Document Actions
Belly up on the Klamath
The elected officials who rushed to Klamath Falls last summer to support irrigation-starved farmers aren't hurrying to the lower Klamath River now to help tally the dead salmon floating in the bathtub-warm water.
By Editorial Board
The Oregonian
September 28, 2002
The elected officials who rushed to Klamath Falls last summer to support
irrigation-starved farmers aren't hurrying to the lower Klamath River now
to help tally the dead salmon floating in the bathtub-warm water.
They could, if they wished, even organize something of a bucket brigade, as
they did last summer to symbolically dump water in a closed irrigation canal. This time they could line up and pass more than 12,000 dead chinook and coho salmon hand to hand from the knee-deep river to the shore.
But the congressmen and the legislators won't come. There's not enough
political hay to be harvested from dead fish, even though these salmon,
just like the Klamath farms, represent jobs and livelihoods, the very food
that rural river and coastal communities depend on.
The truth is the crippling of the Pacific Coast salmon-fishing fleet and the devastation of Indian communities along the Klamath River have never
moved the Bush administration, lawmakers in Oregon and California, or the
public, like the hardship suffered by Klamath farmers last year.
This fish kill, one of the worst in memory in the Western United States, is
not a result of an awful drought or freak natural occurrence. It is an unintended but inevitable consequence of a policy choice to put the needs
of upriver farmers ahead of fish and lower river fishing communities.
The Bush administration and Congress thought it could resolve last year's
crisis in the Klamath Basin by challenging the science of salmon protection
and simply ordering more water to irrigators. Here is the result: Thousands
of rotting salmon, including hundreds of threatened coho, stacking up in
the lower river.
The failure stretches beyond the Klamath Basin. All this shouldn't be
loaded only onto the shoulders of Klamath irrigators. This also is about a
court order that prevents the government from diverting any water from
farmers in the Central Valley of California to the Trinity River system,
which also feeds the lower Klamath.
This wasn't even an especially dry year by Klamath Basin and Central Valley
standards. This is just business as usual in the Klamath River system --
farmers getting their irrigation water, while downriver fish and the people
suffer the consequences.
The Bush administration and some irrigators have claimed water held back in Upper Klamath Lake is too warm already to do the salmon any good. Well, maybe, but the first response of the administration to the fish kill was to release more lake water.
This can't go on. There's too much call on too little water in the Klamath
and Trinity River basins. Last summer, when drought struck and farmers lost their irrigation water, this newspaper added its voice to calls to reduce
water demand in the basin, and urged the administration to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up water supplies and improve fish habitat.
That hasn't happened. The administration, leaders in Congress and Klamath businesspeople have successfully blocked any effort to allow willing sellers of irrigation rights to sell their water, and allow it to be used
instream. Congress has put up some money to help farmers and do small water projects in the region, but it hasn't delivered anything close to the
amount needed to make a real difference.
Conservation and fishing groups now have sued the government, claiming the fish die-off shows that the Bush administration's water plan for the
Klamath violates the Endangered Species Act. Even if they win -- and the
fishermen have a strong case -- it won't save this year's salmon run or
prevent a spawning disaster that will reduce generations of salmon.
But it could lead eventually to what's ultimately required: a more balanced
water policy throughout the Klamath system, one that accepts that fish need water to survive.
Read the original story