[env-trinity] Redding.com: Nearly $1 billion later, salmon still in peril

Sun May 17 11:01:34 PDT 2015

This calls to mind my late good friend Michael Black who began a journal article http://www.ijee.ie/articles/Vol19-1/IJEE1325.pdf on California’s ‘serialistic’ Sacramento River salmon conservation policies/ measures with a quote ‘Fish biologists can have anything they want in the West as long as it’s not water.’.

The most enduring symbol of Sacramento River serialistic salmon conservation policies/ measures for me was the three-story high Glenn-Colusa Canal riffle sifter installed by the Bureau of Reclamation to clean the upstream end of the Tehama-Colusa Canal designated as an artificial spawning channel to offset the loss of river spawning (estimated at an average annual 5,000 fall-run chinook salmon) in what became the Red Bluff Diversion Dam diversion pool. It was an impressive and costly pile of equipment that proved totally ineffectual (the channel silted up). I only wish I had a keepsake photo of it. 

Bill Kier

From: env-trinity [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Tom Stokely
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2015 8:59 AM
To: Env-trinity
Subject: [env-trinity] Redding.com: Nearly $1 billion later, salmon still in peril

http://www.redding.com/news/local-news/nearly-1-billion-later-salmon-still-in-peril_91460501

Nearly $1 billion later, salmon still in peril

Fish restoration project falls short of goals

Damon Arthur 

5:08 PM, May 16, 2015

11:07 PM, May 16, 2015

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REDDING, California - After spending nearly $1 billion on a plan to double the number of salmon and steelhead in the Sacramento River basin over the past 22 years, state and federal agencies have fallen well short of their goals and the fish remain severely underpopulated.

Except for significant gains in a few Sacramento River tributaries, the work done to benefit naturally spawning salmon under the Central Valley Project Improvement Act of 1992 has not accomplished even 50 percent of its goals, according to the government agencies’ own reports.

By 2012, there were supposed to be 68,000 spring-run chinook salmon spawning in the Central Valley. Instead, there were 30,522, according to the bureau.

Federal and state agencies have hit 30.6 percent of their target goal for the fall-run chinook, one of four different salmon runs on the river. Each run is named for the season when the majority of its fish enter freshwater as adults.

The program aims to restore fish populations that plummeted after dams and diversions built in rivers and creeks blocked the fish from getting to the spawning grounds they had used for thousands of years. The development of farms, roadways and cities further changed the landscape, drying up vast areas that were once wetlands and waterways where the fish spent part of their lives.

Officials with the restoration program have tried to piece back together those ecosystems fragmented by development, or at least to create areas that mimic streams and wetlands where the fish once thrived.

Still, fish populations still haven’t bounced back. And even as spending on the programs approaches $1 billion, David Mooney, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act administrator, said lack of funding is an issue.

“Effectiveness has varied with higher costs, lower revenues and more complexity than appears to have been anticipated by the authors of the (improvement act),” Mooney said.

Critics of the program, however, disagree.

“I don’t think money has been the problem,” said David Vogel, a senior scientist with Natural Resource Scientists in Red Bluff. Instead, too much money has been spent on studies, administration and monitoring fish populations, he said.

“They’ve developed a fairly large bureaucracy with a lot of people, and they seem to repeating the same thing year after year,” Vogel said. “I think there’s a lack of accountability.”

Water at a cost

Lawmakers who passed the act intended to restore habitat lost after the Bureau of Reclamation built the Central Valley Project.

Stretching about 400 miles from Shasta Dam north of Redding to the Tehachapi Mountains south of Bakersfield, the huge Central Valley Project consists of 20 dams and reservoirs and 11 power plants. The project annually moves about 7 million acre-feet of water through 500 miles of major canals and tunnels to hundreds of farmers and millions of urban residents.

About 800,000 acre-feet of that water is set aside for fish and wildlife and another 410,000 goes to state and federal wildlife refuges and wetlands.

The project is widely credited with bringing irrigation water to the Central Valley and contributing to its success as an one of the richest agricultural regions in the country.

But all that progress came at a price. Dams built along rivers such as the Sacramento and San Joaquin blocked access to spawning areas for salmon and steelhead — called anadromous fish because they live parts of their lives in the ocean and part in fresh water — and dried up vast wetlands where the streams once flowed.

The bureau estimates development and flood control projects have eliminated 95 percent of the wetlands in the Central Valley. When Shasta and Keswick dams were built they blocked access to spawning grounds upstream in the McCloud and Pit rivers and other tributaries to the Sacramento River.

The winter and spring runs of chinook have fared the worst in the decades since the dams were built. Because so few of those fish return annually to spawn, the spring run is listed as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act, meaning it is likely to become an endangered species. The winter run is considered already endangered and at greater risk of extinction.

A complex system

The chinook salmon’s life cycle covers a vast territory stretching from the upper reaches of Sacramento River tributaries to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and out to the ocean.

The fish are hatched in many of the streams in the area such as Salt Creek, Cow Creek, Battle Creek and Clear Creek. The small salmon fry can spend several months in fresh water, but they eventually move downstream to the main stem of the Sacramento River.

Thousands of the four species of chinook — fall, late-fall, winter and spring — also are spawned in the Sacramento River itself. Nearly all of the wild winter-run salmon spawn in the Redding area, where the restoration project pours tons of gravel annually for spawning beds.

After the salmon make their way down the Sacramento River, they hit the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta, a series of islands and channels the fish need to navigate on their way to the ocean. By the time they reach the ocean, they have changed colors and their gills and kidneys have undergone a transformation that allows them to live in salt water.

After spending two to three years in the ocean, the fish return again upstream to where they were hatched. By that time they often weigh 20 pounds or more.

Challenges abound

Federal officials say there are several obstacles to meeting goals set by the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act, including drought, competing demands for water, lack of money and not enough control over the fish’s entire life cycle.

The program has been limited mainly to doing work upstream of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where the salmon and steelhead are hatched, said Mooney, the improvement act project administrator.

Habitat improvement projects focus on improving stream conditions to increase the chances the fish can successfully spawn, hatch new young and get as many of them as possible out to the ocean before they are eaten by other fish and wildlife.

Improvements include:

*	Installing screens at irrigation diversions to keep fish from swimming into irrigation canals and ditches.
*	Pouring tons of gravel into the Sacramento River and tributaries for salmon nests.
*	Removing fish passage barriers.
*	Improving channel conditions in Sacramento River tributaries.
*	Planting trees and shrubs along stream banks.

So far, fewer than a quarter of the proposed restoration projects have been completed.

The project lists 289 different actions and evaluations to complete, but from 1997 to 2012, only 67 had been completed.

Bob Clarke, fisheries program supervisor for the fish and wildlife service’s Pacific Southwest Region, said the size and complexity of the area encompassed by the project has hampered efforts.

“Where we haven’t met goals, that’s because it’s just a bigger system,” Clarke, whose agency works with the bureau to implement the fish recovery program.

“As big as the program is, we haven’t been able to take on the programs we have wanted,” he said. “Then there are issues beyond our control that affect the fish populations.”

But Vogel said not enough “on-the-ground” work has been done to restore fish habitat. He also said officials have known about the size and complexity of the issues for many years, but have been unwilling to change direction and adapt.

Randy Smith, of Redding, a retired physician who leads major volunteer efforts to restore and clean up streams in the area, said fish restoration is not complicated. Fish need water at the right time and the proper habitat.

In his view, federal and state officials have wasted money on projects that don’t work while the salmon slide toward extinction.

“If you take a creature as creative and willful and independent as the salmon and you make it impossible for that species to exist then you aren’t very smart,” Smith said.

Vogel credits the restoration project with doing much to improve conditions for salmon and steelhead, but said federal officials are not likely to achieve their goals until they focus more on improving conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

But getting federal and state agencies to turn their attention to the Delta has been difficult, said Vogel, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who has spent decades working on the river.

“It’s incredibly frustrating for myself and many of my colleagues,” Vogel said. “Their approach seems to be they’re pretty happy with the status quo.”

Vogel said he would like to see more work done to keep young salmon from being drawn into the interior of the Delta, where they are preyed on by other fish. When they get caught in the maze of channels and islands, it is difficult for them to get out to the Pacific Ocean, he said.

Further, focused studies on how the fish migrate through the Delta are also needed so that future restoration can focus on work that will have the greatest impact, he said.

For example the pumping system that sends water south of the Delta creates a current that draws the fish toward them rather than to the ocean, he said. The fish are trapped at the pumps and then released closer to the San Francisco Bay, but they are preyed on by other fish when they are let go, he said.

It’s treacherous in the Delta. But “once they get to the ocean, they have a very high survival rate,” Vogel said.

Clarke and Mooney said improving conditions in the Delta is a key component to restoring salmon numbers, but the program “has not emphasized Delta work” because there are other state and federal programs involved in carrying out restoration in the Delta.

Tom Stokely, a water policy analyst for the California Water Impact Network, points to water management as a third component that has led to low fish numbers. The state Department of Water Resources and the bureau have mismanaged water coming out of Shasta and Keswick dams, he said.

“It comes down to the water operations are killing the fish,” Stokely said. He said bureau officials mismanaged water in Lake Shasta last fall, depleting the cold water pool in the reservoir.

Salmon eggs and recently hatched fish need water temperatures below 60 degrees to survive, but water in the Sacramento River below Keswick Dam became too warm last fall, killing thousands of salmon eggs and recent hatches.

Bureau officials have said lack of rainfall from the ongoing drought prevented them from keeping an adequate cold water pool in the lake to ensure egg survival.

Are They Listening?

Criticism of the restoration program has been going on for years. An independent review of the project written in 2008 for the bureau and the fish and wildlife service analyzed how the agencies operate and the work they have done and concluded they have been ineffective.

That report, Listen to the River, criticized how the agencies work together, identify problems and prioritize projects. It also faulted the program for not doing more in the Delta.

“All of these have contributed to a program that has been unable to identify and attack the fundamental system-level problems and realize the greatest biological benefit in an effective way,” the report says.

Seven years after the report came out, Clarke said officials are still working to change the way they prioritize restoration projects and hold them up to a more rigorous scientific standard as to whether they are working.

“It’s a process, unfortunately it’s not a process that allows you to get your results immediately,” he said.

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