Mammoth wants to reposition the water gage it uses to measure flows in Mammoth Creek, and LADWP has filed suit challenging their right to do so. This quote doesn’t spell out the details (you can get those here), but you can definitely feel the love:

Norby accuses the enormous L.A. agency of deafness and bad science. “It’s fundamentally false and without merit,” he said. “Less than 1 percent of their water is exported from here. We’ve told them the amount is immeasurable, but they won’t listen.”

A host of environmental agencies signed off on the proposal to change the measuring point for bypass flow, a point emphasized by the local water district’s director.

“These are the experts, the people who really serve the public interest,” he said.

“Their endorsement stands in clear rebuttal to the statements made by the LADWP, which are indicative of the quality of the facts they’re working with,” he added.

“They have no grasp on the basics.”

Norby believes that Los Angeles is simply continuing its 100-year-old campaign of expansion and take over. “They are trying to take away rights that Mammoth Community has exercised for half a century,” he said.

And this love letter:

Calls to the L.A. water agency were met with silence or revealed a lack of knowledge of journalistic practice. Jana Sidley, the Deputy City Attorney on the case, directed calls Chris Plakos, who said he could not comment on the case because the matter was in litigation.

“A reporter for a courthouse news service should have known that,” Plakos added despite the fact that lawyers are regularly televised commenting on ongoing litigation from the courthouse steps, and that Courthouse News regularly includes quotes from lawyers about ongoing litigation.

Norby suggested that obduracy and inpenetrability are the agency’s stock in trade.

“It took six months of effort just for us to get a meeting with them,” he said. “It will likely take many more years of litigation and cost the rate payers millions in legal and consulting fees before anything gets done,” he added. “They’re impenetrable.”

See you remaking Chinatown, Tom Chandler.

How the drought in California was decimating agriculture, and that if you didn’t support essentially open-ended pumping of water from the Delta, you were a smelt-hugging terrorist who favored fish over people?

Remember the appearance of famous blowhard Sean Hannity, who may have set a record by not getting a single fact right in his televised report about the water crisis?

Turns out the truth was rather different than we were told. From the NY Times comes an article about a new Pacific Institute study:

Farmers and most other residents in the state’s breadbasket blame environmentalism run amok for forcing them to leave fields unplanted when the water they hoped for was diverted to benefit the endangered ecosystem of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. But the institute’s report, based on an extensive analysis of federal and state data as well as the records of water districts, argues that environmental constraints played at best a minor role in water shortages and rural unemployment.

If any single factor is to blame for rural unemployment, the analysis concludes, it is the collapse of the construction industry, which was crucial to the state’s booming growth in the early 2000s. The report noted that “strong demand for California farm products on national and global markets also kept both crop prices and revenue high throughout the drought.” The industries that suffered disproportionate harm from the drought, the report said, were hydropower and salmon fishing, not agriculture.

That’s not the explanation that the Fox News commentator Sean Hannity offered for the Central Valley’s troubles two years ago, when the photograph above was taken. In 2009, fallow fields sprouted signs reading “Congress-Created Dust Bowl” — an apparent reference to congressional support for the Endangered Species Act, one of the laws involved in curtailing water supplies from the federal Central Valley Project.

But the report notes that in two of the drought years, 2008 and 2009, California’s crops brought record high revenues. And while some Central Valley counties, particularly in the southern portions of the valley, suffered significant declines in crops like citrus fruits, overall unemployment in the agricultural sector rose in lockstep with — or even a bit more slowly than — unemployment in other sectors.

Record revenues and unemployment on a par with other sectors aren’t exactly what was promised.

Not by a long shot.

It’s always easy to blame environmental restrictions when people don’t get all the water they want, though it’s pretty clear that farmers–on the whole–did a hell of a lot better than salmon fishermen (commercial and sport), both of whom essentially took a couple years off.

Rather than face the reality that California’s water is badly overpromised–and then get on with solving the issue in a way that doesn’t decimate the Delta, salmon and their related industries–some agricultural concerns feel free to point fingers, misinform, and then file lawsuits in an attempt to remove even more water from the Delta.

In fact, Underground Fave Whipping Boys Westlands Water District–the wholly untrustworthy-but-politically-connected district that wanted to annex the McCloud River into their water district (located hundreds of miles south), were recently caught in yet another bald-faced lie about the amount of water used by agriculture in the state.

The drought wasn’t kind to California agriculture–droughts are generally hard on everyone–but it’s also clear it was a hell of a lot harder on salmon and the Delta Smelt than it was on farmers, and that some reasonable compromises better be found before the wet years play out, and we’re facing another drought–and the flood of emotionally driven misinformation that accompanies them.

See you reading the papers, Tom Chandler

Does the state need another golf course this badly?

Yeah, right. From Yubanet:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected an attempt to strip protected status from wild steelhead trout in California’s Central Valley. A group of Central Valley irrigators had argued that ocean-going Central Valley steelhead population should be removed from the endangered species list based on their opinion that freshwater rainbow trout – which never go to sea – might someday replace extinct steelhead populations.

It was yet another cynical, bald-faced attempt by Central Valley water users to avoid the shitstorm that’s been coming for a long, long time.

And all this comes on the heels of a long-awaited report which found that way too much fresh water was being diverted from the California Delta- at least if we wanted the salmon and steelhead to survive. (From the Sacramento Bee):

This is hardly a shocker. Over the last several decades, cities and farms have diverted about 50 percent of the flow of the Sacramento River and nearly two-thirds of the San Joaquin River.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a fish scientist) to tell you that fish need water – preferably cool, unpolluted water. If you take that water away, or return it to the river laden with fertilizers, pesticides and higher temperatures, fish suffer. It is that simple.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/07/31/2926767/finally-deltas-flows-get-needed.html#ixzz0xFPN2gVV

Will we see the restoration of even a small portion of historical salmon & steelhead runs in our lifetime? Or the complete loss of them all?

Stay tuned, Undergrounders.

From High Country News: Feinstein’s Water Bomb

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is preparing to introduce a legislative rider that would dramatically reduce Endangered Species Act protection for salmon and other fish in California. The amendment would lift restrictions on the amount of water that farmers can pump from the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta for the next two years. But it could also scuttle a delicately negotiated effort to balance protections for endangered fish with the water needs of farms and residents of Southern California.

Feinstein’s effort comes as the state seems bound for the third year of an emergency fishing ban to protect dwindling salmon runs, and as populations of the Delta smelt and other fish continue to crash. And the move is a remarkable turnaround: Just four months ago, Feinstein denounced Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, for trying to introduce a similar amendment at the behest of California water districts.

Feinstein’s office declined repeated requests for details and comment yesterday, but insiders familiar with the matter say that the Senator’s reversal is largely due to lobbying by the Westlands Water District. Last year, after three years of drought, the federal government cut water deliveries to many irrigation districts in the San Joaquin Valley. Westlands, which is the largest district of its kind in the nation, was hit the hardest, and saw its supply of water from the Delta dwindle to just 10 percent of the amount it holds contracts for.

Woo-hoo! Strip away ESA protections on the Delta – just as many of its native fish populations are collapsing?

Westlands has recently launched offensive after offensive on the California Delta – and this after many years of essentially draining the Trinity River.

Feinstein – who happily supported Westland’s buyout of the McCloud River Bollibokka property by Westlands – has also been a longtime supporter of raising Shasta Dam (so you can imagine she won’t be seeing any checks from our admittedly impoverished part of the world).

She’s also been willing to engange in negotiations with Westlands about ceding them literally billions of dollars of water – and this for an irrigation district whose land is rich in selenium, and probably never should have been irrigated in the first place.

Anyone want to guess where Ms. Feinstein’s campaign money comes from these days?

Later, the New West story makes it clear how little gutting ESA protections will actually mean to Westlands:

But pushing aside the federal pumping restrictions intended to protect threatened smelt and endangered salmon would solve only part of the district’s problem. Fish-related restrictions account for just 15 to 20 percent of the cutbacks, according to an independent analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California. The vast majority of the water shortage is due to the drought. (For an in-depth exploration, see Breakdown).

Westlands’ battle against the pumping restrictions has nonetheless reached a heart attack-inducing pace. Last week, the district led a confederation of farm-water agencies in asking federal district judge Oliver Wanger to order the federal government to run its Delta pumps at maximum capacity. That helped capture the surge of water delivered by a massive winter storm, but the reprieve lasted just six days before the government had to throttle down its pumps. On Wednesday, Westlands and other water users asked Wanger to order that those pumps be started up again, but the judge denied that motion.

The problem isn’t the overused, factually inaccurate “favoring fish over people” meme so widely misused in the Central Valley.

Instead, the issue is more simply this: The water in the California Delta has been overpromised to the point the whole shebang isn’t sustainable. Throw in a little drought, and you’ve got the legal madhouse that is the California Water Wars.

Those with a minute or two and the inclination might want to visit Ms. Feinstein’s “contact” page on her Web site, and and send a nice, respectful email like:

Ms. Feinstein:

I’ve read – with considerable alarm – about your plan to gut ESA protections for the California Delta, a move which would further harm one of California’s already-failing salmon runs.

With the current pumping restrictions accounting for only 15%-20% of Westlands shortfall, it’s clear the problem isn’t one of favoring fish over people – it’s one of California’s water being egregiously overpromised.

Dooming salmon populations – and possibly the remnants of California’s commercial salmon fishermen – in favor of a water district that is already the recipient of billions of our taxpayer dollars is clearly a bad idea, and I hope you’ll reconsider your stance.

Sincerely,

Due to a lack of time, I’ve eased up on the California Water Wars posts, but sometimes it gets so bad you can’t ignore it.

This is one of those times.

See you getting cranky, Tom Chandler.

At least Stream Y had only been denuded of its greenery; Singlebarbed’s now-famous “Little Stinkin’” river has been stripped of its water(courtesy an irrigation district), and yesterday he visited it again in the hopes of finding a little wet stuff in the streambed.

What he found instead would make any fishermen throw back his head and howl at the moon:

Dead and desiccated beaver were scattered near their burrows. While agile underwater they’re clumsy prey on dry land, easy pickings for coyotes or someone’s Rottweiler.

The pelts were too far gone for my road kill honed reflexes, and I left them for the buzzards.

Even the deep stretches were dry, at best with a bit of dampened mud at the bottom. No fish carcasses were evident but they would’ve been picked clean and skeletal.

It’s a complete wipe. Bugs dead, fish dead, and the wildlife in the area foraging for water as best they can. I found a couple muddy traces that had an inch of water remaining, and the volume of animal tracks nearby were moot testimony to the deer, coyotes, and birds having to make do.

It’s a riveting post, thought not a manifestly happy one. It’s tempting to shrug it off as an isolated incident, but it’s not.

In fact, it’s potentially more a model of California’s water future than elegant-yet-ugly essay.

With Big Ag drumming up support on the back of a string of lies about unemployment, what’s causing that unemployment, and the negligible effects of a short-term halt in pumping from the Delta, it appears that California’s prevailing sentiment about water has swung toward the “dry ‘em up” side of the pendelum.

California – one of the most hyrdologically altered landscapes on the planet – is now in the grip of a drought, but it’s also witness to a war being waged for the stuff that runs in its veins.

While the media largely buys the spin offered up by those profiting from the taxpayer’s largess, the California Delta’s ecology remains in free fall, and politicos seemingly can’t hand out the corporate welfare checks fast enough.

Now – with new water “storage” and “conveyances” planned (at taxpayer expense), and a growing sense that any trickle of water that makes it to the ocean is wasted – we’re witness to what may be the last call for any sizable populations of salmon & steelhead in this state.

It’s grim and getting grimmer, and because he sums it up better than I can, I’ll let Singlebarbed wrap it up for us:

Something stinks, and it’s not the corpse of my creek. She smells of hot rock and a few posies … all that remains.

And while the idea is an interesting one, actual implementation faces a lot of hurdles – not the least of which is the 602′ high Shasta Dam. In fact, transporting fish over the dam and then back down (of the two, back down might be harder) could relegate this project to has-been status – except that the fisheries people don’t see many alternatives.

Underground Fave water journalist Matt Weiser wrote this article about the project, where he notes the issues, but also pens several telling passages (both key passages bolded below):

Restoring fisheries above Folsom, Shasta dams faces high hurdles | Sacramento Bee

The Sacramento was the only river in western North America with four salmon runs. They numbered in the millions – so numerous that American Indians and settlers could catch a salmon dinner with their bare hands. Now one run is gone, and two are endangered. The fourth could join them soon.

Restoring a fragment of that spectacle to the Central Valley is the goal of rules proposed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The service wants, among other things, restoration of winter- and spring-run salmon above Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River, and steelhead above Folsom Dam on the American River.

Combined, the fish transit order is considered the biggest of its kind in U.S. history.

…

“It’s pretty substantial, the amount of work that’s required,” said Mike Chotkowski, regional environmental officer at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dams. “We still haven’t even determined whether it’s feasible.”

The fisheries service says that without restoring access upstream, it’s likely the three fish species will go extinct. Climate change means it will be harder to maintain cold-water habitat below the dams, so they must have access to better habitat.

“The fish are at that jeopardy point where it’s important for us to take immediate steps,” said Howard Brown, Sacramento River basin chief for the fisheries service.

Wow. Frankly, this is an idea I hadn’t even heard proposed before, and now some consider it essential. Is it a desperate throw of the dice, or simply a recognition that the hatchery mitigation model has totally let us down, and that habitat destruction in the central valley is largely irreversible?

Some have already suggested it’s far most cost-effective to simply restore small creeks below the dams:

Rabe said 600 small creeks between Modesto and Redding also could be restored – at far less cost than fixing the big dams.

“Don’t
waste time and money on the dams. Spend it on the creeks,” he said.
“That would open literally thousands of miles of spawning, which would
make a huge, huge difference.”

Still – as we learned from the destruction-by-irrigator of Singlebarbed’s home waters – most of the Central Valley’s waterways are tied up by the West’s arcane water laws, and restoring cool, clean, sustainable flows to them might be even more involved than figuring out how to move fish around big dams.

In other words, it appears we’ve pumped all our easy options into oblivion, and all that’s left are the hard choices that nobody wants to make (so they probably won’t get made). 

See you on the dam, Tom Chandler.

salmon restoration, california salmon, california water wars, sacramento river salmon, shasta dam, matt weiser, upper sacramento river

You could say the news caught my eye.

The court-ordered biological opinion on restoring salmon to California’s largely salmon-free waters was just released, and this tidbit from the Redding Record Searchlight suggests salmon could be restored to the Upper Sacramento River above Lake Shasta?

A federal plan to revive salmon in the Sacramento River could put the fish upstream of Shasta Dam for the first time in seven decades and would mean the end of Lake Red Bluff.

The National Marine Fisheries Service made the two recommendations in its 800-page biological opinion for the Central Valley Project released Thursday. The Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Shasta Dam and the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, has tentatively approved the federal court-ordered plan while it reviews the lengthy document.

The Keswick and Shasta dams have blocked spawning beds on the Upper Sacramento and McCloud rivers north of Shasta Dam since the bureau began construction on the dams in the 1930s.

Federal and state scientists will develop a pilot project to truck fish trapped in the lower Sacramento around the dam by 2011, said Maria Rea, supervisor of the fisheries service’s Sacramento office. A permanent plan for moving the fish past the two dams should be created between 2012 and 2015, she said.

What? I thought – frankly – that it was just a mixup due to terminology (some call the Sacramento River near Redding the “upper” part of the river).

Then we went digging around the Sacramento Bee’s should-be-award-winning California water wars coverage, and found this:

The rules require the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to restore access for fish to waters above Nimbus and Folsom dams on the American River, Shasta Dam on the Sacramento, and New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus.

Those dams were built decades ago without fish ladders and have blocked access to hundreds of miles of historic spawning grounds.

The Bee’s Matt Weiser is not the kind of writer to get this stuff wrong, so I’d suggest moving salmon around Shasta Dam is at least a consideration.

Frankly, I’m not all that sanguine about the potential for trapping and trucking salmon – it hasn’t exactly been a raging success in the Columbia basin. And the mechanism for doing so – or returning the salmon smolts to the ocean – isn’t at all clear.

Then again, I’ve also long heard that Shasta Dam effectively blocked access to better than 80% of California’s salmon and steelhead spawning habitat.

One Thing Is Clear

With many of California’s native and anadramous fish populations in a state of collapse, the water wars are firing on all cylinders – including a broadside from Arnold “Fish Terminator” Schwarzenegger, who has consistently cast this as an issue of “fish vs people” – an idiotic stance, especially given the clearly unsustainable nature of current water projects, and the fact a lot of commercial and recreational fishing dollars are also being lost (I’m waiting for someone to ask Ahhnold why he  favors Alfalfa over People).

Still, salmon swimming again in the McCloud, Upper Sacramento, and Pit Rivers?

I’d be surprised. Still, we’re all about news here at the Trout Underground. I bet there’s plenty more of it to come.

UPDATE: Note from Underground Fave Reporter Matt Weiser in response to my question about whether the plan really provided for Upper Sacramento salmon passage: “Yes it does, in great detail, starting with trial reintroductions, then full permanent fish passage by 2020.”

For now, I’m going fishing. See you on a stream, Tom Chandler.

Their purchase of the exclusive, private Bollibokka Club on the lower McCloud was first cast in terms of removing barriers to raising Shasta Dam (another bad idea).

Now another possibility has surfaced (courtesy of Westlands itself): They’d attempt to annex the 3000 acres of the Bollibokka Club into their irrigation district, then claim water rights for their hundreds-of-miles south irrigation district. This from the Redding Record Searchlight:

Some Shasta County officials are worried that a Fresno-area water district may ask to annex almost 3,000 acres it owns along the McCloud River — a possible move to shift the water rights hundreds of miles south.

The issue will be discussed this morning at the Shasta Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) meeting.

So far, no annexation proposal has been filed by the Westlands Water District, Shasta LAFCO Executive Officer Amy Mickelson said. Westlands, the largest water district in the nation, includes farmland in western Fresno County and Kings County.

While it appears nothing is imminent, Westlands did make a pair of phone calls – one to the Shasta LAFCO cited above, and one to the Fresno LAFCO, which feels suspiciously like they’re shopping for the most agreeable entity.

Shasta LAFCO’s Mickelson said she took a brief call in January from a Westlands representative about possible annexation of the land, but like hundreds of calls the district takes each year, nothing has come of it since, nor does she think anything ever will develop.

“I truly think this was just a stab in the dark, (to ask) how easy would it be?” she said of Westland’s inquiry. “I think we’re quite a ways from seeing anything formally filed, if and when they opt to do that.”

Mickelson mentioned the call in a staff report to Shasta’s commissioners to keep them informed, and she’s watching Westland’s agendas to see if the water district takes further action, she said.

After its call to Shasta LAFCO, the water district called Fresno LAFCO to see if it could decide an annexation request of the Shasta County land, Mickelson said. Shasta’s commission opposes that move and Mickelson has sent an e-mail to the Fresno agency saying so, she said.

When asked directly by the Record-Searchlight reporter, the Westlands spokesperson delivered what we’d call a weasly non-denial:

Woolf sidestepped a question about why Westlands might also be interested in annexing that land into its water district, hundreds of miles to the south, however. She stressed that no decision had been made.

“I honestly don’t know if we would be pursuing that or not. It hasn’t been done at this point in time,” she said of annexation.

None of this means anything’s going to happen. None of means something won’t happen. It does, however, offer up visions of Owens Valley North.

What it does mean is that the Westlands Irrigation District is pretty much running at normal speed, which is to say looking for any angle that profits them – regardless of the economic and envionmental harm done to others.

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for some members of the district, who are facing severe cutbacks in water deliveries. Westlands is an irrigation project that should never have been built in the first place (the salt-and-selenium tainted soil creates huge problems), but at this point, I’d suggest the best route isn’t to let them environmentally (and economically) devastate yet another river.

In our third year of drought (I saw a statewide survey figure suggesting about 81% of normal snowpack), the California Water Wars are in full bloom, and if you don’t believe me, spend a few minutes on the unbelievably complete (and neutral) Aquafornia.com blog.

Everyone’s going at everyone else hammer and tongs, with seemingly the only winners being attorneys.

mccloud river, westlands irrigation district, california water wars

Now, the National Marine Fisheries Service has issued a new biological opinion (to replace the opinion a judge found wanting), and the information is staggering.

Only 20% of the salmon smolts survive the trip from Red Bluff to the Delta, and once there, the water project’s pumps decimate the remaining smolts – only only 16.5% of the juveniles survive at the state facility and only 35% survive at the federal pumps.

Ouch.

The rest of the report makes for equally grim reading; it’s clear that many of the populations are headed for extinction, and that water is dearly overpromised. You can read more at Dan Bacher’s eye-opening article for Indymedia and at this post on Dan Blanton’s excellent message board.

Here are a few facts excerpted from Blanton’s article:

Staggering losses of salmon and steelhead smolts take place in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, according to the scientists. Indirect losses in the Central Delta were found to be far more significant than losses from direct impingement at the state and federal pumps.

When the cross channel gates on the Sacramento River in the North Delta are open, 65% of the juveniles perish as they are drawn into the Delta interior. When the gates are closed, more than 50% survive.

At the pumps themselves, only 16.5% of the juveniles survive at the state facility operated by the Department of Water Resources and only 35% survive at the federal pumps operated by the Bureau of Reclamation.

Once fish are pulled into Clifton Court Forebay, nearly all of them are lost. The net total loss in the Delta is approximately 60% of the fish entering the system. This number does not include those lost prior to getting to the Delta.

Overall, when the Sacramento River survival of 20% is combined with the Delta survival of 40%, only 8% of the smolts make it to the West Delta!

Interestingly, this opinion appears to provide vindication to retired DFG fishery biologist Frank Fisher, whose arrived at similar conclusions in the early 90s, but whose conclusions were widely derided by water project staff:

The biological opinion also documents the major contribution of high water temperatures on the Upper Sacramento to spawning and egg mortality, as well as the staggering loss of juveniles – 80 percent – between Red Bluff and the Delta. The scenario portrayed by the scientists is very similar to that revealed by Frank Fisher, a now retired DFG fishery biologist, when he documented in 1991-92 the direct correlation between the increase in Delta exports and the decline of Sacramento River salmon.

He documented a “Black Hole of Death” that occurred to migrating salmon smolts in the Delta, due to reverse flows, stranding and entrainment of fish in the pumps caused by increased water exports. Considered a “maverick” at the time, Fisher’s data and conclusions have been vindicated by the draft biological opinion.

You can read Bacher’s whole article here: Delta Exports a Key Factor in Salmon and Killer Whale Declines : Indybay.