| Victims of Dams Rally In Capitol: by Tim McKay |
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Hundreds of demonstrators representing tribes, fishermen and environmentalists rallied on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento last month to highlight the effects of PacifiCorp’s Klamath River dams on their lives.
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April 2005
The rally was partly a commemoration of the International Day of Action for Rivers and partly an effort to encourage Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to call for removal of the six Klamath dams.
The dams are undergoing a once-every-half-century relicensing process by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Parallel talks also are underway between the Scottish-owned PacifiCorp and four tribes, the states of California and Oregon, federal water and wildlife agencies, various user groups and environmental organizations—including the NEC.
The Klamath once was the third most productive salmon stream in the U.S., providing Native American tribal members with more than a pound of salmon daily. But the dams have cut off hundreds of miles of spawning habitat, dropping the number of spawners from more than a million to the tens of thousands expected this fall.
Fish Floundering
The dearth of salmon also is attributable to an unprecedented die-off of 65,000 adult fish in 2002 and the continuing chronic loss of juvenile salmonids due to low water flows and disease.
Since fisheries managers base annual commercial, sport and Indian quotas on weak stocks, the fate of the fall-fun chinook salmon season affects a wide swath of the Pacific coast.
Klamath restrictions are likely to reduce the take of as many as 200,000 Sacramento River fall-run fish, which can command a price of $50 each at dockside.
“We’re going to have about half the fishing opportunity that we had last year off the coast of California and Oregon,” said David Bitts, who has been fishing out of Eureka for 30 years. “I’m probably looking at a 50% reduction in my revenues, and I’d say for the whole fleet.”
Fish restorationists also are pressing for a recovery plan for spring-run fish.
Quotas Coming
The Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC) this month is expected to make its recommendations on how many salmon may be taken this season when it meets in Tacoma, Washington.
The weather hasn’t helped either, with most of the normal snow and rain in the upper Klamath basin falling generally in central and southern California.
In the end, it looks like this could wind up as one of the three or four driest years of record since 1961. The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Klamath Irrigation Project’s water supply, is preparing for a major drought and buying water from farmers.
The Klamath Coalition, of which NEC is part, has advocated retiring farm land from willing sellers to increase water supply and also continues to challenge federal water management in the upper basin in court.
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Updated Wednesday, April 13, 2005 |
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