Your “follow-up” article about juvenile salmon dying
in the Klamath River (HCN, 7/19/04: Follow-up) contained an error.
You stated: “But the Bureau of Reclamation has no more water to
send downstream …” BuRec does have the ability to send more water
downstream. They could do this by cutting irrigation deliveries by
as little as 10 percent. However, the BuRec has been ordered by the
Bush administration to provide full water deliveries to irrigators
no matter what the consequence for downstream salmon.
BuRec does pay some of these irrigators not to use water —
buying back water which, in truth, the irrigators have no priority
right to use. But demand still exceeds supply, in part because the
$50 million in the Farm Bill for Klamath Basin “agricultural water
conservation” has delivered expensive new irrigation systems to
irrigators but produced only “paper water.”
Meanwhile,
the California Governator’s Fish and Game Department pretends
that nothing can be done and that “collaboration is the key.” What
the Fish and Game Department is now about is collaboration in the
destruction of Klamath River salmon.
Felice
Pace
Klamath,
California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Collaboration is killing Klamath salmon.
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