A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
November 28, 2007
3. Watersheds
Levee repair effort kills thousands of fish; U.S. officials scramble to save survivors and explain how the project to drain a flooded delta island went wrong - Los Angeles Times
Editorial: Fish left high and dry by government -
DELTA ISSUES:
Supervisors fear Delta efforts will hurt county - Fairfield Daily Republic
Supes speak out on Delta plan - Vacaville Reporter
MCCLOUD TROUT STUDY:
Group to study redband trout; Conservationists raised $120,000 for
WILDLIFE ISSUES:
7 federal wildlife decisions to be revised; A political appointee had overruled recommendations by staff scientists on endangered species. She quit under a cloud - Los Angeles Times
Levee repair effort kills thousands of fish;
By Eric Bailey, staff writer
RIO
The massive die-off has left federal officials scrambling to explain why it happened, while cleaning up the resulting mess and saving some of the fish that are still alive.
Meanwhile, the state Fish and Game Department has launched an investigation, and irate local fishermen have struggled with red tape that has kept them from mounting a rescue operation.
"Everyone is pointing fingers, but I want to save fish," said Bob McDaris, a local marina owner. "We've got a problem here. Let's fix it and not let it happen again."
The roots of the mess date back to the stormy winter of 2006, when waves pounded a hole into the levee that encircles
Just a couple of dozen miles south of the Capitol dome in
"It became a magnet habitat," said Dan Bacher, editor of the Fish Sniffer newspaper. "Because it was recently flooded, it offered a rich food chain that attracted and sustained a whole web of fish."
But the hole in the levee also represented a navigational hazard as the tides flowed out. Rushing water swamped several small fishing dories, prompting Coast Guard rescues and raising liability worries.
The flow also cut into private property across the narrow waterway that separates
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation hired a Bay Area construction firm to fix the breached levee. Just before Thanksgiving, the company closed the hole in the bank and fired up massive pumps to remove the water that had claimed
Suddenly, thousands of fish were left high and dry.
Bureau of Reclamation spokesman Jeff McCracken said that by patching the hole at low tide, authorities hoped to minimize the number of fish left stranded. Biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service said no endangered fish would be affected, so no special accommodations were required, McCracken said.
Authorities figured that scores of fish might be left on dry land, he said, not tens of thousands, the only estimate officials will venture for now.
"This was an absolute shock," McCracken said. "Would we do it differently? Yeah, there's no doubt about that. The end product was a dismal failure."
And more than a bit ironic. The Bureau of Reclamation purchased
That effort, dubbed CalFed, eventually stumbled, largely because of flagging federal funding.
In the meantime, Mother Nature accomplished what the federal government couldn't, flooding the island in the late 1990s and again in January 2006, leaving much of its more than 1,200 acres underwater.
With the levee repair, a thousand acres are now dry, stretching in a baked mudflat covered with a 5 o'clock shadow of weed stubble and willows.
A shallow pool of water covers the remaining 260 acres, the depth ranging from a few inches to a few feet.
Oxygen in the remaining water quickly depleted. By the hundreds and then the thousands, the fish succumbed.
Federal authorities eventually jumped in, dispatching crews to clean up dead fish in hopes that a few survivors could hang on in what now amounts to a small, shallow lake.
Work is expected to continue for weeks. On Tuesday, crews prowled the banks with nets, dodging cattails and weeds.
Gulls wheeled in a crazed flock over the bubbling patch of water where authorities were pumping oxygen to aerate the muddy, mocha-hued pool. Nearby, an armada of egrets poked through tules. A family of otters came by for breakfast, while hawks have been seen dive-bombing in for dinner.
Some fish have measured as long as 4 feet and weighed more than 20 pounds. The haul is being buried on the island by a giant backhoe.
"This is nothing," one worker muttered, surveying the rotting fish. "You should have seen the pile yesterday."
Bacher, who has chronicled the delta's travails over the years, said this disaster stands out for its size and timing, coming on the heels of the Bay Area oil spill that had already shut down fishing on a huge swath of the coast.
Outrage among fishermen, he said, "is off the charts. People are just beside themselves," especially because they've been told not to help.
McDaris, an avid fisherman, has been trying to get permission for a week. He has a list of 75 fellow anglers willing to help, but was told to stand down.
On Tuesday, McCracken and the bureau finally agreed to help get the fishermen onto the island as soon as this weekend.
But beforehand, McDaris and Bacher said, they will go to the island to see if there are any fish left to save.
"If they stay on that island, they'll die," McDaris said of the fish. "If I can save even just 10 stripers, that's 10 more that someone else can catch."
Editorial: Fish left high and dry by government
Fish don't live very long without water.
That's common sense to most of us, but apparently not to the federal government. The same federal government that cut flows in the Klamath River five years ago, leading to the death thousands of adult salmon, this week relearned the obvious in
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation hired a company to fix a levee next to
When crews started pumping water to drain the area around the island, fish that once swam through the levee breaks had no escape route and died in the murky, oxygen-depleted water.
Thousands of fish died. What's amazing is, the bureau seemed unmoved until fishermen and a marina owner in the area started raising a stink about the dead fish.
"When we realized how many fish were there, we quit pumping," bureau spokesman Jeff McCracken told the Associated Press. "By then, we certainly, apparently, had passed the point of causing some fish loss."
McCracken chose his words carefully because a state agency, the Department of Fish and Game, has started a criminal investigation. It's against the law to allow the "wanton waste" of sport fish. Most of the dead fish were striped bass, a popular sport fish with a plummeting population. Catfish and carp were also found dead, and those two fish can survive just about anything. Salmon, bluegill, sturgeon and other species were apparently among the huge numbers of dead fish, which may take weeks to clean up.
Workers used fishing nets Monday to scoop up dead fish, some up to two feet long, in a 260-acre area of shin-deep water.
It will be interesting to see if this is just a case of the government doing whatever the heck it wants. The owner of a marina in
Meantime, Attorney General Jerry Brown will weigh the results of the investigation. We don't need to wait until the investigation is complete to say the government slipped up on this one. #
http://www.chicoer.com//ci_7577657?IADID=Search-www.chicoer.com-www.chicoer.com
DELTA ISSUES:
Supervisors fear Delta efforts will hurt county
By Barry Eberling, staff writer
The state's Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force meets again Thursday and Friday to discuss the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Supervisors have been keeping track of the ideas that have emerged so far.
'There's good and bad things in there,' Supervisor Mike Reagan said.
Supervisors then proceeded to zero in on the bad things they fear could hurt the county's environment and its Delta drinking water.
The Delta is the hub of the state water system, with giant pumps lifting water into canals for the journey to Southern California cities and
It also extends into eastern
One phrase in the state's draft Delta vision statement particularly concerned some supervisors. It calls for 'a separation of water for human uses from water for the ecosystem.'
'That spells 'peripheral canal,'' Supervisor Barbara Kondylis said.
A failed, early 1980s proposal for a peripheral canal to bring water around the Delta for shipment to
The draft vision statement doesn't specifically mention a peripheral canal. Still, supervisors fear less fresh water might flow through the Delta into
Suisun Marsh could become too salty, Kondylis said. The 115,000-acre marsh contains 10 percent of the state's remaining wetlands and is home to endangered species, as well as dozens of duck clubs and farms.
'The Suisun Marsh is the biggest ecological disaster waiting to happen,' Kondylis said.
Reagan is concerned that ideas expressed in the draft state Delta vision, if enacted, could cost
Also, county officials are afraid the state will restore large amounts of north Delta habitat in
County officials presented to the board a letter they plan to give to the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force this week, supplementing a letter the county sent in October. But Kondylis called language 'too conciliatory.'
'I just think it needs to be more in-your-face 'We don't like it, we'll fight you tooth and nail every step of the way,'' Kondylis said. #
http://www.dailyrepublic.com/story.php?id=101.5
Supes speak out on Delta plan
By Danny Bernardini, staff writer
Hoping their concerns and suggestions will be included in future plans for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Solano County Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday to send a letter, letting their voices be heard.
The letter is being sent to the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, county legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office following the supervisors' discussion of what should be included and how it should be written. Included are concerns about
The letter was written in anticipation of a third and final draft of a Delta Vision Plan, which is likely to be approved Thursday or Friday. The task force hopes to have its final vision plan in place by January. A strategic plan on how to implement the vision plan is to be in place by October 2008.
What originally was a letter simply asking to be included and considered in the discussion, Supervisor Barbara Kondylis said, should be changed to reflect the genuine concern of the board.
"The letter is too conciliatory," Kondylis said, speaking of the original draft. "This is about water going south. If it were me, I would come out with guns blazing. I just think we ought to be protesting this. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but we need to be more than squeaky."
Supervisor Jim Spering echoed Kondylis' remarks. He said the issue of water rights was buried in the original draft of the letter.
"That is the essence of all of this. It should be in the first sentence," Spering said. "The letter should be more assertive."
Elizabeth Patterson, staff environmental scientist for the Department of Water Resources and newly elected Mayor of Benicia, told the board that anything decided later this week was not a permanent decision.
"This is really just a vision, not a plan," Patterson told the board. "The details will be developed next year. Depending on what happens Friday, we look forward to working out the details in 2008." #
http://www.thereporter.com/news/ci_7579783
MCCLOUD TROUT STUDY:
Group to study redband trout; Conservationists raised $120,000 for
Redding Record Searchlight – 11/28/07
By Dylan Darling, staff writer
REDBAND: Andrew Braugh holds a McCloud redband trout last summer in Raccoon Creek, a tributary of the
More than $120,000 has been raised to study, aid and educate people about a little fish found in the cold waters of the
California Trout, a conservation group, announced Tuesday that the money will be used to help redband trout that live in the river and many of its tributaries. The Orvis Company, a fly-fishing gear manufacturer, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation each gave $30,000 grants to start the fund last year.
The remaining $60,000 was donated by people who learned of the cause via Orvis's catalogs and the company's Web site, as well as California Trout members.
"This is a great starting point," said Andrew Braugh, project coordinator for California Trout's Mount Shasta Regional Office.
The money will be used by the McCloud Redband Core Group -- a collection of resource agencies, private landowners, community members and nonprofit organizations -- to cover the costs of analyzing the fish's genes, restoring parts of its habitat and teaching people about it, he said.
Akin to rainbow trout, redbands have a brick red streak across their sides, said Steve Baumgartner, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game in
Scientists, including Baumgartner, are studying whether redbands deserve to be classified as their own species of if they are simply a variation of rainbows. The fish can breed with rainbows so scientists are trying to isolate the genes that give it the red mark.
"We've developed a lot of information, but it's not a complete picture yet," he said.
Redbands are native to the north state and live in colder, harsher environs than other trout, Baumgartner said. Those found in the McCloud system stay small, with adults measuring about 8 inches long. #
http://www.redding.com/news/2007/nov/28/group-to-study-redband-trout/
WILDLIFE ISSUES:
7 federal wildlife decisions to be revised; A political appointee had overruled recommendations by staff scientists on endangered species. She quit under a cloud
By Janet Wilson, staff writer
Federal wildlife regulators will revise seven controversial decisions on endangered species and critical habitat made by an Interior Department political appointee who quit in the spring amid charges of improper meddling in scientific decisions.
Former Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Julie MacDonald, a civil engineer from
She could not be reached for comment.
MacDonald "should never have been allowed near the endangered species program," Rahall said in a statement Tuesday. "This announcement is the latest illustration of the depth of incompetence at the highest levels of management within the Interior Department and breadth of this administration's penchant for torpedoing science."
The congressman held hearings on MacDonald's oversight of endangered species programs during her tenure.
MacDonald, who owns a Sacramento-area ranch with her husband, took a particular interest in
Under her direction, proposed habitat protection for the endangered arroyo toad, a tiny amphibian that once inhabited many
Those species are among seven identified by federal regulators in the letter to Rahall as possibly needing further protection.
Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Valerie Fellows said decisions on whether to add back habitat could be made within a year. She said that the agency was short on funds and staff but "these species are a top priority."
Senior regional staffers and field biologists, who know the endangered species best, determined which of MacDonald's decisions needed reevaluation, Fellows said.
Kieran Suckling, policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the Fish and Wildlife Service action was "nothing more than cynical damage control."
The federal agency is under court order to revise past actions pertaining to five of the seven species, Suckling said, and there has been extensive media coverage on the other two. "They're not giving anything up. . . . They're desperately trying to contain a public scandal rather than investigate the depths of corruption at Interior."
His group, which has successfully sued the Interior Department and the Fish and Wildlife Service over endangered or threatened species, filed suit in half a dozen federal district courts last week seeking to overturn other decisions made or influenced by MacDonald.
In all, the group has filed notice of intent to sue to gain broader protections for 55 species.
Fellows said she could not comment on active litigation but noted that agency staffers had reviewed all 55 decisions that MacDonald made during her tenure and had determined that her other actions were legal. Interior spokesman Hugh Vickery noted that although officials had concluded there were problems with MacDonald's work, she was legally entitled to make policy decisions on endangered species.
Jamie Rappaport Clark, head of the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Clinton, countered that political appointees are not supposed to pressure subordinates who are career scientists to change their findings. MacDonald regularly did that, investigators found.
"In my 20 years of government service . . . I've never seen anything like it," she said.
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