may actually decrease over the next thirty years. In fact, the 
Planning and Conservation League has identified 4.2 million acre-feet of 
water that could be conserved using cheap and readily available conservation 
and reuse technologies, while this “Delta Damaging Plan” might provide only 
1 million acre-feet of additional water, at the expense of a system that is 
already short more than 1.6 million acre-feet

Key elements of this massive water grab include actions by Federal and State 
water agencies that reduce protections and increase water volumes for 
pumping at the expense of California’s sustainable water future:

*	The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) was politically pressured 
into reversing their prior scientific finding that increased pumping would 
jeopardize salmon and steelhead trout. Even their watered down Biological 
Opinion (BiOp) stated that the project would increase the likelihood of 
extinction for all listed species on most rivers tributary to the Delta.


*	The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will soon gut key protections currently in 
place to ensure that fish will have the cold water necessary for their 
survival (e.g., by deleting the requirement that enough cold water be held 
in Shasta Reservoir for release to the Sacramento River and 
alteringtemperature control standards).


*	The Bureau of Reclamation rushed through forty-year sweetheart water 
delivery contracts with Northern California districts for more water than 
they need so that those districts can sell the water to Southern California, 
all at ludicrously large markups.


*	The State Water Project will increase water export capacity by up to 25 
percent. CDWR is currently pushing to get approval to use its pumps to 
export as much as 1 million acre-feet of this water.


*	The Department of Water Resources is connecting the State Water Project 
canal to the Bureau of Reclamation’s Delta Mendota Canal so CDWR can pump 
more water for Bureau water contractors such as the Westlands Water 
District.


The San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary is critical for the health of the west 
coast ocean salmon fishery, along with major crab and herring fisheries. 
This important ecological resource should not be destroyed.

Taking Action: We need you to write a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger. 
Tell him these key fisheries depend on the health of the Bay and Delta 
ecosystem. It is your livelihood that’s at stake.

Tell him it makes no sense to you that his Department of Water Resources is 
planning to increase pumping of water from the Delta when the Delta is 
already so stressed that many of its species are in serious decline.

Tell him we already have faster, better and cheaper ways to provide water 
for his State’s future. These are outlined clearly in the just released 
California Water Plan.

Tell him you want a sensible, defensible, sustainable water policy that 
conserves our public resources and maintains a strong fishing industry. Send 
your letters, e-mails, or make your phone calls to:

The Honorable Arnold Schwarzenegger
Governor of the State of California
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814
Office: (916) 445-2841
Fax: (916) 445-4633
E-mail to the Governor: http://www.govmail.ca.gov



Busting the Dams and Busting Loose
With Water on the Klamath

It’s Hasta La Vista Time for Low
Flows and Bad Water

Unless someone has their head where the sun doesn’t shine, it’s no secret 
the salmon fishery for Oregon and California this year is the most 
restricted it’s been in recent history, despite some record runs, all 
because of two fish kills in the Klamath River in 2002 and the impact that 
has had on stocks that would have been available for harvest this year and 
next.

Salmon fishermen are facing the worst season in decades in Oregon and 
California, in spite of record returns to the Sacramento River this year, 
because wherever those imperiled Klamath fish intermingle with abundant 
runs, “weak stock management” principles require fishermen to avoid all 
impacts everywhere. Fishing opportunities within the Klamath Management Zone 
(KMZ) are pretty much closed entirely this year, but closures and 
restrictions have affected ports as far south as Santa Cruz and north to the 
Columbia River – nearly 600 miles of coastline.

Years of federal mismanagement in the Klamath shorted water to the river 
that fish needed to survive. In 2002, so much water was taken by the U.S. 
Bureau of Reclamation and others from the river that fish died in massive 
numbers, first a juvenile fish kill of at least 200,000 that spring, 
affecting this year’s adult returns, and later that summer an estimated 
80,000 adult spawners died before they could spawn. Rampant spread of 
several fatal fish diseases in the river, which are favored by slow moving 
warm water, has taken a huge toll of juvenile fish in every year since then.

The cause of the disaster is well known. This was not an act of God, nor any 
mystery; it was a deliberate result of current federal water policy. This 
year’s collapse traces straight back to the intentional (and politically 
motivated) spring 2002 decision by the Bush Administration, acting through 
the Bureau of Reclamation, to permanently reduce flows to the lower Klamath 
River to record lows. By keeping back far more water for federal irrigation 
than recommended by scientists and fishermen, the government left too little 
in the river for salmon to survive their journey to the spawning areas. The 
Administration’s Klamath water policy, whether intended or not, was a wanton 
action to starve the river.

Reclamation controls all the flows that pass through Iron Gate Dam, the 
lowest in a series of small dams on the Klamath that block the mid-river. 
These flows can amount to half of the total volume at the estuary during 
critical summer months and in dry years. 2002 was a particularly dry year.

Starting in spring of 2002, Reclamation embarked on a 10-year water 
allocation plan. This plan was embodied in a Biological Opinion (“BiOp”) 
approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). That BiOp, 
however, was the result of NMFS caving in to political pressure from the 
Bureau and the Administration. NMFS non-scientist officials overrode the 
agency’s own Science Assessment Team, who said the fish needed more water, 
and placed the fish clearly in jeopardy. In fact, the head of the NMFS 
Science Assessment Team, Dr. Michael Kelly, would later file a 
whistle-blower complaint about agency higher ups ordering the plan to be 
rewritten to Bureau of Reclamation specifications, in spite of a known high 
risk to fish.

That 10-year plan reduced spring and summer flows in the Klamath River to 
less than half that required to protect salmon in the river, and so turned 
the river into a warm-water trickle that bred parasites, produced algae 
blooms, crowded the fish and deprived them of important habitat. The federal 
agencies were repeatedly told by fishermen, the Tribes and their own 
scientists that this would lead to disaster, but all objections were ignored 
in the Bush Administration’s haste to respond to heavy political pressure 
from irate Upper Basin irrigators and their Congressional representatives.

As a result of the spring 2002 juvenile fish kill, the 2005 season is less 
than half what it was just last year, and lost fishing opportunities may 
cost our industry up to $100 million this year alone. Next year we will pay 
the additional price for the fall 2002 adult spawner fish kill of up to an 
estimated 80,000, with an unknown additional price tag for those losses.

PCFFA has made formal requests to the Governor’s of both California and 
Oregon to declare a disaster, and to request the declaration of a “fishery 
failure” by the Secretary of Commerce. The Secretary of Commerce has the 
legal authority to declare a “commercial fishery failure” disaster 
declaration under the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management 
Act, Section 312(a) [16 U.S.C. §1861(a)]. Independent authority for such a 
disaster declaration also exists under the older Interjurisdictional 
Fisheries Act (IFA), at 308(b) [16 U.S.C. §4107(b)]. Similar disaster 
declarations occurred for the west coast salmon fishery following the 
seven-year drought in the late 1980’s, and during the severe El Niño events 
of 1982-83 and 1995.

Thirty-seven members of Congress in Oregon and California have supported our 
request for disaster relief. A copy of that letter is on the PCFFA web site.

Ultimately, however, the problems in the Klamath can never be solved unless 
there is more water left in the river for the fish. The State of California 
plays a key role in advocating for additional flows to keep these fisheries 
alive and recovering. Another measure under consideration is the removal of 
Iron Gate Dam and other small, now obsolete, power dams that block the river 
and have cut off hundreds of miles of good spawning and rearing habitat 
above them. These dams not only block fish passage, but they seriously 
impair water quality.

The 50-year license for operating these dams expires in March of 2006, 
present a once in a lifetime chance to restore this key river system and 
bring the salmon home to the upper basin. So far the State of California has 
taken the position that several of these dams should come down. This would 
help restore salmon to the upper river where they were once abundant.

Taking Action: California Governor Schwarzenegger should stand firm in 
supporting fishermen and in demanding more water for the lower Klamath River 
to protect and restore fisheries. Drop him a letter or call his office 
asking him to continue to take a strong stand on putting more water in the 
Klamath River, removing dams in the Klamath that kill fish, and working 
toward full salmon recovery for the Klamath Basin. You can contact his 
office as follows:

The Honorable Arnold Schwarzenegger
Governor of the State of California
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814
Office: (916) 445-2841
Fax: (916) 445-4633
E-mail to the Governor: http://www.govmail.ca.gov

For More Information on the Klamath See: “Can’t Fish Salmon? Federal Klamath 
Water Policies Are To Blame,” from the April 2005 FN on the web at: 
www.pcffa.org/fn-apr05.htm. Likewise see: “Why the Klamath Matters to West 
Coast Fishermen,” from the August 2001 FN, on the web at: 
www.pcffa.org/fn-aug01.htm. Also check out the top of the PCFFA Home Page 
at: www.pcffa.org where you will find the latest letters from PCFFA 
requesting disaster assistance and letters from Members of Congress 
supporting those efforts.



It’s Either a Recovered Salmon Fishery for the
Columbia or Preserving Obsolete Dams.


The Governors Can’t Have it Both Ways.

The mighty Columbia was once the largest salmon-producing river in the 
world, with runs estimated at from 10 to 16 million adults. Today the number 
of wild salmon and steelhead is down to about 2-3 percent of those historic 
runs, and nearly every run is federally protected under the Endangered 
Species Act. Today the Columbia and its major tributary, the Snake River, 
are the most heavily dammed rivers in the nation.

Fishermen have been the lead is decades of struggle, first to secure fish 
passage through the Columbia at all (the original plan provided for no fish 
passage of any sort), and today the struggle is to reopen parts of the river 
once again to spawning and rearing, primarily with the removal of the lower 
four Snake River dams (Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower 
Granite).

As we have written before, these four dams have been a disaster for the 
Northwest economy, killing far more economic wealth in the form of 
devastated Snake River salmon runs (once 50 percent of the Columbia’s 
productivity) in return for very few public benefits.

Access to a huge amount of pristine spawning and rearing habitat is on the 
other side of the lower four Snake River dams. Blocking spawner access to 
that habitat, plus making it that much harder for outmigrating smolts by 
forcing them through four more banks of turbines just makes no sense.

The four lower Snake River dams were not built because of either good 
science or sound economics, but as a result of decades of persistent 
Congressional lobbying by Idaho development boosters and land speculators. 
Even the Army Corps of Engineers, in a comprehensive report in 1933, and 
then again in 1938, concluded that additional projects proposed for the 
Snake River would never even pay for themselves as projects, even ignoring 
major losses to fisheries damages.

The lower four Snake River dams generate relatively little power (less in 
fact than could be saved by reasonable conservation measures), provide 
little or no irrigation water (only one provides any at all, and then only 
for about 36,000 acres that could just as easily be supplied by wells), and 
no flood control whatsoever. The only major benefit any of these four dams 
ever provided is heavily subsidized river barge transportation, and then 
only between Pasco, WA (the original barge terminal before the dams were 
completed in 1974) and Lewiston, ID. Even these transportation benefits can 
be cost-effectively replaced by railroads which, were it not for the large 
federal barging subsidy, would actually be much cheaper.

In fact, fisheries managers from Washington and other states warned 
repeatedly that the planned construction of more dams would be a disaster 
for the Columbia’s salmon runs. This is a typical example, from the State of 
Washington Department of Fisheries Annual Report for 1949:


“Another serious threat to the Columbia river fishery is the proposed 
construction by the U.S. Army Engineers of Ice Harbor and three other dams 
on the lower Snake river between Pasco., Wash., and Lewiston, Idaho, to 
provide slackwater navigation and a relatively minor block of power. The 
development would remove part of the cost of waterborne shipping from the 
shipper and place it on the taxpayer, jeopardizing more than one-half of the 
Columbia river salmon production in exchange for 148 miles of subsidized 
barge route.... This policy of water development, the department maintains, 
is not in the best interest of the over-all economy of the state. Salmon 
must be protected from the type of unilateral thinking that would harm one 
industry to benefit another.... Loss of the Snake River fish production 
would be so serious that the department has consistently opposed the 
four-phase lower dam program that would begin with Ice Harbor dam near 
Pasco.”

Unfortunately, what fisheries managers had predicted in 1949 came true – 
once abundant runs of salmon spawning in the Snake River were all but 
destroyed, leading to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars each year 
in economic benefits to the entire Northwest and well into Southeast Alaska, 
which is also heavily dependent on Columbia-origin stocks.

The four lower Snake River dams were constructed by Congressional fiat, over 
the intense objections of commercial fishermen, Tribes, state agency 
biologists, coastal communities and even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 
Salmon can apparently survive the impact of the four lower Columbia main 
stem dams, but these four additional Snake River dams were truly a 
short-sighted boondoggle that can no longer be justified.

Why does the Columbia matter to fishermen all over the west coast? First, 
there are direct losses of harvest opportunities from massive fish losses 
from the Columbia itself. This collapse has impoverished the lower river 
gill-net fleet which once plied the lower Columbia from Astoria, but also 
dramatically affected fisheries in Southeast Alaska, which is more than half 
dependent upon Columbia stocks for its harvests.

Second, since Columbia basin salmon are so widely migratory, and thus a 
component in many mixed-stock ocean fisheries, Columbia and Snake 
River-driven “weak stock management” constraints on all west coast salmon 
fisheries are not uncommon. When this happens, harvest opportunities on many 
otherwise abundant stocks must be curtailed and ocean fisheries closed. 
Thishappened most dramatically in 1997 when large portions of the 
Sacramento-San Joaquin chinook harvests were closed to protect weak Snake 
River fish, causing losses in the many tens of millions of dollars in 
California and Oregon. In earlier years, whole chunks of the Southeast 
Alaska salmon fishery were also closed, all to prevent impacts on these 
extremely weak Snake River stocks. Snake River-driven constraints stand 
right behind the Klamath as a likely cause of future closures.

Third, more depletion of the Columbia River north-migrating stocks could 
once again destabilize the hard fought Pacific Salmon Treaty, intended to 
put an end to past fish wars between the U.S. and Canada over salmon that 
migrate back and forth between the two countries. That Treaty rests on the 
assumption that for every salmon originating in a British Columbia stream 
that is later caught by Alaska fishermen, at least one U.S. fish originating 
in the Columbia River, most of which are north-migrating, can be caught in 
British Columbia. This one-for-one equation, however, quickly breaks down 
when stocks from the Columbia are in deep decline, as has happened in recent 
years. Just a few years ago, the Treaty broke down completely over these 
issues, resulting in a renewed “fish war” with Canada and the imposition of 
“transit fees” for fishing vessels routinely moving (as many do) between 
summer waters of Alaska and over-wintering in Seattle or Bellingham, 
Washington.

Fourth, your taxpayer dollars are going toward an increasingly preposterous 
$500 million/year menu of “salmon recovery” measures that are not actually 
intended to truly recover the fish, not going to do anything about impacts 
of the four lower Snake River dams, and not going to, in the end, solve any 
of the problems of the river. The latest such 2004 Biological Opinion 
“recovery plan,” for instance, courtesy of the Bush Administration, actually 
abandons salmon recovery as a conservation standard in favor of merely 
maintaining museum runs of fish, and likewise totally ignores Columbia River 
dams by attempting to reclassify them as “part of the environmental 
baseline,” as though they had been dropped there by Ice Age glaciers and not 
the Army Corps of Engineers.

That latest 2004 Salmon Plan has once again been challenged in U.S. District 
Court by PCFFA and many other fishing groups and fish advocates, and is 
likely to be entirely invalidated as seriously flawed. Under the current 
plan, 2005 spring chinook returns have deteriorated to less than 15 
percenttheir abundance even in 2004, and all lower Columbia commercial and 
sport fishing has been closed on an emergency basis. Members of Congress are 
calling for a declaration by the Secretary of Commerce of a “fisheries 
failure” parallel to that asked for the Klamath, and fishery closures are 
now migrating up the Washington coast and far inland to Idaho.

Taking Action: Write to your Northwest Governors and tell them to make every 
effort to recover salmon in the Columbia to full harvestable levels, 
including rethinking the need for the lower four Snake River dams which have 
been a disaster for once-abundant Columbia River salmon fisheries and 
Northwest fisheries economies everywhere:

The Honorable Ted Kulongoski
Governor of the State of Oregon
160 State Capitol Building
Salem, OR 97310-4047

The Honorable Christine O. Gregoire
Governor of the State of Washington
PO Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002

The Honorable Dirk Kempthorne
Governor of the State of Idaho
700 West Jefferson Street, 2nd Floor
Boise, ID 83720-0034

For More Information on the Columbia See: “Why the Columbia Matters to West 
Coast Fishermen,” from the July, 2004 FN. A copy of that article is on the 
Web at: www.pcffa.org/fn-jul04.htm. Also see the “Proposed Columbia Salmon 
Plan Protects Dams, Imperils Salmon,” from the October 2004 FN, on the Web 
at: www.pcffa.org/fn-oct04.htm; and “Ending the Era of Big Dams: Why Some 
Dams Must Go,” from the August 1999 FN at: www.pcffa.org/fn-aug99.htm.



If You Don’t Act, Who Will?

What needs to be done to protect these rivers is pretty clear. It’s also 
clear that a lot of different fisheries depend on the health of these 
rivers.

So don’t just sit there in your wheelhouse fuming over the radio or cell 
phone with your code group about there being no fish, or about regulations 
stopping you from fishing. Don’t just sit there in front of your PC 
kibitzing with your blog group. Get off your ass and make a phone call or 
write a letter to the Governors and tell them your livelihood and your 
fishery is at stake and you’re mad as hell and you want the problems fixed 
now! You’ll feel better for it and it will do some real good.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Glen Spain is the Northwest Regional Director for the Pacific Coast 
Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) and the Institute for 
Fisheries Resources (IFR); Allison Gordon is a salmon watershed volunteer on 
staff with IFR’s office in San Francisco; and Zeke Grader is the Executive 
Director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations 
(PCFFA). PCFFA can be reached by email to: fish1ifr at aol.com. Check out the 
PCFFA web site at: www.pcffa.org.