Salmon Stakes

In an effort to appease irate irrigators, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec) had dewatered the Klamath River, which drains a 9,691-square-mile watershed of high desert, woods, and wetlands in southern Oregon and northern California. By July the agency had cut the flow from its Iron Gate Dam from 1,000 cubic feet per second - previously deemed by the administration as the bare minimum necessary to prevent extinction of the system's coho salmon - to about 650 cfs. From July 12 to August 31 more water went down the main diversion canal to irrigators than down the river to salmon.

Meanwhile, farmers were getting - and wasting - so much water that they were flooding highways and disrupting traffic.

State fisheries biologists, commercial fishermen, sport fishermen, Klamath Basin Indian tribes, and environmental groups had repeatedly warned the Bush administration that such dewatering would devastate chinook salmon and steelhead trout populations and perhaps usher cohos into oblivion. After the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) determined that BuRec's plan would indeed jeopardize the existence of coho salmon, the leader of the NMFS team writing the biological opinion (required by the Endangered Species Act when a federal action might affect a listed species) says he was ordered to change his finding and that, when he refused, his superiors made the changes themselves.

In mid-September, four months into BuRec's new 10-year water-distribution plan, chinooks, cohos, and steelheads from the icy Pacific hit the low, warm, deoxygenated river and turned belly up. The mortality estimate was 33,000 fish, mostly chinooks. From all reports, it was the largest die-off of adult salmon ever. Bright, robust fish, many over 30 pounds, covered gravel bars, blocking foot traffic, fouling the water, filling the air with a stench you could taste.

The Klamath system was once the nation's third biggest producer of Pacific salmon. All five species flourished there, as did steelhead, green sturgeon, and two species of native mullet known locally as the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker. Now chinooks and steelheads are down from their presettlement abundance by something like 90 percent. Sockeye, pink, and chum salmon are extinct in the basin. Cohos are listed as threatened. Until the 1970s the Klamath tribe caught thousands of pounds of mullet; now it takes one fish a year for ceremonial purposes. Both mullet species are endangered, and the green sturgeon is being considered for listing. These fish have been flickering out because BuRec's 95-year-old Klamath Project has replumbed the Klamath system with a network of 6 dams, 185 miles of canals, 516 miles of lateral ditches, and 45 pumping stations. Now water flows everywhere it never belonged.

About 280,000 of the basin's original 350,000 acres of wetlands and shallow lakes have been drained or filled. Still, the Klamath Basin - a.k.a. "Everglades West" - provides refuge for 80 percent of all waterfowl that negotiate the Pacific Flyway. In winter these birds help sustain the largest population of bald eagles in the contiguous states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service operates six national wildlife refuges in the basin. But, like BuRec, the service is part of the Department of the Interior; and, under the Bush administration, it has become part of the problem.

Klamath Basin farms get about 12 inches of rain and 100 growing days a year. Before there were crop surpluses, water shortages, and endangered species, it seemed a dandy idea to make this high desert bloom. These days it's an insane waste of money and resources - like transporting iron ore by air. Until October 31, 2002, when The Wall Street Journal ferreted it out, the Bush administration had been suppressing a peer-reviewed U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study that found that agriculture in the Klamath Basin generates $100 million a year compared with the $800 million generated by recreation, such as camping, boating, rafting, swimming, and fishing, and that restoring water to the river would boost this last figure to $3 billion. The study also determined that buying out the farms and protecting the land would create $36 billion in benefits at a cost of $5 billion. In an internal USGS memo obtained by the Journal, an agency scientist revealed that the regional director "wants to slow [release of the study] down because of high sensitivity in the Dept. right now resulting from the recent fish kill in the Klamath. Suffice it to say that this is not a good time to be handing out this document."

In the Klamath Basin the government gets farmed a lot more than the land. There is scant demand for most of the crops grown; sometimes they're even plowed back into the ground. Originally it cost farmers nothing to get a permanent irrigation hookup to BuRec's public-financed Klamath Project. Now, on top of this, they get electricity to operate irrigation pumps at one-sixteenth of fair market value, a lower rate than their ancestors paid in 1917. During the dry summer and fall of 2001, basin farmers - some irrigating normally with emergency wells drilled at public expense - harvested $48.6 million in state and federal relief. Many reported their most profitable year ever.