[Water_news] 3. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATERSHEDS - 5/28/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

May 28, 2009

 

3. Watersheds –

 

Smelt operations a hedge against extinction

The Redding Record-Searchlight

 

Frogs find home on dam spillway

The San Francisco Examiner

 

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Smelt operations a hedge against extinction

The Redding Record-Searchlight – 5/28/09

By Dylan Darling

 

If the fragile Delta smelt winds up going extinct, the species could be restored where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers merge using a population being bred in the north state.

 

Scientists at the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery, a small operation nestled on the Sacramento River close to Shasta Dam, have reared the fish since last year. There are now 1,400 of the tiny fish at the hatchery, and the goal is to create a stock of thousands.

 

The project is expected to continue while the smelt remain in danger of sliding into extinction, said Scott Hamelberg, hatchery manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

 

"We are all, of course, keeping our fingers crossed, hoping that doesn't happen," Hamelberg said.

 

Although the hatchery's crew members have mostly worked with winter-run chinook salmon that can be more than 30 inches long and weigh more than 30 pounds, they've learned how to handle the smelt. The small fish usually grows only to 3 inches in length, weighs a couple of grams and usually lives for about a year or two.

 

"You just do everything smaller," said John Rueth, assistant manager at the hatchery. "They are actually very similar to salmon."

 

Spawning the smelt requires squeezing eggs out of the females and sperm out of the males. Although, unlike with salmon, Rueth said the work on the smelt requires tweezers.

 

Also unlike the salmon, the smelt accumulating in the tanks at the hatchery are not for release, he said. Instead, they and another population being bred by University of California at Davis researchers in Byron are being held in case the wild population completely disappears.

 

Having the smelt living about 200 miles from the Delta at Livingston Stone allows the population here to also serve as a backup for the Byron stock in case there is an earthquake, power failure or other problem that kills the fish, said Bob Clarke, fisheries program manager for the Fish and Wildlife Service's regional office in Sacramento.

 

"You don't want to put all your fish in one spot," Clarke said.

 

The agency has two hatcheries in the state, Livingston and Coleman National Fish Hatchery near Anderson. Because of the problems with the smelt, the green sturgeon and Sacramento perch, the agency is considering building a new hatchery in the Delta, Clarke said.

 

He said a new hatchery could cost as much as $20 million, but it could be years before it's built.

 

In the meantime, the smelt safety net will stay in the north state.

 

"For years, they'll be breeding (the Delta smelt) at Livingston Stone," Clarke said.#

 

http://www.redding.com/news/2009/may/28/smelt-operations-a-hedge-against-extinction/

 

Frogs find home on dam spillway

The San Francisco Examiner – 5/27/09

By Katie Worth

 

SAN MATEO COUNTY — A vital reservoir near San Mateo that stores billions of gallons from the Hetch Hetchy water system will soon boost its capacity by as much as 10 percent.

 

The restoration of the Lower Crystal Springs Reservoir comes 26 years after the state ordered the water level lowered 8 feet until safety concerns were addressed. Engineers at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which owns the dam, started considering how to address those concerns and return it to previous capacity.

 

Enter the frogs.

 

With water no longer flowing regularly over the spillway, the 119-year-old dam’s knobby top provided a perfect place for water to collect and for the red-legged frog, a threatened species protected by the state, to take up residence. A nearby spring flows onto the south end of the dam, perpetually feeding the pools of water, and the raised road on top shades the puddles, slowing their evaporation.

 

The frogs thrived, leaving the state, county and water agency stymied.

 

“We find red-legged frogs all over the county. This time we just happened to find them on top of the dam,” said Public Works Director Jim Porter, who added that his department worked for 15 years to find a solution to the problem.

 

It appears water will start flowing over the dam again within a few years, according to Public Utilities Commission project manager Tasso Mavroudis.

 

The county, which must replace the raised portion of Skyline Boulevard because it is seismically unstable, will be moving the frogs from the top of the dam to a new wetland area on land owned by the commission. The road and the columns supporting it will be removed, perhaps as soon as October 2010, Mavroudis said.

 

Once the demolition is complete, the San Francisco water agency will begin its work to improve the spillway and the basin below it that water flows into. The spillway is a lowered portion of the dam that catches excess water. When that’s finished — perhaps by early 2012 — San Mateo County will complete work on the road.

 

The water agency considers the project important — and will invest an estimated $32 million into it — because the additional 8 feet mean some 3 billion more gallons of Sierra Nevada water that could be stored in the reservoir. That increase comes on top of the 22.1 billion gallons the reservoir currently holds.

 

Storage is becoming an increasingly important matter as the state becomes more concerned about droughts, Mavroudis said.

 

One of the project’s goals will be to improve drainage on top of the dam, so the monolithic concrete structure never becomes an ecosystem for threatened frogs again, he said.

 

“A lot of the maintenance has been deferred for years because of the frogs,” he said. “It’s been a problem since Day One.”#

 

http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Frogs-find-home-on-dam-spillway-46327667.html

 

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