[env-trinity] Modesto Bee on Litigation

[Byron]

Delta diversion killing off tiny fish, suit claims

By Dana Nichols
Stockton Record Staff Writer
Published Wednesday, February 16, 2005 

The giant pumps that send Delta water to Southern California are killing off
a tiny, translucent-blue fish that lives here, and federal wildlife
officials are letting it happen, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by
environmental groups. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year said increasing the amount of
water sent south from the pumps near Tracy would not hurt the Delta smelt. 

But the lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento notes
that smelt populations continue to hover at their lowest levels in nearly
four decades. The lawsuit seeks to have the Fish and Wildlife Service ruling
-- and therefore the water exports it allowed -- overturned. 

Bill Jennings of DeltaKeeper, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, blamed
pressure by Southern California water interests for influencing the Fish and
Wildlife Service. 

"In the Delta, political science has resulted in the lowest levels of Delta
smelt in 38 years of record," Jennings said. He noted that many other
species of fish, including striped bass and threadfin shad, are also at
record-low levels. 

"By almost every yardstick of ecosystem health, we find a continuing decline
in Delta fisheries," Jennings said. 

Fish and Wildlife Service officials responded to the lawsuit with a prepared
statement that defended the original ruling to allow extra water diversions
from the Delta. The statement said that the agency also reduced the number
of smelt that the export pumps near Tracy are allowed to kill. 

Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Jim Nickles said officials would not
answer questions about the lawsuit. Also, he referred questions about
declining fish populations in the Delta to state biologists. 

Water exports from the Delta were boosted last year under a revised
operating plan for the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water
Project, the state's two major canal-and-pump systems that move Delta water
to the southern San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. 

Federal officials listed the smelt as a threatened species in 1993. The fish
were getting sucked into water pumps near Tracy and killed. 

The fish was also in trouble because reduced river flows and water exports
had shifted the line between fresh river water and salty Bay water. The
smelt likes to feed and breed in the mixing zone. Biologists said the fish
did best when the mixing zone was out toward Suisun Bay, where tidal marshes
offered lots of spawning habitat and food. 

Water exports and reduced river flows shift that line upstream into narrower
channels. 

Environmentalists and biologists say the smelt population usually drops
during drought years and flood years. Droughts stop water flows the fish
need, and floods wash the smelt and their food out of the Delta and into San
Francisco Bay. 

Yet the low populations the past two years have come during average water
years, at least in terms of rain and snow. Critics of the water exports say
the increased Delta pumping is to blame. 

"The Delta smelt remains at risk of extinction," said Bay Institute senior
scientist Tina Swanson. She also said that the Fish and Wildlife Service has
ignored available data on the smelt. 

Environmentalists worry about other fish species as well. State surveys last
summer found the lowest striped bass population in 45 years. 

Adding to concern is a simultaneous decline in the population of microscopic
animals called zooplankton that serve as food for fish, said Dan Odenweller
of Stockton, a retired fisheries biologist who has worked for both state and
federal agencies. 

Odenweller, who is now a volunteer for DeltaKeeper, said he sat in on a Feb.
7 meeting of state and federal biologists looking at the problem. Odenweller
said he believes politics is making it difficult for scientists to fairly
evaluate whether water exports are hurting the smelt. 

"There has been a reluctance to look at those factors," he said. "People who
bring the subject up get ostracized." 

But government biologists say that a number of factors could be causing the
fish population declines. 

"It is not clearly one thing or another, and most people I talk to have not
come to any conclusion about why these indices have been low the last couple
of years," said Patrick Coulston, supervising biologist at the state Fish
and Game's Central Valley Bay Delta branch office in Stockton. 

Mike Wintemute, a spokesman for the Fish and Game office in Sacramento, said
that it might be the timing of water pumping rather than the amount of
pumped water that is important. 

"It is hard to say whether this is another downward trend that is going to
trend upward over time and recover, or is this something we need to be
concerned or alarmed about," Wintemute said. "I think right now we are in
the concerned stage." 

Environmentalists say those concerns go beyond fish and show the failure to
restore the Delta and clean its waters. 

"People need clean water. Delta smelt need clean water," said Steve Evans,
conservation director for Friends of the River, one of the groups joining in
the suit. "And we still don't have clean water in the Delta."

 

Byron Leydecker, 

Chair, Friends of Trinity River

Consultant, Californiua Trout, Inc.

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810 ph

415 383 9562 fx

415 519 4810 ce

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://www.fotr.org

http://caltrout.org

 

 

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