In the News: State Water Board, DWR and Reclamation Forge Salmon Protection Plan
Seeking to preserve a salmon fishery wracked by drought, the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) has given the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) and the Department of Water Resources (DWR) until March 15 to come up with a plan to ensure the fish have appropriate water temperatures to survive.
The request is to develop an alternative to a plan shelved in December by the State Water Board that would have required more than 1 million acre-feet of extra storage in Lake Shasta by the end of October 2016.
Salmon eggs need cold river temperatures of 56 degrees Fahrenheit or less to survive. At 62 degrees Fahrenheit there is a 100 percent mortality rate. Early fall-run Chinook salmon spawn between Red Bluff and Redding on the Sacramento River. Fall-run Chinook are the most widely distributed run of salmon in the Central Valley. Warm water releases in 2014 decimated the majority of the Sacramento River’s endangered winter-run Chinook salmon. The winter-run are “unique,” according to NOAA Fisheries, because they spawn in summer, something that high- lights the extreme difficulty of managing dam releases for all beneficial uses.
The damage caused to the salmon population has spurred calls for improved fisheries management. To help prevent a similar fish die-off in 2015, officials released the Sacramento River Temperature Management Plan in June that would have required holding more water in Shasta for later release to help keep river temperatures cooler.
The struggle to balance all beneficial uses of water has prompted calls for revision. “To incorporate uncertainty into drought planning, priorities need to be clearly defined and a margin of safety established for top priorities, such as preventing extinction of endangered species,” wrote Jeff Mount, senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California, in a June 2015 blog post. He acknowledged that the margin of safety “would have meant increased water scarcity for some down- stream irrigators,” but that the scarcity “would not be permanent.” For the salmon, “extinction is permanent, regardless of whether it rains again.”
Reclamation officials told the State Water Board to wait before committing to a mandatory storage edict.
“I love magic, but I think we’re not going to be able to come up with that amount of water,” Reclamation spokesman Louis Moore told the Redding Record-Searchlight Dec. 11.
Water agencies that rely on Folsom Lake for their supply supported that State Water Board’s plan, saying that reservoir has been excessively drawn down to support downstream needs at their expense. Folsom Lake fell to a record-low 134,000 acre-feet in December.
The drought has put an extraordinary strain on the state’s water management apparatus, as officials balance reservoir storage with necessary releases. Criticism has come from water contractors, who say their water is unduly withheld from them and environmentalists, who believe fish protection is too far down on the priority list.
“I believe the Board’s recent proposal was little more than an effort to make it look like they were protecting the public trust, Jon Rosenfield, conservation biologist with The Bay Institute wrote in an email. “Then they backed away from even their own inadequate and incomplete proposal.”
In an email to Western Water, State Water Board Chair Felicia Marcus pledged the Board will “do our best” to provide an adequate protection level for salmon. ❖
– Gary Pitzer