Wildfire kills Klamath fish: ‘Everything that’s in there is dead.’
Tens of thousands of fish died over the weekend in the Klamath River, the result of the McKinney Fire in Siskiyou County, California, just south of the Oregon border. As the fire burned, thunderstorms and flash floods unleashed landslides of ash and mud into the water, causing parts of the river to swell even as its oxygen levels dropped. Scientists say that dead fish started appearing last Thursday — adult and juvenile suckerfish, juvenile chinook and coho salmon, steelhead, lamprey, crawdads and more.