Conservation News
Crops or salmon: What will it be?
By Tim Holt, Excerpted from the Sacramento Bee, June 20, 2004
Submitted by Bruce Dau
Crops or salmon: What will it be?
By Tim Holt, Excerpted from the Sacramento Bee, June 20, 2004
Submitted by Bruce Dau
Injun Billy remembers as a boy running as fast as he could on the hot sand along the river so it wouldn't burn his feet. In those days, there were deep holes all along the meandering river, holes that were thick with salmon in the fall and spring. And there were eels and acorn soup to eat along with the salmon, cooked over open fires by the water. Injun Billy, also known as William Carpenter, 71, is a Hoopa tribal elder, who lived as a boy and young adult along the wild Trinity River.
Today the sand bars and deep fishing holes of Injun Billy's early days are gone, as are 80 percent of the Trinity's fish. Today's Trinity River is a creature of the Bureau of Reclamation, and of the powerful economic and political forces that have shaped Northern California's water delivery systems. The bureau built the river's dams as well as the 11-mile tunnel that has diverted as much as 90 percent of the Trinity's water southward via the Sacramento River.
In pre-dam days, before 1964, the river channel was periodically scoured out by high winter and spring runoffs from the lakes and tributaries of the nearby Trinity Alps. The more even, regulated flows of post-dam days limited this scouring, allowing sediment and vegetation to accumulate along the river's banks, filling up the fishing holes, clogging the gravel in spawning grounds and over the decades creating a straight, rectangular-shaped riverbed.
Now this reshaped river, is the subject of a tug-of-war in federal court. The river is currently at the center of a monumental legal battle between Central Valley water users and public utilities, led by the sprawling Westlands Water District, and the Hoopa and Yurok tribes that want river flows, and their fishery, restored. At stake for Westlands is no more than 10 percent of their federal water deliveries. If the Indians do manage to regain the flows they feel they need for a healthy river, Westlands farmers would have to make up the difference in the open water market, at a cost substantially higher than the federally subsidized water they receive now.
For over half a century Westlands, the largest irrigation district in the nation, has been a major player shaping water delivery decisions in Northern California. By the early 1950s, its farmers had severely depleted their water supply, an underground aquifer. They began looking northward to replace it and soon found themselves paired with Northern California Congressman Clair Engle, who was looking for support for an extension of the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) into the Trinity region. The resulting alliance helped secure funding for the Lewiston and Trinity dams and the 11-mile diversion tunnel through the mountains to the Sacramento watershed, a $225 million public works project that eventually turned the Trinity into a trickle of its former self.
During most of the post-dam period, the Westlands and the rest of the CVP clients got their water, the Hoopas and the Yuroks, who live along the nearby Klamath River, got empty promises, beginning with Congressman Engle's vow that once the Trinity project was completed the Indians would still have all the water their river and its fish needed. In the 1970s through the 1990s, as it became obvious that the water exports were having a devastating effect on the river, the Indians received as their consolation prize an endless stream of federal studies telling them what they already knew, that the dams and diversions were killing their fishery.
The political will to do something about it did not surface until the very last days of the Clinton administration, when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt issued an order to ramp up the flows in the Trinity to 47 percent of their historic levels, a level that the government's voluminous studies had determined would bring the river's chinook and coho salmon and steelhead to sustainable population levels. That decision was promptly challenged in court by Westlands and several other litigants. They have effectively blocked implementation of Babbitt's decision up until the present day.
Last April the Hoopas persuaded a three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to send more water down the Trinity than they've ever seen in this post-dam era (47 percent of historic levels). The extra water release was an emergency decree; the judges must still issue a ruling on the merits of the Westlands case which is centered around the energy crunch California was experiencing at the time Secretary Babbitt issued his order.
Westlands has for some time maintained that the river and its fishery can be restored by undertaking physical improvements in the watershed, such as sediment reduction projects, that don't involve increasing river flows. A previous effort to broker a deal by the Interior Department's Bennett Raley, assistant secretary for water and science, fell through earlier this year. Raley's compromise proposal was rejected by the Hoopas because they felt it tilted too far in favor of the farmers. Under Raley's proposal, Trinity flows would have been brought up to sustainable levels only in wet years, meaning that any resulting gains in the fishery would be jeopardized in dry and normal years.
Injun Billy has grown old and discouraged watching the decline of his boyhood river and its fish. The next generation, however, has seen the river's levels go from a relative trickle to almost half its pre-dam flows this year, thanks to the judges' decree. Because of their remote location, the Hoopas haven't been able to cash in on casino gambling. Instead, they're betting their future on the natural resources of their valley. For all but 40 of the last 10,000 years their river and its fishery have supported them, and they stubbornly hold on to the belief that it will do so once again.
Editor's Note: As of June 21, 2004, the Trinity River at Lewiston is flowing at 2,020 cfs. The historical average (post dam) for this date is 800 cfs.