Town Loses Fight to Stop Fish Kill-Off

Scores of state wildlife agents swooped down on this tiny eastern Sierra town Wednesday in an early morning chemical offensive against the notorious northern pike, a steel-jawed predator that many fear will decimate California’s dwindling salmon population.

But equally steely Portola residents fought back until the bitter end against a government that they claim is arrogantly poisoning their drinking water along with the sharp-toothed pike that have taken over Lake Davis.

As more than 100 protesters cheered, a Portola city councilman and three other demonstrators swam out to the middle of the icy lake before dawn and padlocked their wetsuited bodies to a buoy in a last-ditch effort to stop the state from killing all the fish in this premier trout habitat.

It didn’t work. All four were cited for trespassing. Three were treated for hypothermia at a local hospital. And by 8 a.m., 22 boats stacked with chemical barrels and manned by technicians in head-to-toe protective gear streamed onto the lake and began pumping brown plumes of a piscicide called Nusyn Noxfish into the water.

“I never thought we’d be here today,” said Plumas County Supervisor Fran Roudebush, who has led the effort against the chemical treatment and turned many of the 20,000 residents of this sparsely populated logging county into environmentalists in the process. “The thing that I find so sad is that I had such faith in the government, that [Gov. Pete] Wilson would step in at the last minute. But the ones who are not telling the truth won.”

State wildlife officials suspect that a rogue angler introduced the northern pike into Lake Davis, about 60 miles northwest of Reno, sometime in 1994; the fish is not native to waters west of the Mississippi.

*

Although this week’s effort was believed to be the largest intentional fish poisoning in California, wildlife officials treated nearby Frenchmen Lake in 1991. That lake, however, did not supply drinking water.

Biologists fear that if the pike were to escape from Lake Davis and migrate to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta 130 miles away, the California aquatic industry would be in great peril.

“The cost [of the treatment] is $2 million,” said Banky Curtis, regional manager for the California Department of Fish and Game. “When you compare it to the billion-dollar fishing industry in the state of California, it’s a reasonable cost. . . . We believe this will be a successful treatment. We will kill all of the fish.”

While many residents understand that the voracious pike must go, they have spent the past two years fighting a government that they do not trust to protect their drinking water, to safeguard their health, to listen to their concerns or to choose the best and least harmful means of eradicating the pike.

“I believe there’s lots of people who sincerely believe there is danger in this treatment, and I feel bad about that,” Curtis said. “But the state health officer has determined that there will be no long-term adverse impacts.”

Emotions have run so high in recent days that, while 100 Fish and Game staff members were brought to this remote, mile-high lake to apply the poison, the department enlisted 90 game wardens, 55 members of the California Highway Patrol and 25 local sheriff’s deputies to protect them while they did it.

Hours before the treatment, several hundred demonstrators had staged an angry candlelight vigil near the shores of Lake Davis--no mean feat in a town whose population barely crests 2,000.

Residents chanted and jeered at the wildlife officials, prayed for them to change their minds and put the poison away, and pelted them with Halloween candy, while one protester dressed as the Grim Reaper waved his scythe.

Teenagers sobbed, choruses of “Kum Ba Yah” duked it out with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” under a luminous harvest moon, and local activist Jeanne Rowden exhorted the unruly crowd: “Please, let’s have a moment of silence for the [Department of Fish and Game]. Pray for them. Let us pray: Dear God, let them see the error of their ways, and find a nontoxic solution.”

Local residents understand that the pike has already taken a huge bite out of the economically important Lake Davis trout population. But they argue that the fish has already been found in the Truckee River and in other nearby lakes.

They fume that, as residents of a small town, they have been run over roughshod by big government, which they say has ignored other options for controlling the pike, such as gill-netting, electrocuting or fishing the lake until all the pike are gone.

“We fight back, but we’re actually too small to do anything,” said Jennifer Mills, 16, as she huddled near a bonfire on the shores of the lake before dawn Wednesday, cheering for her neighbors bobbing away in the chilly waters. “Imagine the economy of Portola. The tourists come here and build homes and give us money. They’re not going to come here anymore.”

*

But most of all, residents fear that the 16,000 gallons of liquid poison and 60,000 pounds of powdered poison will harm their children and their neighbors. The active ingredient in Nusyn Noxfish is a plant-based chemical called rotenone, which causes all organisms that breathe through gills to suffocate.

It is not the rotenone that worries them here. It is the trichloroethylene, TCE for short, a carcinogenic byproduct of rotenone manufacture, that had them up in arms and out in the dark and cold to protest.

“If you extract all the TCE from all the chemicals we have on site, you’ll get 10 gallons,” said Patrick Foy, Fish and Game spokesman. “After application, that will be about one-tenth of the standard that’s acceptable in the drinking water supply.”

In addition, he said, the state will provide the city with an alternate drinking water supply until the lake tests clean for all chemicals. That should take about two months, at which time wildlife agents will reintroduce 700,000 trout to the pike-free lake.

Not good enough, say Portola residents, who thought they had a chance until the very end, who figured they could be a rural David taking on a big-city Goliath. The local Board of Supervisors took the state to court in March and in September passed an ordinance making it illegal for the lake to be poisoned.

Their plan was that Plumas County sheriff’s deputies would arrest members of the Department of Fish and Game who dared to come up here to treat the lake. The state’s response was to vow that the Highway Patrol would then turn around and arrest the sheriff’s deputies.

Before it came to such an impasse, however, the state took the county to court so that a judge would rule the law illegal. But it took Plumas County Superior Court Judge William Skillman until Tuesday--less than 24 hours before the treatment was scheduled to start--to order the county not to interfere “with the state or its officers.”

Tuesday night, the locals took to the street. Wednesday morning, four of them took to the lake, only to be arrested along with three other protesters who had trampled official signage and were charged with destruction of state property.

“I’m cold, but it was the right thing,” said a shivering Jeanne Rowden as she hobbled out of the water while the sun rose. “We have exhausted every legal means. We got no satisfaction. We had to do this. . . . We’ve done something no other community has done. We scared the Department of Fish and Game.”