The California Water Wars: Pumping the Delta Smelt Into Oblivion

When I lived in the SF Bay Area, I fished the California Delta often. If you wanted to catch fish, you paid attention to the tidal flows, but you also knew that all bets were off when the massive pumps in the Southern Delta started pulling water and sending it south.

In many cases, the pumps removed so much water that the flows would actually reverse, and you didn’t have to be a scientist to know that wasn’t a good thing.

Battle for the Delta Smelt

If you’ve never fished it, the Delta is a maze of channels and levees that drains most of the central valley watersheds into the Pacific Ocean.

It’s home to a dizzying array of fish — including the numerous anadramous species migrating through. It’s also home to the endangered Delta Smelt, and has become a battleground pitting a tiny, two-inch fish against some of the most powerful water pumps known to man:

FRESNO — State water officials decided this week to switch off water pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta at night, hoping that pumping during daylight hours would help protect a tiny, threatened fish species.

Some 609 Delta smelt have been killed in the pumps in July alone — since state and federally owned pumps that carry drinking and irrigation water from the Delta ramped up to normal operating levels last month.

This “pumping days only” decision comes on the heels of a late-May total shutdown of the system to protect the Smelt — one which raised howls of concern from water districts all over the southern half of the state (but few mandated conservation plans).

The halt hasn’t really helped; Delta Smelt populations are crashing hard — some fear it’s too late to save the few remaining smelt. From the end of the Contra Costa Time article:

Regardless, environmentalists said the move came too late to keep the fish population from crashing.

“We have a species that has been brought to the brink of extinction,” said Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. “Why is it essential that pumping be maintained until there are no smelt left in the Delta?”

A cynical observer might suggest that pumping the Delta Smelt into oblivion is a goal of water interests, who would rather the problem disappeared than have to struggle with it for years to come.

Still, with groups like the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance taking up the cause (I profiled them here a few days ago), I suppose there’s hope. Still, it’s far more likely the powerful water interests to the south will have their say, the pumps will run, and the Delta Smelt will exist only as a memory.

The Bad, The Ugly, The Ugliest

It’s hardly surprising there’s little support for the Delta Smelt among the water consumers (big agriculture, cities, swimming pools, movie stars…) of the central and southern halves of the state, and if you needed proof, check out the reader comments to a Sacramento Bee article.

One dim bulb “researched” the smelt online and concluded that all the noise was being made over a fish that lives in the Great Lakes, while another invoked the Iraq war and other problems to suggest we “get back to basics” — which in this case means business as usual on the species extinction front.

Stay tuned for more from the California Water Wars. We expect they’ll be raging for years to come.

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