THE PACIFIC COAST FEDERATION
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From Fishermen's News of April, 2005
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The 2005 California and Oregon ocean salmon fishing seasons are a disaster. This will be one of the most restricted seasons in management history. However, it comes as no surprise. The impact of two serious 2002 fish kills in the Klamath River (both juveniles and adults), caused when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation greatly reduced that river’s flows, will severely affect this year’s ocean fishery and chances are, next year’s as well.
That we would be facing trouble this year as a result of the 2002 Klamath juvenile fish kill was known back in March 2004, when Klamath 3-year old fall chinook (this year’s harvestable 4-year olds) were observed to be at their second lowest number on record. In March of 2005 those very low projections were borne out.
How did this happen? All of this occurred because the Bush Administration decided in 2002 that full irrigation water deliveries to Upper Klamath Basin, in spite of a drought, were more politically important than saving fish or fishing dependent communities.
Thus, in spite of a predicted record 2005 run for California Central Valley stocks -- perhaps the largest since Shasta and Friant dams were built (largely a result of hard work by fishermen pushing habitat improvements and better flows) -- and strong runs nearly everywhere else, the ocean troll season this year will have to be severely restricted to protect the meager Klamath fall chinook populations. Under the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s “weak stock management” policy, fishing on abundant stocks has to be restrained wherever severely depressed Klamath fall chinooks may also be found -- an area roughly extending from the Columbia River to Monterey Bay, almost 800 miles of California and Oregon coastline.
The economic losses to the commercial salmon fishery alone this year are projected to exceed $100 million, at a minimum, and possibly much more. Tragically, this all comes at a time when years of consumer education efforts have paid off in the form of high market prices and peak consumer demand for wild salmon. If we cannot supply that demand, however, consumers will turn back toward farmed fish, affecting our markets for years to come.
The cause of the disaster is well known and most of us knew or should have known this was coming for the past three years. This was not, after all, an act of God; 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 -- placating noisy irrigators -- and the salmon be damned!
The Bureau of Reclamation controls all the flows that pass through Iron Gate Dam, the lowest in a serious 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 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.
And so a deal was cut, not for the salmon but only for the irrigators, which the Administration considered a key constituency in that election year. Fishermen were sold down a river where salmon couldn’t swim.
In the spring of 2002, these “irrigators-first, salmon-last” federal water policies resulted in the death of many out-migrating juvenile salmon by depriving them of access to edge habitat needed to hide from predators, stranding them on banks, and causing the rapid spread of warm-water parasites that carry diseases to which stressed juvenile salmon are particularly vulnerable. Monitoring of juvenile fish kills was sparse at the time, but estimates are that at least 200,000 juveniles died that spring, and possibly many more.
Those dead 2002 juveniles are the salmon now “missing in action” in the Klamath, and whose premature deaths prevented them from ever growing into the adult spawners needed to replace their generation in 2005. This year’s closures are caused primarily by the loss of these juvenile 2002 fish.
Moreover, during September of 2002, these same biased water policies resulted in what has been called the largest adult fish kill in U.S. history. During that month as many as 80,000 otherwise healthy adult spawners perished as the returning salmon tried to crowd back into a shriveled, toxic river. It was the perfect condition for an epidemic. Massive numbers were killed by diseases and warm temperature stress. Two separate independent scientific studies concluded that near-record low river flows mandated by the Bureau of Reclamation were the primary cause of this catastrophe. However, those impacts will hit us again next year.
The Klamath salmon recovery plan says that at least 35,000 natural spawners must get to the Klamath’s spawning grounds each year, the so-called “spawner floor.” Only the surplus fish above that minimum spawner floor are harvestable, and in practice only a fraction of those. When the final numbers came down this February, however, it appeared that even without any fishing at all, only 42,600 natural spawners were likely to come back to the Klamath. A fishing season like that of 2004 would have resulted in only 22,700 -- far below the spawner floor. Hence major cutbacks in the ocean troll fishery were mandatory this year, affecting tens of thousands of people in almost every coastal community.
And why? All so a few hundred federally subsidized irrigators in the upper basin’s Klamath Irrigation Project could have far more than their fair share of river water during the 2002 drought, primarily to grow low-valued potatoes -- a crop already in worldwide glut, much of which is plowed under in most years for lack of a market -- all at the expense of the Klamath River, its fisheries and lower river and coastal fishing dependent communities.
The venerable Wall Street Journal later reported on 30 July 2003 that the water cut off to the Klamath River in 2002 was engineered by White House Political Advisor Karl Rove. In a campaign to help the re-election of U.S. Senator Gordon Smith, Rove created a photo-op by having Senator Smith help open the Klamath Project irrigation diversion head gates with two Cabinet Secretaries and assured them that they would get full deliveries in spite of the drought (to see the original Wall Street Journal article go to: http://www.pcffa.org/RoveWSJ07-30-03.htm). In other words, the west coast fishing industry must now suffer $100 million in fishery losses because of water unnecessarily diverted from the Klamath in 2002 just to serve the Administration’s political pandering.
Fishermen do not blame the rank and file Klamath Basin farmers, who like us are hard working family food producers. Like fishermen, they too are caught up in a water crisis not of their own making. Federal Klamath Project farmers only plant where there is available federal water. Most are innocent victims of federal water promises that could never be met, and of decades of both federal and state water mismanagement.
However, we should and do blame the federal government for this disaster. It was the federal government that promised farmers more water than was ever available and took too much water from the river, pitting farmers against lower river and coastal fishermen and Tribes. It is the federal government which makes water policy and well as is supposed to protect fisheries. How can the federal government justify systematically strangling the west coast salmon fisheries by killing this once great river?
All salmon fishermen have ever asked is that enough water be left in the Klamath River for damaged fisheries to recover, so we can once again make a decent living doing what we do best -- providing high quality salmon for people’s tables. Instead, the federal government has made the Klamath River toxic to salmon but safe for potatoes.
To understand how damaged the Klamath has been, remember that historically the Klamath Basin was the third most productive salmon river system on the west coast, producing a salmon escapement of between 660,000 to 1.1 million adult fish annually, including chinook, coho, pinks and chum salmon as well as abundant steelhead. Only the Columbia and the California Central Valley river systems produced more salmon.
As European settlers came to the Northern California and Southern Oregon coastlines, the Klamath Basin salmon fisheries sustainably supported many canneries served by a large fishing fleet, and helped build and feed coastal ports like Fort Bragg, Eureka, Crescent City and Coos Bay.
In contrast, in 2005 we will be lucky to make even the 35,000-spawner floor. In other words, the wild salmon productivity of the Klamath River, once one of the greatest rivers of North America, is now down to about 4% of what it once produced.
Water is very scarce in the basin. The 9,691 square mile Klamath Basin extends far inland and in many places is very dry. The Upper Klamath, in which the Klamath Irrigation Project is situated, is classed as high desert, receiving an average annual rainfall of less than 12 inches/year. The great salmon runs of the Klamath Basin, therefore, were utterly dependent on both the quality and amount of water in the Upper Klamath River and its tributaries (which include the Trinity and Shasta Rivers), and particularly the water from the natural storage lakes in the Upper Basin. These large but shallow wetland lakes (including Upper Klamath Lake) naturally stored large amounts of water and gradually released it downriver during the driest parts of the year at just the right time to support abundant salmon runs. The roughly 350,000 acres of natural wetlands in and around these lakes also helped filter pollutants, including naturally occurring nitrates and phosphates, out of the river.
Then, in 1907 the newly formed Bureau of Reclamation entered the Upper Klamath Basin, with its mission to “let the deserts bloom.” Project by project, human re-engineering diverted water and altered upper basin natural flow patterns, taking a toll on a once-functioning landscape and the many species that rely on its water. An estimated $50 million in federal irrigation aid and subsidies was provided to transform the Klamath Irrigation Project’s terrain into what it is today: flat fields of wheat, potatoes, barley, alfalfa and onions, covering more than 204,000 acres of dried lake bed and drained marshes. However, the conversion of more than 79% of the Upper Basin’s wetlands greatly reduced its natural water storage capacity and simultaneously increased the water demand. In addition, without wetlands to act as a natural filter for breaking down pollutants carried by agricultural runoff, the overall quality of water also became a serious problem.
Today, from its headwaters to the estuary, the Klamath River is now the most polluted river in Oregon, and one of the most polluted in California. When natural inflows are low, downriver fish now get what is essentially agricultural wastewater to swim in, rather than a clean, cool river.
Hydroelectric development completed the picture of Klamath Basin habitat fragmentation. In 1917, the first of two Copco Dams was completed, blocking salmon passage to hundreds of miles of spawning habitat in the upper basin. Several other hydropower dams were to follow. By 1962 the final and southern-most dam of the Klamath Hydroelectric Project, the 173-foot Iron Gate Date, was completed – with no fish passage. All anadromous runs of salmon and steelhead, once abundant in the upper basin, are now extinct above Iron Gate Dam.
Even as late as 1979-1982, and in spite of serious declines, Klamath fall chinook salmon still accounted for roughly 30 percent of all salmon harvested from fishing communities from Fort Bragg, California to Florence, Oregon, the region later to be called the “Klamath Management Zone (KMZ).” Yet over the decades there have been fewer and fewer salmon coming out of the Klamath River. In recent decades the primary culprit in these declines has been deliberately reduced flows.
In the past 30 years especially, the end result has been systematic economic strangulation of KMZ coastal ports, culminating in almost complete closures by the early 1990’s. Once booming KMZ ports such as Brookings, Crescent City, Eureka and Fort Bragg have lost up to 99 percent of their levels salmon landings of the late 1970’s.
These collapses spelled economic disaster. Fishermen whose families have lived in those ports for generations are now forced to fish hundreds of miles further south or (if they have permits) further north to be able to make a living at all. Some have lost their lives making these long trips to find fishing grounds that no longer exist near their homes.
Downward-ratcheted restrictions and ultimate closures long predate any ESA listings, by the way, and can only be blamed on the declining runs themselves, which were in turn caused primarily by declining water flows and deteriorating water quality from the Upper Klamath Basin. In a very real way, the Bureau of Reclamation has put us out of business. Water needed to protect some of the west coast’s largest and most economically valuable salmon runs has been systematically shifted upriver to grow potatoes, sugar beets and onions in the middle of a desert.
Finally, in 1997 the plight of the once abundant coho salmon in the Klamath River became so grim that it had to be federally listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Coho, of course, are just the indicator species’ for the health of the whole river. Today all Klamath-based salmon fisheries are threatened, not just coho.
In 1998, 1999, and then again and vastly worse in 2000 and 2002, the lower river salmon runs suffered massive juvenile fish kills in the hundreds of thousands each year. There is so little water left after a multitude of irrigation diversions, and what is left is of such poor quality, that salmon fish kills now occur in the Klamath on average in 5 of 7 years. Extremely low water flows allowed from Iron Gate Dam, plus an influx of chemical fertilizers from the federal irrigation project itself, cause fatal water temperatures, massive algae blooms, crowding, stress and rapid spread of disease.
These fish kills were all avoidable, but doing so would have required letting more water actually stay in the river. The Bureau of Reclamation, under pressure from the irrigation community, has consistently refuses to do so.
Salmon, of course, swim wherever they please, and ocean stocks often intermingle. All the Klamath salmon stocks are under stringent “weak stock management” constraints, and so the KMZ is now almost entirely closed to protect them.
Far north and south of the KMZ, however, weak stock management measures necessary to protect intermingling Klamath stocks have become the primary limiting constraint on allowable harvest on surrounding stocks in west coast salmon fisheries below the Columbia River. Fishermen in and around San Francisco, for instance, now have to forego between 50 and 60 otherwise harvestable Central Valley fall chinook in order to avoid accidental capture of just one intermingling Klamath fall chinook. Further south to Monterey, encounter rates of Klamath fall chinook are much smaller, but this only means the ratio of fish to forego in order to save one Klamath fish is even higher. This year these restrictions will mean losses of roughly $100 million for California and Oregon fishermen and coastal economies.
The Klamath is thus the key indicator stock and the gatekeeper to a whole lot of ocean salmon harvest. For every Klamath fish we save to return to the river as an adult spawner, between 50 to 60 other non-Klamath fish from far more abundant runs could potentially be harvested. Working in reverse, the loss of one Klamath fish costs us dearly in terms of foreclosed harvest opportunities throughout both Oregon and California. When sheer lack of water caused by agency stupidity in the Klamath kills fish by the hundreds of thousands, this threatens closure of the entire coastal salmon fishery below the Columbia, resulting in thousands of lost jobs and perpetual economic disaster for fishing-dependent communities.
Unfortunately, many of the Klamath’s federal water policies that led to massive salmon kills in the past, and closed ocean fishing seasons today, are still in place and doing continuing damage to future fisheries.
Water flows planned by Reclamation for upcoming years are still far less than those most fisheries scientists say are necessary for fish, not to mention far lower than NMFS’s designated “target flows” in its own 2002-2012 “Coho Biological Opinion.” Unfortunately, in a questionable backroom deal cut with the Bureau, NMFS is not even requiring those “target flows” until 2010 – an unconscionable delay which will cost the Oregon and California fishing industry several more fishing seasons in years to come, and a loophole PCFFA is challenging in court.
The Coho Biological Opinion requires downriver flows be supplemented this year by a “water bank” program under which some irrigation demand is being retired (though at huge taxpayer expense) on a year-by-year voluntary lease basis. This helps but is only a temporary fix at best. The water bank will ultimately cost far more, and be far more uncertain, than simple purchase and permanent retirement of water permits from willing sellers, of which there are now many. A recently released report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) on the Klamath Basin water bank highlights serious costs and problems with the effectiveness of that program. It should be replaced by a well-funded demand reduction program designed to bring water demand permanent back into balance with actual supply.
There are also five small and obsolete hydropower dams on the central Klamath that not only cut the river in two by blocking all upstream salmon migrations, but also create massive water quality problems for the rest of the river. These dams have a 50-year license that expires in March 2006. PCFFA, all the Tribes, several state agencies and many others are saying these dams should be decommissioned and removed to restore several hundred stream miles of former salmon habitat. Negotiations over the fate of these dams are ongoing.
There are also massive subsidies for agriculture in the upper Klamath Basin that encourage over-planting and wasteful water practices. Many of these subsidies are grossly unfair, and some of them (such as irrigation pumping power rates fixed at 1917 levels, or about 1/12th what nearly every other farmer pays) are subsidized straight out of the pockets of other ratepayers, including commercial fishermen who are thus forced to help pay for putting less water in the river and fewer fish in their own fisheries. Economic incentives should be changed to encourage water conservation, not encourage waste of this increasingly precious resource.
And finally, even though it is clear that water resources in the Klamath Basin as a whole are already seriously over-committed and its aquifers depleted, water-permitting agencies in both Oregon and California continue to give out more surface water and groundwater withdrawal permits. More than 90 such diversion permits have been given away by the Oregon Water Resources Department in the arid upper basin since June 2002, and 21 are now pending, including one huge permit that would allow the diversion of up to an additional 149,288 acre-feet of water for resale at huge markups. PCFFA is asking the water agencies to put a moratorium on giving away more water in the Klamath. Until we know how to bring water demand back into line with actual supply, it simply makes no sense to keep giving out more water and making things worse.
In all these situations, commercial fishermen (primarily through PCFFA) are working with the Tribes and citizen’s groups to change these wrong-headed policies in an effort to secure more water for the Klamath River. We will also work with the farmers and ranchers in the area whenever possible to make these changes happen in ways that ultimately benefit those communities too.
Ultimately there is no way to avoid rebalancing the Klamath Basin water supply so that demand does not exceed supply and the fish have their fair share. Water use in the Klamath must be made sustainable and equitable for both fishermen and farmers. Only that pathway will give both fishermen and farmers water security and put an end to the basin’s contentious water wars.
Even the modest water reforms obtained so far in the Klamath Basin have been hard fought and must now be vigorously defended by PCFFA and others in courts against attack from disgruntled agricultural interests who want to turn back the clock.
However, these water reforms must be realized. As long as the demand for Klamath Basin irrigation water far outstrips the supply, and as long as the lower river is being systematically dewatered to fill irrigation shortfalls in the upper basin, chaos and conflict will continue. In the end, though, even bloated federal water projects must eventually learn to live within the rainfall limits available. Meetings, marches, lawsuits or lobbying cannot create one extra drop of rain.
The pre-requisite of all positive Klamath change, however, must be to reduce water diversions for all uses until demand once again matches the actual water supply and still leaves enough in the river for fish. This can be accomplished through a combination of water conservation and willing seller water permit retirements and there are plenty of opportunities in the basin for both. There are also many opportunities for habitat restoration. However, without a sustainable and balanced water policy in the Klamath Basin that leaves enough water in the river to support viable fisheries, all else is just futile nibbling around the edges.
What is NOT an option is for the whole downriver and coastal fishing industry to continue to be economically strangled, their communities deliberately sacrificed, just to grow a few more crops on marginal land in a desert. The days of bloated and misdirected federal water projects are at an end. There are lots of places farmers can grow potatoes, but there is only one Klamath River for the salmon. Without sufficient water in the river salmon, fishermen, their families and coastal communities cannot exist.
For more information and to find out what you can do to help reform water policies in the Klamath River, see the PCFFA website at: http//www.pcffa.org/klamath.htm.
Predevelopment River Conditions -- Salmon, steelhead, coho, chum and pink salmon are all abundant in the Klamath Basin, which was the third largest anadromous fish producing river in the US. Average annual escapement was about 880,000 spawning adults in a mix of species.
1870’s -- 1960’s -- Systematic conversion of upper basin wetlands to farmlands, and from net water storage to net water usage, radically changing hydrology and greatly reducing summer flows to the river. Today 79% of what were historically upper basin water-rich wetlands are now irrigated farmlands. The Klamath Irrigation Project expanded to its current size by the 1960’s. Non-Project irrigation continues to expand even today.
1970-80’s -- Widespread collapse of Klamath fisheries results in the creation (October 1986) of the Klamath Fisheries Restoration Task Force and the Klamath Fisheries Management Task Force (16 U.S.C 460ss-3 et seq.) and a $20 million restoration program to run 20 years. Similar restoration is begun in its major tributary, the Trinity River (in 1984), which is also seriously depleted by agricultural water diversions.
1997 -- Klamath River coho salmon populations plummet to 2-3 percent of historic run size, then are listed as “threatened with extinction” under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).
1998, 1999, 2000 -- Major salmon fish kills occur in the lower Klamath. By this time there are fish kills on average in 5 out of every 7 years. Low flows released by the Bureau of Reclamation are implicated as a prime cause.
2000 -- The Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) runs the Klamath Irrigation Project for the entire year, in violation of the ESA, without consulting with NMFS on the impact of its irrigation operations on ESA-listed coho salmon. In May 2000, PCFFA challenges the BOR in federal court, winning in March 2001. The Judge orders BOR to consult with NMFS.
2001 (April) -- Consultation by BOR with NMFS results in two 2001 Biological Opinions requiring a 1/3rd curtailment in Klamath Irrigation Project water deliveries for that season to prevent extinction of coho salmon. Irrigators ultimately got 2/3rds of a normal year’s water. This was the first time in 90 years that fish got priority for Klamath water over irrigation. Near riots occur in the upper basin among irrigators and their supporters.
2002 (February) -- National Research Council (NRC) issues preliminary findings on the scientific basis for establishing Klamath flows. Under intense political pressure, and against the warnings of fish biologists, sections of that preliminary report are selectively used by the BOR to justify extremely low flows for the lower river throughout that spring and summer.
2002 (March-May) -- At least 200,000 juvenile salmon perished in the lower Klamath River from strandings, heat stress, low oxygen and disease caused by exceptionally low flows released by BOR from Iron Gate Dam.
2002 (May) -- NMFS issues its 2002-2012 Coho Biological Opinion (BiOp), endorsing BOR’s low river flow proposals until at least 2010. PCFFA challenges that BiOp in court as leaving too little water in the river and raising the risk of a major fish kill.
2002 (September) – Up to an estimated 80,000 adult spawners perished in the lower Klamath River due to crowding, heat stress, low oxygen and disease caused by exceptionally low flows released by BOR from Iron Gate Dam. Two separate independent scientific reviews later confirmed low flows as a major cause of this fish kill, called the worst adult fish kill in U.S. history.
2002 (October) -- NMFS Biologist Dr. Michael Kelley reveals how his Science Assessment Team’s conclusions that flow levels proposed by the BOR would result in “jeopardy” [i.e., eventual extinction] of federally protected Klamath coho were rewritten by NMFS non-scientist officials, under political pressure, to justify lowered river flows. Kelly then seeks whistleblower protection under federal law.
2003 (July) -- U.S. District Court Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong rules the 2002-2012 Coho BiOp “arbitrary and capricious” and invalidates several sections of it, but defers to the agencies when she turns down PCFFA’s request to restore Klamath flows back up to prior levels to protect fish.
2003 (July) -- Wall Street Journal reports 30 July 2003 that the water cutoff to the Klamath River in 2002 that resulted in two major fish kills was engineered by White House Advisor Karl Rove to help the re-election of Republican U.S. Senator Gordon Smith (see: http://www.pcffa.org/RoveWSJ07-30-03.htm).
2003 (October) -- Final NRC report, “Endangered and Threatened Fisheries in the Klamath River Basin,” is released. Among other findings, the NRC panel concluded (pg. 35) that there was no scientific justification for BOR river level proposals later incorporated by NMFS into the 2002-2012 BiOp.
2004 (March) -- Pacific Fishery Management Council is told of predicted low numbers of returning Klamath three year olds (second lowest on record) that were juveniles in 2002. This implies a very poor peak return for 2005.
2004 (July) -- PCFFA writes President Bush requesting preparation for disaster for the California/Oregon salmon fishery if Klamath runs come in as low as predicted (see: www.pcffa.org/Klamath-PresidentLtr-14Jul04.pdf). PCFFA also warns California Fish & Game Commission and Pacific Fishery Management Council of potential disaster for the fishery if Klamath numbers come in low. PCFFA asks all these agencies to begin preparations for such a disaster. No such actions were taken.
2005 (April) -- Klamath four year old return numbers were predicted in March 2005 to be even lower than previous estimates. Pacific Fishery Management Council adopts 2005 salmon season. Despite projected record numbers of Central Valley chinook salmon, the 2005 ocean troll season will be among the most restrictive in history due to very low Klamath numbers. Estimated economic losses are at $100 million or more.
PCFFA is the west coast’s largest organization of commercially fishing families. Zeke Grader is PCFFA’s Executive Director, and Glen Spain is its Northwest Regional Director. You can contact PCFFA at either (415)561-5280 or (541)689-2000, or send us email to: fish1ifr@aol.com. Our web site is at: www.pcffa.org.