Levee repair effort kills thousands of fish

On the graying banks of a delta island just north of here, the sight and the stench are hard to miss. Thousands of dead fish float belly up atop the water, victims of a federal levee repair project gone wrong.

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 Prospect Island, a federally owned parcel on the north edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

Just a couple of dozen miles south of the Capitol dome in Sacramento, Prospect Island filled like a bathtub that January. Over the months that followed, all sorts of fish -- striped bass, catfish, carp, sturgeon and other species -- found their way into what amounted to a new ecosystem in an otherwise struggling delta.

“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 Prospect Island from the rest of the delta. A lawsuit was threatened. Something had to be done.

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 Prospect Island.

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 Prospect Island in 1994 for $2.5 million, with plans to flood it as part of an expansive and ambitious state and federal effort to save the delta ecosystem while ensuring uninterrupted water exports.

That effort, dubbed CalFed, eventually stumbled, largely because of flagging federal funding. Prospect Island remained fallow.

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.”

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eric.bailey@latimes.com