Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
April 11, 2008
5. Agencies, Programs, People
LOCAL FLOOD CONTROL PROJECTS:
Water basins along Sprinter at center of flood dispute - San Diego Union Tribune
Flood Control and Wine Train Strike Deal -
Battling Upstream; The tribes on the Klamath know that as the river goes, so go the salmon - San Francisco Chronicle
LOCAL FLOOD CONTROL PROJECTS:
Water basins along Sprinter at center of flood dispute
By Michael Burge, staff writer
The city obtained a permit in 2001 to build three catch basins, called “detention basins,” but only built one, according to city and corps officials.
The basins are designed to contain rising waters during heavy rains.
Those permits have since expired, said Oceanside City Engineer Scott Smith, and the city is attempting to revive them.
The absent detention basins are at the heart of a dispute between
The transit district raised the track bed above the former 100-year flood plain of
Heavy rains in January flooded some businesses along the creek, and owners and the city blamed creek alterations caused by the Sprinter.
But Robert Smith, team leader for the Army Corps of Engineers' Rancho Bernardo office, said the Sprinter was supposed to be built in tandem with the city's detention basins along the creek.
“These basins will solve the flooding problem, as far as I can tell,” he said yesterday.
The permit allowed the city to build three basins: one at
The
A city ordinance prohibits an alteration of a waterway that would affect the flood plain, he said.
“It appears the Sprinter construction has encroached on the
He said technically, the transit district didn't need a permit from
“At that point we said, 'Hey, you say your project is going to be mitigated by detention basins that weren't built,' ” the city engineer said.
“The ultimate solution (is) when you identify an impact you should identify mitigation,” he said. “They identified mitigation that was the city's responsibility.”
The city of
In October 2004, the agencies signed a 57-page “memorandum of understanding” that detailed work the transit district would do on the detention basins and the reimbursement it would get from the city for that work.
The transit district built walls for the basins along the railroad tracks, and the city was to complete the basins on its side of the tracks. The agreement does not specify when the city would do that work.
“In concept, we have a very collaborative approach with the city of
“I'm pretty much of the view (that city officials) have a problem in the flood plain and
The transit district has written a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission that shows flooding along
Yesterday, an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the transit district may have altered the flood plain by adding 100,000 cubic yards of fill dirt in the creek bed to raise the track.
He said the district failed to file an application with FEMA to update a map that delineates the flood plain.
“What this all boils down to is that the transit district, when they had an engineering study done . . . they were under the impression that the city was going to build those detention basins,” said Marshall Marik, FEMA's flood planner.
They weren't the only ones.
“When these basins come on line, it's very possible the flooding problem will go away,” said Robert Smith, the Army Corps engineer. “Potentially, your FEMA concerns go away, too.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080411/news_1mc11sprint.html
Flood Control and Wine Train Strike Deal
The flood project and Napa Valley Wine Train have reached an agreement that will allow a major railroad relocation to begin this fall, both parties announced.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scheduled to award a contract for $40 million or more this summer to move track, build two railroad bridges and make depot modifications.
These changes will remove the railroad as an impediment to flood waters and set the stage for excavation of a flood bypass channel and the start of flood protection along Napa Creek.
But first the local flood project and Wine Train had to agree to the details of the railroad relocation.
“This agreement serves the community by moving us closer to flood protection and by preserving the transportation corridor that is of great value to all of us now and in the future,” Greg McManus, CEO and president of Wine Train, said in a prepared statement.
The federal contract will raise about a half mile of track between
The railroad work is expected to begin this fall and continue through 2010, assuming federal funding is sufficient to keep the project on schedule./Register
Battling Upstream; The tribes on the Klamath know that as the river goes, so go the salmon
San Francisco Chronicle – 4/11/08
By Glen Martin, staff writer
The
But what happens on this river affects
Oliver's home is several hundred yards from the river's mouth, and from his property you can hear the muffled reports of big combers breaking on the beach. A group of Yurok Indian youths are in the yard, grilling Pacific lampreys - anadromous, eel-like fish with circular mouths filled with sharp radula. Lampreys are highly esteemed by the Yurok, and are gaffed in the winter during low tides, when they skitter across flooded sandbars from the sea to the river. The close proximity to the big surf makes eel snagging a dangerous business, and fatalities from sleeper waves occur with some regularity.
Inside the small, clapboard house, Oliver, a tribal elder, is eating strips of smoked salmon. Oliver is thin but not frail, an exceptionally handsome man with long iron-colored hair and dark eyes glimmering with humor.
He is 78, and has lived in this home for 55 years. A wood stove provides radiant heat. On the walls are photos - of family and tribal members, but also of fish: big salmon arrayed on a plank, skewered salmon staked around a fire, a close-up of a lamprey in shallow water, a huge sturgeon hanging from a tree limb. The room smells pleasantly of smoke and fish.
A few Yuroks are seated and standing around Oliver, who is ensconced in a comfortable chair near the stove. As he nibbles on the fish - symmetrical, long strips of blood orange chinook, translucent as stained glass - he uses a jack knife to carve a lamprey hook handle from yew wood.
Lamprey hooks are the essential tool for eel fishing. The requisite technique is to chase an eel as it lunges across the sandbar, snag it with the hook, then flip it high up on the beach with a flip of the arm and wrist.
Oliver's eel hooks are held in particularly high regard, a set of finished hooks hang on a wire above Oliver's chair, the golden yew wood handles glossy. They are carved with uncanny accuracy to represent a lamprey head, right down to the radula in the mouth and staring, inquisitive eyes. The lamprey is an intelligent fish, say the Yurok; when you run after them with the hook, you can see the alarm in their faces. Somehow, Oliver has captured that sentience in his carving.
The talk is discursive, humorous and mildly chaffing. Oliver asks one of the young men if he is still seeing a Tlingit woman. Tlingits are a southeastern
No, the young man says, a half-smile on his lips. She went back north. Oliver nods his head sagely, intent on his carving.
"That was a tough woman," he says after a time. He looks around the room, fixes on a visitor sitting nearby on a stool. "That woman could've whipped three of you," he says. "She was fierce. Ate too much seal meat." There are gentle laughs, and heads nod in agreement.
This is a conversation that has been going on for a long time - eight to ten thousand years, give or take a millennium. That's how long the Yurok,
The three main tribes inhabiting the
The Yurok had access to the migrating fish as soon as they left the sea, when they were at their fattest and brightest. Along with the river - and its salmon, steelhead, lampreys and candlefish - they also had the open ocean to exploit. Their food sources included Dungeness crabs, seaweed, mussels, abalone and periwinkles from the intertidal zone. They carved - still carve - elegant boats from redwood logs, and were redoubtable mariners, hunting marine birds, seals and sea lions and fishing for ling cod and rockfish in the rough inter-coastal waters. They had first rights to the dentalium and abalone shells that were the primary medium of exchange for the
The river was their source of food and wealth, and it was their highway, their means of establishing commerce with other tribes. They were a water people, and still are. The photos on Oliver's walls are religious icons - graphic representations of all that is sacred to the tribe: the fish. Fishing nets and implements. Boats. The River. Because in any conversation with a Yurok, it always comes back to the river. To a very significant degree, the river is the reservation: Tribal holdings extend 1 mile inland along each bank from the mouth of the Klamath more than 40 miles upstream. Most of the land is exceedingly steep, of little utility for anything except conservative and limited forestry. What the tribe has always had, and still has to a significant degree, is the Klamath.
"The river gave us everything we needed to thrive," said Troy Fletcher, a tribal member and resource policy analyst. "It gave us food, wealth, beauty. This was paradise, and we knew it."
But like most rivers in
Too, the main stem Klamath dams warm the river's water, encouraging destructive parasites and blooms of toxic blue-green algae. Increasingly, it is clear the Klamath can have the dams or it can have fish, but not both.
For years, the Yurok have been at the vanguard in a battle to remove the dams. Allied with them are the other Klamath tribes, commercial fishermen and sport anglers. Opposing them are the dams' operators - which have shifted over the years, as the facilities have changed ownership - and farmers in the
The Klamath always has been a major front in
In 2002, the Bush administration sided with the farmers and slashed the releases to the river, delivering the water up to the irrigation districts. A massive fish kill on the Klamath followed; the salmon never really recovered from the blow. The incident scarred the collective sensibility of the Yuroks, and it is a subject that still engenders deep anger on the reservation.
The situation on the Klamath has far-reaching consequences - all the way down to
[Some fisheries biologists say it's already too late for salmon in the Lower 48 states. Development, logging, water diversions and dams, they claim, have compromised the spawning streams to an irreparable degree.
Oceans warming due to climate change - and perhaps overfishing - are just additional nails in the coffin.
As of this writing, the Pacific Fishery Management Council - the regulatory body that governs West Coast marine fisheries - is poised to proscribe all salmon fishing for the 2008 season. The reason: An unexpected collapse in
But many fisheries experts maintain Pacific salmon and steelhead can be revived in the continental
Bill Kier is a
Kier acknowledges that the data on southern range Pacific salmon is a mixed bag.
"But I still believe they have a very real fighting chance," he said. "The fact is that caring for salmon results in stabilized watersheds, better water quality, more wildlife - and in general terms, a cleaner environment. If you manage water and land for salmon, it doesn't matter if you're talking about the Klamath or the creek that flows through Mill Valley - life will be better not just for the salmon, but for the people who live in those watersheds, whether they're Native Americans, farmers or suburbanites."
Dams are not the only thing winnowing the Klamath's salmon. A couple of years ago, fluctuating ocean conditions off western
Oliver, who has been watching the fish runs all his long life, is convinced pollution also is a major factor in the decline.
"Everywhere in the world, people are using these harmful chemicals to do everything, right down to cleaning their toilets and dishes," he said. "The timber companies are spraying their lands with herbicides, and it runs into our rivers. The farmers are using too many pesticides. The whole system is poisoned, and the fish can't take it."
But for the Klamath, most biologists agree, the biggest problem is the dams. The battle over their disposition has raged in the courts, Congress and the media for two decades. Last year, the Yuroks and their allies caravanned to
He may have been unnerved by a similar trip the Yuroks, Hupas and Karuks took to
After getting stonewalled by Buffett, a certain level of depression settled in along the river. But it now appears that serious negotiations about dam removal and increased flows were not wholly undermined by Buffett's rebuff. Indeed, talks have continued - both with
"That worries us," said Zeke Grader, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "On the other hand, we're not going to actively oppose a settlement. We have to have good cops and bad cops on this thing, and the Yuroks are the good cops. We understand that."
Fletcher did say any settlement must be predicated on the removal of the main stem's four dams and adequate downstream flows for the fish. He also noted the tribe never really felt like its fight was with the farmers.
"After (the) 2002 (fish kill), we reached out to them," Fletcher said. "They share a lot of our values. They're rural people, people who are tied to the land, who are spiritual and hard-working. And like us, they face an unstable future. When we started talking to them, we realized, hey - we have a lot in common with these guys."
But there is still PacificCorp. The farmers aside, Fletcher acknowledges it is naive to think any corporation would sign an agreement that results in a significant financial loss simply because other parties consider it the right thing to do.
"We understand this has to make sense for PacificCorp," he said.
Fletcher is built like a logger: big shoulders and arms, and a torso like a keg. Arriving at tribal headquarters near the Klamath's mouth for a recent interview, he walks into the building with his hands blackened from grease and soot. He had just driven over a snowy mountain road from the hamlet of Weitchpec, about 40 miles upriver. En route, he had come across a car engulfed by fire, and had stopped to help its owner put it out. That kind of instinctive willingness to aid a neighbor in trouble is embedded in most rural cultures, but in Yurok society it extends to the landscape itself.
"We believe we were given an obligation by the creator to restore and protect our land and our fisheries," Fletcher said. "It's spelled out in the preamble to the tribal constitution. For us, this goes back to the beginning of time. The challenge right now is extreme. But the obligation has always been there, and it will never change."
As part of meeting that obligation, the tribe imposes fisheries closures and season quotas on its members, even though the Yuroks have the sovereign right to catch as many fish as they want. Not all members are happy with the strictures, though they comply.
One tribal member who feels the regulations should loosen up a little is Tommy Wilson. Orphaned at 13,
"That big city," he said. "I couldn't hack it. After a couple of months, I came back here, lived on my own, and did what I had to do to stay alive."
That included selling salmon, sturgeon, black bear parts and home-grown marijuana to a friendly man who later turned out to be an undercover U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent. In court,
"I said that we should be able to thrive, not just survive," he said. "That means when I catch a fish or kill a bear, or plant a seed and harvest the plant, I should be able to do with it what I want. We were once a wealthy people - and it was this river that made us rich. I didn't feel the federal government had the right to force bare subsistence on us."
The judge agreed, and threw the case out of court. But despite his entrepreneurial views - by no means unusual among the Yurok -
"Individually, we don't define ourselves first and foremost by our professions," said Maria Tripp, the tribal chairwoman. "To us, the most important thing is to be Yurok. Work is what you do - Yurok is what you are."
Courtesy among tribal members and hospitality to visitors is written into the Yurok constitution. There isn't any emotive breast-beating or preaching, but everyone is expected to strive for right thinking and right acting.
You see this manifest, especially, when it comes to boat building.
The Yuroks have been carving redwood log boats for thousands of years; the craft are exquisite artifacts by any measure, and sacred to the tribe. All the boats are carved by hand without jigs or other mechanical aids, and a long apprenticeship is required before an artisan is allowed to create one without direct supervision. More than a steady hand is demanded of the carver: A clear mind and quiet heart also are requisite.
"No one is allowed to approach a boat if he is angry or upset," said Fletcher. "We believe the boats are living things - we carve then with hearts, lungs and noses. They can be affected by bad thoughts and feelings."
On a large, grassy lot in front of tribal headquarters, tribal member Dave Eric Severns has been carving a boat every day, up to 12 hours a day, since Thanksgiving.
"It's not something you just - do," Severns said, slowly peeling away long strips of straight-grained wood with a gouge. He moves slowly and talks softly, seemingly out of deference to the boat. "You live it. I work on this boat all day, way into the night. And when I go to bed, I still see it in my thoughts. It stays with me in my dreams, and then I wake up early in the morning and come back out here."
This is the first boat Severns has carved on his own, after working for six years under his mentor, George Wilson. It's about 20 feet long. The log it is carved from was more than 5 feet in diameter, and weighed about 1,600 pounds. When the boat is finished, Severns said, four men will be able to lift it and move it with ease.
"This is a river boat," Severns said, moving his hand along the smooth, brick-red gunwales. "The ocean boats were up to 60 feet long and 12 feet wide. Eighty years ago, Yuroks used the ocean boats to deliver milk from Klamath dairies up to
There is a knob in the bow section of the boat that is meant to represent its heart; a small black stone rests on it. The stone, says, Severns, is a lock that keeps the boat secure.
"Boats had primary owners, but anyone could use one if they needed it - unless there was a rock on the heart," Severns said. "Someone from the tribe comes by here and sees the rock on this boat's heart, they know it isn't supposed to be moved."
Up at Oliver's house, the lampreys have finished cooking on the charcoal grill. Nearby, a couple of young men check conditions in a large smokehouse. It is full of lampreys; they hang like golden stalactites from racks near the rafters. One of the Yuroks cuts off a slab of grilled eel, rolls it in a slice of white bread and hands it to a visitor. The meat is dense, rich, oily and incredibly sweet. Oliver walks among the youths, evaluating the cooking techniques, sampling eel, essaying humorous comments. Sometimes he simply looks at the river for extended periods of time.
Tripp says Oliver and other elders are the tribe's bedrock assets, keeping the people anchored to their place in the world.
"When my friends and I were going to college (at nearby College of the Redwoods and
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