Environmentalists Plan Court Fight to Save Salmon

Environmentalists will go to court again to seek greater protections for salmon-spawning areas from a federal anti-erosion project on the Sacramento River between Chico and Red Bluff.

They want the state Board of Reclamation to prepare a more thorough review of environmental effects of the project, which would line the river banks with rock to check erosion.

“We are planning to go back to court again. We settled out of court with them in good faith last year, but we don’t think they’re living up to their end,” David Bobb of Colusa, president of the Sacramento River Preservation Trust, said Friday.

Report Branded ‘Paltry’

Environmental groups branded as “paltry” the environmental impact report drafted by the Board of Reclamation. The report was debated at a crowded public hearing in Red Bluff Thursday night.

Bobb said the report is “totally unacceptable. We’re asking them to revise it and hold more hearings.”

Bobb said the legal action has the support of the Sierra Club, the Planning and Conservation League and fishing organizations.

The Sacramento River, which carries almost one-third of California’s surface water, is the only large river in the state that continually changes course. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is supervising the bank lining work, says that above Colusa the river destroys an average of 142 acres of land a year and washes away about 7.5 million tons of soil.

The bank protection is favored by farmers and homeowners whose land is threatened by the river.

River Threatens Land

Environmental groups charge that the project will damage spawning grounds for the river’s declining population of salmon. They also contend that the Red Bluff-Chico region’s contribution to the San Francisco Bay silting problem is small.

The Corps of Engineers last year began work on a long-term project to check erosion in a 17-mile stretch between Chico Landing and Red Bluff by lining the river bends where most of the erosion takes place.,

Environmentalists went to court last June in an effort to block the project. An out-of-court settlement allowed the work to proceed, but required the Reclamation Board to draw up an environmental impact report before it resumes this year.

The work is done only in summer and early autumn.

Rock lining of riverbanks, a process widely known as “ripraping,” is fought by conservationists, who argue that it constricts the river in a narrow channel and destroys wildlife habitat. They favor creation of a permanent “meander belt” along the river’s banks.