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Scientist say that with global warming sea levels are going to rise with the melting of the ice caps and more of the Earth will be covered by ocean. So what’s this about a water shortage?
The water we’re talking about here is fresh water – the stuff found in the streams and rivers where anadromous fish like salmon are born and nurse, spawn and die. It’s the stuff that mixes with salt water as rivers meet the sea creating and null zones, the biologically rich estuaries that provide either spawning grounds, nursery areas or both for Dungeness crab, herring, various species of sole and a lot of other commercially-valuable fish and shellfish species.
A number of water agencies have been looking for years to develop new dams and reservoirs and increase diversions. The problem is that most rivers in the west, particularly as you move south along the U.S. Pacific Coast, are already so over-drafted that today there is not enough fresh water reaching many estuaries to adequately maintain estuarine function. Nowhere is that more evident than the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta/San Francisco Bay estuary system, where the total average freshwater inflow deficit may be approaching 2 million acre-feet annually.
Dams have the added impact of blocking or impeding fish migration, placing further stress on stocks over and above the water withdrawals. There is no fish passage around the downstream dams on the Klamath, or any in the California Central Valley rivers. On the Columbia, fish passage and dam operations continues to be the biggest killer of salmon in that system.
In recent years, fortunately, a number of bad water projects have been forced to reform their operations and some equally bad proposed projects have been stopped. The cost of new projects (all of the good dam sites have been taken) coupled with the far cheaper costs of water conservation and reuse, have acted to slow demand. Much of this demand, it should be noted, was created by the agencies seeking to increase the amount of water they wielded and their service areas.
In the west, the single biggest factor halting the insatiable appetites of water agencies and their land developer and agribusiness clients has been the Endangered Species Act (ESA). However, the ESA is not the impediment some agencies and many developers would have the public believe. The ESA is really just the messenger that the current level of water use is overtaxing the environment, stressing aquatic ecosystems and threatening to extirpate native fish populations (including a number of important salmon runs) from whole river systems. The real “impediment” to the diversion of more fresh water is, in fact, the environment – not the ESA.
What’s at stake? A lot. Consider the following: The Columbia is the biggest salmon producing river in North America. Its production affects everyone from the historic gillnet and tribal fisheries on the river to Alaska and BC’s troll fisheries. At the mouth of the Columbia is one of the major Dungeness crab fishing grounds along the coast and the river still supports a small commercial sturgeon fishery.
To the south, the California Central Valley system, consisting of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their tributaries, has been second only to the Columbia/Snake system in salmon production in the nation. Fed by the Sierra snowpack, these two rivers, one from the north and the other from the south, converge in a massive delta that then empties into San Francisco Bay, forming the most important estuary on the west coast of North and South America.
Aside from producing the majority of salmon caught offshore California, Oregon and Washington, San Francisco Bay is a major nursery area for Dungeness crab and it supports the largest herring roe fishery south of British Columbia. The Bay also serves as a nursery for English sole and California halibut and prior to World War II supported an oyster and shrimp fishery, as well. Additionally, San Francisco Bay and the Delta support a recreational fishery for sturgeon, Striped bass and shad.
The Klamath is the third largest salmon producer along the U.S. Pacific Coast. While its recent production has been modest compared to historic levels, the Klamath, as Oregon and California salmon fishermen know, does have a strong affect on fishing regulations and the ability to access more plentiful stocks. The over-draft of lower Klamath water in 2002 was at the root of the in-river fish kills that year that resulted in the almost total closure of salmon fishing off California and Oregon in 2006.
While much of the focus on the Klamath is on removing the four lower river PacifiCorp dams, now up for relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, overall water supply will still be a problem in the basin that has to be addressed.
Water is also an issue in many smaller systems as well. California coastal chinook are ESA listed and their recovery will require, for example, the restoration on flows into Northern California’s Eel River (presently flows are being diverted to the Russian River). Otherwise it may be these fish, not Klamath, constraining coastal fishing in the future. In many watersheds natural coho populations, too, are or will be affected by quantities of fresh water available instream.
Not only will a warmer climate melt much of the polar icecaps, but also reduce mountain snowpacks. For the west where snowpack is a natural part of water storage, this means there will be more water and floods in streams during the winter (with less as snowpack) and less water available in summers. Indeed, this is already happening throughout most of the west coast. The simplistic answer from the water managers is to build more storage.
While this appears reasonable on its face, there are two problems. The first is the nature of the storage facilities and how those would affect fish; for example, impeding fish migration or entraining fish in screens at fish pumps.
The second and bigger problem is getting assurances that water stored from heavy winter runoff will in fact be made available instream for fish and inflow to estuaries during spring and summer months (the periods when the melting snowpack historically fed rivers) and not simply used to foster new development or expand irrigated agriculture.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta supplies some 16 million Californians with drinking water. If the tributaries to this system are included the number is millions more. The system also supplies much of the irrigation water used for farms and irrigation in the nation’s most valuable agricultural area. The seeds of conflict are evident since the same rivers upstream of the Delta and downriver to San Francisco Bay have been a major fish producing system. Overuse of water for out-of-stream uses endangers in-stream resources; out-of-stream food production threatens in-stream food production.
When the State of California embarked on its own water plan with the passage of the Burns-Porter Act by the Legislature in 1959, putting before the voters in 1960 a massive bond act for the construction of dams in the north state and conveyances and canals for the water to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, one of the issues was how to divert the water in storage from the dams through the Delta. To divert the water south through massive Delta pumps, a series of barriers were proposed in the Delta. It was obvious to fishery scientists and many fishermen, however, that the proposed barriers would be the death knell for California Central Valley salmon, which accounted then, as now, for the lion’s share of the ocean catch.
To save the salmon, fishery advocates convinced the Administration of Governor Pat Brown to consider an alternative. The proposal was instead of moving the captured flow of the northern state streams, such as the Feather and Eel, using the Delta as a conveyance, a canal would be routed around the east side of the Delta. Some of the water in this “Peripheral Canal” would be released at various location into the Delta, but with most of the water headed for the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and over the Tehachapi’s down into the LA Basin.
After incorporating in early 1976, one of PCFFA’s first missions was to work in Sacramento on behalf of the passage of the Peripheral Canal. Aside from the problem of vehement opposition to the canal from communities in the Delta concerned about their water quality and salt water intrusion (through the loss of Sacramento River flows through the Delta), doubts began to be raised about the Peripheral Canal’s effect on Sacramento salmon which accounted for most of the Central Valley production (the San Joaquin was dead above the Merced after the federal Central Valley Project’s Friant Dam cut off flow in the late 1940’s).
There were three problems. First, screens had not been developed that would be capable of preventing the entrainment of downstream migrating Sacramento chinook into the canal. Second, no one trusted the water agencies (in this instance the California Department of Water Resources). Who would enforce the conditions requiring the “sweetening” of the Delta with Sacramento River along the course of the canal, instead of all the water simply heading south? Third, and probably most important, was a growing understanding of the biological functioning of an estuary. Freshwater was not simply “wasting away to the ocean” as the Farm Bureau and the water buffaloes were insisting, but that freshwater was mixing with the ocean water to create the biologically rich areas where fish thrived.
By 1982, PCFFA’s position on the Peripheral Canal had changed (it was not supporting the since discredited barrier plans either) and a statewide voter referendum put a halt to the Peripheral Canal that had been approved by then-Governor Jerry Brown.
Subsequently, the freshwater needs for the Bay and Delta was the subject of a year-long quasi-judicial proceeding by the State Water Resources Control Board in 1986. PCFFA participated in those hearings through the fledgling Bay Institute. Following the year-long hearings, the State Board staff spent more than a year pouring through the scientific information that had been presented, and in October 1988 prepared a draft order that found the Bay-Delta system required an additional 1.6 million acre-feet of flow annually. When word got out of the draft order, the Chair of the State Board, in poor health and confined to a wheelchair, was threatened with firing and the Legislature and Governor quickly acted to see the order buried.
The reality of the 1.6 million acre-feet annual freshwater deficit for the Bay and Delta, however, was not lost a few years later on the Congress. Deciding to split the responsibility for the deficit between the federal (Central Valley Project) and California (State Water Project), Congress in 1992 passed the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA), that, among other things, allocated 800,000 acre-feet of water for fish and wildlife purposes, and embraced state policy (from 1988) to double the size of natural spawning salmon populations. It would seem that half of the problem had been solved.
Instead of improving, however, the State never got around to providing its half of the water needed for fish. Worse, the feds tried to fudge the numbers and even when some water was grudgingly provided upstream for fish or wildlife they made sure it was captured within the Delta, instead of flowing west to maintain the health of the estuary. In December 1994, then-Governor Pete Wilson, together with the Clinton Administration, responded to whining from the water agencies and put together a joint state-federal initiative aimed at “restoring Delta fish and wildlife (including salmon) and creating a dependable water supply for the state.” It was called CALFED.
In the course of the next decade an estimated $2 billion in federal dollars were spent by CALFED, for studies, purchases of water and land, and countless meetings -- while all the time the agencies were still refusing to take any action to restore natural hydrology, provide more freshwater inflow to the Bay, or develop any comprehensive Bay and Delta restoration plan. By 2005, populations of two indicator species, the Delta smelt and splittail, had declined so badly that both were in danger of extinction. Furthermore, despite highly curtailed salmon seasons because of the Klamath, Central Valley salmon returns in 2005 and 2006 were just adequate, not the record number of returns that had originally been projected.
Molly Thomas, one of the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Project personnel assigned to work in the Institute for Fisheries Resources offices during 1999-2000, summed the situation up best, saying “fish don’t swim in money.”
In the last two years, we have witnessed state and federal water agencies’ attempts to grab even more Delta water through the euphemistically entitled South Delta Improvement Plan. PCFFA, along with a number of other conservation and fishing plaintiffs, had to sue to overturn a National Marine Fisheries Service Biological Opinion (“BiOp”), reportedly written by Bureau of Reclamation staff, that would have given this water grab the go-ahead. Even now the freshwater deficit to the Bay and Delta may be more like 2 million acre-feet given the agencies water accounting methods. And this past month another suit was filed after a finding that the agencies didn’t even have permits to pump from the Delta – permits required to protect the remnant Delta smelt population.
Added to all this is a crumbling levee system in the Delta and the threat of a major earthquake that could liquefy the whole place. So what has been the response? The Governor has put together a “Delta Vision” program consisting of a Blue Ribbon Task Force with a group of stakeholder advisors that includes PCFFA. While this sounds encouraging, the Task Force, which is not required to attend any of the stakeholder briefings or meetings, can totally disregard the stakeholder recommendations. But even then, there’s a question of whether the Blue Ribbon Task Force will even be listened to. The Governor’s office has already indicated its preference for two major reservoirs (one has been called a giant evaporation pond) taking even more water from the Delta and, you guessed it, the Peripheral Canal.
While California is seen as a leader nationally in the fight against global warming (large reservoirs, by the way contribute to global warming), it is disappointing that it has latched onto discredited 1950’s proposals for dealing with its water issues. Worse is that the state continues to place its reliance on water from the Delta and its tributaries rather than looking elsewhere for reliable sources. It is folly, too, since the reservoirs and canal provide no water supply protection against the state’s infamous multi-year droughts. All the more terrifying is what all this could mean for many of the state’s fisheries.
In its 2005 update (www.waterplan.water.ca.gov/previous/cwpu2005/index.cfm), the California Water Plan identified water supplies for the future that would, among other things, protect its fish and wildlife. First among those was conservation, which is by the far the cheapest, with real savings to be had from more efficient irrigation systems to household water saving appliances and fixtures (toilets, wash machines, home irrigation).
The second place where additional water could be found to meet demand was from water reuse. Perhaps not as dramatic as from “toilet to tap” as some waste treatment plants are now capable of, but certainly using gray water in irrigation as well as trapping and reusing runoff could add to the available water supply, as well as, in the latter case, reduce pollutanted water discharges.
Groundwater recharge basins could help to alleviate the overdraft of many aquifers, utilizing nature’s own evaporation-proof reservoirs. Probably the best hedge against long-term drought (when there is little water left to conserve or reuse) is desalination. Desalination is already being used to clean up some groundwater basins and desalination of ocean water could provide needed freshwater for coastal and even desert communities and thereby relieve pressure on rivers and streams and the fish they support.
Traditional desalination plants are problematic. The intakes can be massive fish killers. They require a tremendous amount of energy. And, finally, the salt brines can be toxic to life where they are discharged. Desalination technology, however, has a long way to go and is very promising. Beach wells appear to provide a fish-safe way for water intake. Siphons are a potential energy saver where water is taken to facilities below sea level (such as parts of California’s vast desert, dubbed the “Inland Empire”). Moreover, if it’s possible to ship toxic drainage water from the western San Joaquin Valley to Morro Bay to dump in the ocean, it should be possible to bring seawater from Morro Bay to the Valley for desalination to irrigate the crops there.
The temperatures and sunlight achieved in the Southern San Joaquin Valley and the desert could serve as the potential energy source for distillation plants. The waste salt brines dried in a desert climate could be used for products or easily stored. Even wave energy devices have desalination potential.
All this is to say there are some innovative ways of dealing with California’s future water supplies, without having to destroy our fish and the rivers and estuaries that support them.
The Columbia River is the economic engine for what is still a multi-billion dollar, salmon-based commercial fishing industry employing tens of thousands of people coastwide from Alaska to northern California – all of which are dependent on the health of Columbia River salmon runs, which make up the bulk of all salmon landings on the west coast.
Without the productivity of the Columbia River’s salmon runs, most commercial salmon fishing in Oregon, Washington, Southeast Alaska as well as parts of northern California would have to be permanently shut down or severely curtailed at a huge economic deficit to the region’s economy.
The Columbia River has already been heavily tapped for irrigation water as well as water for some cities. More than 40% of the total summer flows of the Columbia River are diverted annually, and the biologically fragile river system that supports the largest salmon runs in the world has been severely strained. As a result, much of the fresh-water estuary habitat used by juvenile salmon has been destroyed by salt-water intrusions now occurring all the way upriver to Portland, with more habitat losses threatened by additional upriver diversions.
Nearly every run of salmon in the Columbia River is now listed as either threatened or endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. A primary cause of the salmon’s plight is too little water left in the Columbia each summer.
Salmon are very much a cold-water dependent species. Excessive water diversions have resulted in much higher than normal water temperatures in the Columbia, today at nearly the upper threshold of salmon survival throughout much of the river during every summer. Less water will inevitably mean slower flows and still higher water temperatures, and thus far more salmon dying in the river from temperature stress -- wasting literally billions of dollars in Columbia River salmon restoration investments over the past two decades.
Nevertheless, the Columbia still looks like a big river, with all that water “just wasted” by flowing to the sea. It is not surprising that development and agricultural interests have been slavering to get their hands on more of that water for years.
Into this mix comes a new bill in the current Oregon Legislature – H.R. 3525, cleverly nicknamed the “oasis bill,” that would require an additional 500,000 acre-feet of water to be permanently withdrawn from the Columbia to feed an expanded eastern Oregon irrigation system, including the development of an additional 100,000 acres, to create what proponents call an “eastern oasis” in Oregon’s eastern desert. Similar bills in the Senate include SB 483 and a slightly stripped down version (SB 610) that would “only” take 200,000 acre-feet instead of 500,000.
All these bills over-ride Oregon’s many salmon protection laws, putting new irrigation diversions legally ahead of the health of the state’s salmon runs, and overturn current salmon restoration policies. This is why these bills have all been opposed by Oregon’s Department of Fish & Wildlife. They additionally would short-circuit the traditional process of evaluating proposed new water diversions by the state, which by current law must consider the impact on fish and wildlife. This is why they have all been opposed by the Oregon Water Resources Department. These bills are opposed, too, by PCFFA, Salmon for All and several other fishermen’s groups -- both sport and commercial.
Additional water diversions also jeopardize national Columbia River salmon recovery obligations under the U.S. – Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty. That Treaty requires states and federal agencies to make every effort to recover damaged Columbia River salmon runs. Passage of HB 3525 or a similar bill would seriously undercut those efforts as well as our national credibility as we enter into negotiations on renewing that Treaty.
The proponents of these bills have also had the gall to state baldly that “there is no science that says these diversion would have any effect on salmon,” calling them “merely a drop in a bucket.” The fact is, in 2004 a scientific peer review panel of National Academy of Sciences reviewed similar water diversion proposals in Washington to take more water from the Columbia River and concluded:
“Columbia River salmon today are at a critical point…. Salmon are more likely to be imperiled during late summer on the Columbia River, as they experience pronounced changes in migratory behavior and survival rates when river flow becomes critically low or water temperature becomes too high. Further decreases in flows or increases in water temperature are likely to reduce survival rates.”
“Allowing for additional withdrawals during the critical periods of high demand, low flows, and comparatively high water temperatures identified in this report would increase risks of survivability to listed salmon stocks and would reduce management flexibility during these periods.” (From Managing the Columbia River: Instream Flows, Water Withdrawals, and Salmon Survival (2004), National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, pg. 7 (Executive Summary)).
This is why the National Marine Fisheries Service, in previous Columbia River salmon restoration “Biological Opinions,” has ruled that further water diversions from the Columbia River would “jeopardize the future existence” of many of these salmon runs – in other words, would lead to their extinction.
HR 3525 has powerful agricultural support, and is still not dead in the Oregon Legislature. In an unusual move, on June 19th the bill was stripped from its committee (where it would have deservedly died) by referral and brought directly to the floor of the Oregon House of Representatives, then passed by the House on June 21st and sent to the Senate. By the time you read this column it may be on its way to Oregon Governor Kulongoski’s desk. [Editors Note: The billed was pulled off the calendar in the Senate at the request of the Governor and others, and died when the Oregon 2007 Legislature was dissolved. It is expected to be reintroduced in the 2009 Legislature.]
Taking more water from the already strained Columbia is a bad idea that never dies. As many scientists have said, so much water has already been diverted from the Columbia that its fragile biological systems have been pushed to near the breaking point. Diverting yet more water from the Columbia River threatens to collapse the entire Columbia River’s salmon production – collapses we have already seen in other similarly stressed rivers such as the Klamath, though on a far smaller scale. The loss of production from what are still the world’s largest salmon runs – the Columbia River -- would be far more disruptive than the disaster in the Klamath, as well as probably permanent.
Removing the four obsolete hydropower dams in the Klamath Basin (Iron Gate, Copco Dams 1 and 2, and J.C. Boyles Dam) would greatly improve water quality, but do nothing to restore water already diverted from the river. The plain fact is that too little water has been left in the river for lower river salmon to thrive – or in some cases, too little for them even to survive. This latter problem is particularly true for ESA-listed Klamath coho, which need more water in such tributaries as the Scott and Shasta Rivers where they mostly spawn and rear. Unfortunately, these tributaries are in increasingly bad shape, and are completely dewatered in many years during the summers and falls.
Estimates for how much the arid Klamath Basin’s limited water supply has been over-appropriated so far vary from 200,000 to 400,000 acre-feet. Yet both Oregon and California continue to give out more irrigation permits by the expedient of simply ignoring the water needs for ESA-listed fish, depressed (but so far unlisted) fall chinook runs and other wildlife needs, and likewise ignoring senior water rights for Tribes. Water agencies in both states simply do not take ESA or Tribal water rights into account when divvying up water rights.
There are ongoing negotiations seeking to put the Klamath Basin’s limited water supply on a more sustainable basis. Certainly the status quo, which means lurching from crisis to crisis somewhere in the Klamath Basin nearly every year, is no longer viable for many. Until the water needs for fish and wildlife are recognized and met, however, there will be no security for the salmon runs in the Klamath, and the risks of fish kills and consequent ocean salmon fishery closures like those during the past will remain very real.
Every indication is that global climate change is already hitting the arid west particularly hard, and that the future will be worse, making it all the more important that adequate water be permanently set aside for protecting west coast fisheries now.
We do have the ability to make sure our governments do not blunder further, by opposing bad water policies and supporting measures that can protect, and even restore the freshwater flows so many of our fisheries depend upon. As that old fishery “biologist” Oscar Hammerstein wrote in his lyrics to “My Man,” “fish gotta swim.” Here are some things you can do to make sure they have water to do it in:
Write today to:
The Honorable Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California asking to him to protect our fisheries by rejecting new dams and the Peripheral Canal and embracing 1) water conservation; 2) water reuse; and 3) modern, energy efficient and environmentally safe desalination technologies.
Write today to:
The Honorable Ted Kulongoski, Governor of Oregon, asking him to support a moratorium on any new water appropriations from the Columbia River, the Klamath and elsewhere where there are known water overdrafts, and to veto any Columbia River water grab legislation.
Write today to:
The Honorable Christine Gregoire, Governor of Washington, asking her to oppose any new water storage facilities or reservoirs in the Columbia Basin without there first being studies to assure salmon and other important fish populations will be fully protected.
Zeke Grader is Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, with offices in San Francisco. Glen Spain is the Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations’ Eugene, Oregon office. PCFFA can be reached as follows: Southwest Office, PO Box 29370, SF, CA 04129-0370, (415)561-5080; Northwest Office, PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370, (541)689-2000; or by email to fish1ifr@aol.com. PCFFA’s Web Page is: www.pcffa.org.
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