Is Bush really good for salmon?

Bush decision blamed for West's largest die-off of adult salmon
Last updated by lestatdelc on Sat, 10/18/2003 - 10:50pm

Scientists: Diversion of water killed fish
The dramatic die-off of 33,000 salmon last fall along the Klamath River in Northern California was directly caused by the Bush administration's decision to pump extra water from the river to farmers, biologists from the California Department of Fish and Game have concluded.

The disaster in September left one of the state's major rivers stacked with rotting salmon, some up to 3 feet long, from the mouth of the Klamath River near Crescent City to 36 miles upstream. It was the largest die-off of adult salmon ever recorded in the West.

Seeking to control a political embarrassment, the Bush administration said at the time that not enough science was available to conclude what killed the fish.

The report, issued late Friday night, marks the first official documentation suggesting causes for the die-off. It concludes that fall Chinook salmon, steelhead trout and endangered coho salmon died because the U.S. Department of Interior diverted so, much of the river's water to farming interests in 2002 that the fish crowded tightly as they returned to spawn from the ocean and fell prey to disease. The die-off killed 25 percent of the river's fall Chinook run, the report found.

State biologists also concluded that unless the federal government leaves more water in the river starting in March. "there is a substantial risk of future fish kills."

California leaders said Saturday, they will try to convince the Bush administration to devote more water to fish this year.

"We've been working hard to restore fish populations, so when you have a massacre like this it makes it all the more frustrating," said Mary Nichols, California's Secretary of Resources.

"If Interior had resisted the temptation to do something precipitous, we could have avoided, the tragedy of the fish kill and benefited everyone."

Last March, at a ceremony with more than 500 cheering farmers, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman opened the head gates on irrigation canals in Klamath Falls, Ore., giving farmers full delivery, of water from the river, amid protests from environmental groups, fishing interests and Indian leaders who predicted calamity for fish downstream in California.

The event followed a national controversy in 2001, when the feds cut water deliveries to the farmers to protect fish in a drought year, causing economic hardship and bankruptcies among southern Oregon farmers.

The amount of water that Norton ordered left in the river in 2002 was less than levels at almost any time since record keeping began in 1951.

"It's not rocket science, fish need water," said Troy Fletcher, executive director of the Yurok Tribe, based in Klamath, Calif., on Saturday. "We told the Bush administration in March they would devastate the fishery, that they would kill fish. Our predictions were accurate and they came true. The state's report proves it."

This article was published in The Spokesman Review, Spokane, Washington Monday, July 6, 2003