It’s been an ongoing worry that consumers, farmers and environmentalists have dealt with for the past two years. Huge numbers of juvenile winter-run Chinook salmon appear to have baked to death in the Sacramento River, because there isn’t enough cold water.
The endangered species appears to be a step closer to extinction. The National Marine Fisheries Service this week released grim statistics indicating that even more water cuts next winter for agriculture—and a strong El Nino—may not be enough to rescue the commercial and recreational salmon fishing seasons. The organization suggested that a complicated and controversial effort to save this year’s run of salmon may have resulted in failure.
“We try to be hopeful, but this is not good news,” said Maria Rea, the agency’s assistant regional manager.
Rea said one reason for the dire news is because federal officials sharply curtailed flows of water coming out of Lake Shasta this spring, delaying deliveries of irrigation water to hundreds of Central Valley farmers. But it may have been a futile effort to keep enough cold water in the system to maintain the salmon population. If the preliminary figures are correct, it would be the second year that nearly all of the juvenile fish have died because water in the Sacramento River is too warm. Officials estimate that last year, only 5 percent survived long enough to migrate to the sea.
“Chinook salmon are among the hardiest, most robust fish we know of,” said Jon Rosenfield, a biologist with the nonprofit Bay Institute. “Even if you don’t care about fish, the fact that Chinook salmon can’t survive in the Sacramento River is a testament to how poorly we treat our rivers.”
A UC Davis study this summer stated that the drought has cost farmers nearly 9 million acre-feet of water from the state and federal water projects, or nearly half of the usual supply. Although farmers and fisheries have made up much of the loss by pumping additional groundwater, they still fallowed more than 540,000 acres of land, resulting in economic losses of $2.7 billion.
Some farmers suggest that there has been too much water devoted to fish, and have made repeated calls for an overhaul of the federal law that affords special protections for endangered species. Federal scientists thought they had a plan to avoid a repeat of last year’s mass die-off of salmon. They tried to keep temperatures at key points on the Sacramento River at 56 degrees or less to give the juveniles a chance to survive. But officials at the federal Bureau of Reclamation, at one point, realized their temperature-monitoring equipment was faulty, and the water coming out of Lake Shasta was warming up more quickly than they anticipated.
They held back some water from Lake Shasta to keep it cool, and to compensate for the reduced flows from the lake, officials ramped up releases from Folsom Lake to help maintain water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the estuary through which water is pumped to cities and farms in the San Joaquin Valley and into Southern California.
John McManus, executive director of the Golden Salmon Association, said commercial and sport fisherman are bracing for more restrictions.
“The waters are already closed to commercial fishing,” he said, “and for the past two years, they’ve shut down salmon fishing altogether because of poor returns of the fall-run Chinook. These closures have had a devastating effect on the state economy.”
