Three
generations ago, the San Joaquin River was home to one of the
largest chinook salmon runs on the West Coast. Spawning fish
returned from the ocean in such large numbers that local farmers
speared them with pitchforks and fed them to their hogs. Then, in
1939, the federal Bureau of Reclamation began pouring the first of
4.3 million tons of concrete to build Friant Dam and supply water
to farms from Fresno to Bakersfield.
For a couple of
years after the dam was completed in 1945, the bureau still
released some water downstream, and the chinook adapted and began
spawning in pools below the dam. In 1948, a crew from the state
Division of Fish and Game lent the fish a hand, trapping 2,000
salmon from the lower reaches of the river, trucking them past a
dried-up stretch, and releasing them in those pools.
By
1949, however, the Bureau was holding back the river’s entire
flow behind Friant Dam. Undaunted, the Fish and Game crew erected a
makeshift webbing dam in an attempt to force the fish up the Merced
River at its confluence with the San Joaquin. George Warner, a
member of the crew, would later write: “Despite very poor water
quality they pushed and probed at the webbing, trying to get up
their home stream. The small San Joaquin was mostly warm return
irrigation water loaded with salts and chemicals. In contrast, the
Merced flow was clear, purer, and much cooler. But it was not home
stream water.”
A year later, San Joaquin spring-run
chinook went extinct. “The damage done to the San Joaquin is some
of the most extreme environmental damage caused by any water
project anywhere,” says Hal Candee, an attorney with the Natural
Resources Defense Council, which has been trying for the past 18
years to force the federal government to restore flows for fish in
the river. Now, the fight is finally reaching a resolution that may
mark a new, albeit grudging, era of compromise — one that
highlights the challenges of returning fish to a river, and a
world, far different from 60 years ago.
The quest to
revive the San Joaquin began in 1988, when the Friant water
users’ 40-year contracts came up for renewal. The Natural
Resources Defense Council sued the federal government, charging
that renewing the contracts without “reallocating” some water back
to the river would violate the federal Endangered Species and
National Environmental Policy acts.
“We considered it a
nuisance lawsuit initially,” says Kole Upton, the chairman of the
Friant Water Users Authority. But the NRDC borrowed a legal
doctrine forged in the landmark fight to halt Los Angeles’
water diversions from Mono Lake, on the eastern side of the Sierra.
That battle helped establish that a long-neglected part of the
California fish and game code — known as Section 5937 —
imposed a “public trust” responsibility on the state to protect
fish populations below dams, above and beyond federal environmental
law.
“What’s trailblazing is the applicability of
those principles to a federal project,” says Phil Atkins-Pattenson,
an attorney representing the NRDC in the lawsuit.
As the
San Joaquin case dragged on, the farmers began losing ground. In
1999, after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower
court’s ruling that the federal government had violated the
Endangered Species Act when it allowed the contracts to simply roll
over, the Friant water users began settlement negotiations.
“It was a tough call, whether to cooperate and try to
make this work, or do an all-out fight and force society to make a
decision to dry up this community to try to restore a river
that’s been dead for 60 years,” Upton says.
The
negotiations turned on the contentious issue of how much water the
farmers would have to give up to restore the river, and in 2003 the
discussions fell apart on exactly that point. The following year,
however, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that, under
Section 5937 of state law, the federal government was required to
release as much water as necessary to restore the “historic”
fishery.
But as both sides exchanged evidence in
preparation for trial, they discovered an opportunity for a
settlement. “Our experts were indicating that (a restoration
program) would take about a third of our water,” says Upton.
“We’d have to start fallowing land, and some farmers would
just have to get out.” But the NRDC’s consultants projected
that the restoration could be successful if the farmers gave up
about 19 percent of their water, an average of 242,000 acre-feet a
year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water that will cover an acre,
one foot deep.)
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“In this case,” says Upton, “we were
willing to say the enviros were right — as long as
we’re not held accountable if they’re wrong.”
On Sept. 13, the two sides finalized the 19 percent settlement.
Longtime water observer Dan Beard, who headed the Bureau of
Reclamation from 1993 to 1995 and is now a private consultant, says
the pact is especially important because the federal government
“gave away all the water in the river and were unwilling to take
the political heat to take the water back.” The NRDC intervention
and the resulting settlement agreement, he says, show that “when
the federal government and the state government won’t do
their job, you can solve these problems.”
The salmon
restoration program — which includes a raft of measures to
return the long-dry river channel to its historic shape, to
re-establish native vegetation, to protect surrounding land with
levees and to provide fish passage around obstructions below Friant
Dam — could cost as much as $800 million. Much of that will
come from redirecting payments that the farmers currently make
— which go into a general environmental protection pool and
to pay off the cost of the dam itself — into the more
specific San Joaquin restoration program. The rest will come from
state and federal funding. This November, California approved
Proposition 84, a ballot initiative that could provide up to $200
million for the effort. The state’s congressional delegation
is also seeking some $250 million in federal funding.
Participants in the settlement say that the commitment of the state
and federal governments is critical to the 20-year restoration
program. Federal funding for another ambitious program, the effort
to restore the San Francisco Bay-Delta, has essentially evaporated
in recent years.
Under the plan, salmon will be
reintroduced to the San Joaquin in 2012. “You’re talking
about a relatively small amount of salmon,” says Peter Moyle, a
professor of fish biology at the University of California, Davis
who serves as a consultant to the Natural Resources Defense
Council. “In a way, it’s almost a symbolic run. But you get a
river out of it, and that’s what’s really important.”
As tenacious as the San Joaquin salmon were, the Friant
Dam did wipe them out, and finding a 21st century replacement
required some 21st century thinking. Earlier this year, Moyle
recommended that the San Joaquin reintroduction program use a
strain of chinook salmon from Butte Creek, near Chico.
Moyle’s recommendation came largely because the Butte Creek
strain is very plentiful. But, he says, those fish may also prove
especially resilient in the face of global warming.
“There is an advantage to fish that can exist in warmer water,
surviving at temperatures, it seems, that should be lethal,” he
says. “That’s always a plus, because you never know
what’s going to happen.”
Matt Jenkins is
West Coast correspondent for High Country
News.
This article was made possible
with support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection
Foundation and the Jay Kenney Foundation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline River Redux.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
