Hard Times on the Lower Klamath

The old Eureka Ice building stands almost empty, its cavernous, frost-caked rooms testimony to a dying industry once sustained by the Klamath River and its fish.

Where the once-mighty Klamath River meets the sea, commercial fishermen and Native American tribes together struggle to eke out a livelihood from steadily dwindling salmon stocks. For much of the last century, federal water policies serving upriver needs, including agriculture and hydropower, have taken a severe toll on the lower Klamath.

Once the West’s third-richest salmon river, the Klamath is today a shadow of its former self. Salmon die stranded in dried-up streams, weakened by disease, suffocating in warm water sapped of oxygen.

North Coast fishermen brought 4.27 million pounds of salmon into the three major North Coast ports from 1976 through 1980. In 1998, they landed only 58,000 pounds. Income from recreational salmon fishing plummeted 80% in 13 years. So scarce are fish that the Yurok tribe, which has lived off salmon for centuries, has been able to run a normal commercial fishing operation in only five of the last 15 years.

The decline of North Coast fisheries has been a long, slow process as the Klamath and its tributaries were dammed and diverted to generate electricity and to provide water for alfalfa, onions, potatoes and other crops in places such as the Klamath Basin, the Scott and Shasta valleys, and the Central Valley.

The reaction of downriver folk to the loss of fish has been muted compared with the outcry of farmers 250 miles upriver since last year, when their water supplies were sharply curtailed by drought and by provisions of the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

But that is changing. In late April, a group of commercial fishermen joined environmental groups in filing suit against the federal government. They invoked the Endangered Species Act in an attempt to protect coho salmon by sending more water downstream, even if it means less water for farmers.

A federal judge is expected to hold a hearing today and rule soon on their request for a court order to get water to the salmon immediately.

At the Interior Department in Washington, officials declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said they plan to abide by the act.

Farmers and those who depend on their business lashed out at those bringing the lawsuit.

“It shows once again that they’re not willing to work with us to find us a solution,” said Bob Gasser, co-owner of a fertilizer store in the Oregon border town of Merrill.

“I saw four communities just get ripped last year,” said farmer Rob Crawford of Tule Lake. “Now I’m seeing communities just get their feet back on the ground. They need this time to settle down, and they need stability.”

The tension between upriver and downriver needs is an inevitable result of a river system re-engineered beginning nearly a century ago to serve too many people. Now, as the Bush administration takes steps to help farmers, people downriver are speaking out.

“Bush Kills Salmon,” read signs carried by members of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa tribes who journeyed upriver to Klamath Falls, Ore., in March to protest as two Bush administration Cabinet members opened gates that sent river water into irrigation channels that supply farm fields.

Farmers popped champagne corks. They describe the struggle for water as a matter of people versus fish and, as they see it, the humans were finally getting their due.

“To us, it wasn’t a celebration at all,” said Susan Masten, chairman of the Yurok, the largest and one of the poorest Native American tribes in California. “It was a loss. It was a slap in the face.”

Others downriver watched the ceremony on television, feeling shut out and ignored.

“I know that farmers feed America, but fishermen feed America too,” said Ronnie Pellegrini, 36, of Eureka, whose fisherman husband left her and their two young daughters Tuesday to fish for five months in more promising waters south of San Francisco. Fishing off the North Coast is severely restricted.

President Bush last month ordered the secretaries of Interior, Agriculture and Commerce and the head of the Council on Environmental Quality to come up with plans to balance the needs of the farmers, tribes and fishermen.

“We are trying to send the message that we are going to pay attention to all three legs of the stool,” said Sue Ellen Wooldridge, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton’s deputy chief of staff. And, she added, people in the basin need to work together.

But even scientists are arguing over how to help the river. A National Academy of Sciences panel has questioned some of the findings that led to a decision last year to give more water to fish and less to farmers. Higher flows might actually harm coho salmon by sending warmer water from upstream lakes into the river, the panel concluded in a February report that was applauded by farmers. Other biologists insist that higher water levels are essential to the fish.

The Klamath springs from streams in the mountains of eastern Oregon, then moves through arid flatlands, irrigated farms and scrub-covered hills into California. The river winds west through forests of pine, other conifers and magnificent redwoods before emptying into the Pacific an hour’s drive north of Eureka.

The loss of salmon has forced change on thousands of people on the lower Klamath. Jimmy Smith gave up fishing after 34 years and persuaded his son to forgo a life pursuing salmon. Looking out of place in a suit and tie, Smith stood aboard his still-immaculate boat in Eureka harbor and stared at the empty berths where his fellow fishermen once docked.

“They vanished along with the fish,” he said.

Eureka Fisheries Co., once one of the West Coast’s largest fish processors, shut down in July. Half a dozen party boats used to anchor at Eureka for recreational fishing. Only one remains.

Fishing produced $12.4 million in personal income in Humboldt County in 1987. That dropped to $5.8 million just 12 years later.

Experts blame the collapse on farming, overfishing, increased regulation, global competition from foreign fishermen, and logging, which disturbs the forest soil and clogs streams with silt that sullies spawning grounds.

By 1997, coho salmon were so rare that they were granted protection under the Endangered Species Act. Coho may be added this summer to California’s own endangered list.

These adaptive, powerful fish are famed for their ability to move from fresh water to the salty ocean and back to the river to leap up waterfalls, spawn and die.

Now, when spring irrigation begins, the Klamath drops as if a million straws were sucking it dry.

The water level in one major Klamath tributary, the Shasta River, fell so abruptly in April 2001 that salmon were stranded in puddles in the rocky riverbed. Federal biologist Tom Shaw and other rescuers rushed upstream and frantically scooped up thousands of fish with a paint strainer, the only tool they could find in their car. Thousands more salmon died for lack of water.

“There were just too many fish,” Shaw said. “We didn’t have the time. We didn’t have the people.”

The Yuroks and other tribes still depend on the river and the salmon, grilling the fish they catch or smoking it for future use.

They credit salmon for keeping them lean and healthy, a belief predating recent medical research linking oils found in fatty fish such as salmon with helping prevent heart disease.

But these days, with wild salmon so scarce, the Yuroks eat more fried foods, and the diabetes rate is rising.

Even the tribal rites of childhood are changing, said Troy Fletcher, Yurok executive director, whose son loves to fish. “I’d rather have my son on the river fishing than on the street corner buying drugs or experimenting with alcohol,” he said.

The Yurok reservation begins at the mouth of the Klamath, flanking the river for 44 miles through thick redwood and pine forests mingled with dogwood, redbud and lush green ferns.

Executive orders in 1855, 1864 and 1891 reserved the rights of the Yuroks to continue to make a livelihood from the river, for food, sale and ceremony, Fletcher said. Those rights were reaffirmed in a 1988 Hoopa-Yurok settlement act, he said, and the tribe successfully defended that right in court as recently as last year.

To protect the river, the tribe employs 15 biologists and as many as 45 technicians in summer, using grants and tribal money.

But the Yuroks fear they are losing the water war. The farmers upriver have crafted an elaborate Web site, replete with legal opinions, snowpack reports, and accounts of agricultural bankruptcies and other hardships blamed on the Endangered Species Act.

Eighty percent of the Yurok reservation lacks electricity or telephone service.

“The Indians are too poor to declare bankruptcy,” said Yurok biologist Mike Belchik.

The re-engineering of the Klamath River began in 1907, when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation launched a massive irrigation project to promote settlement and agriculture in the arid plain along the upper Klamath.

Eventually, the river flow changed so drastically that Klamath Falls lost its waterfalls.

Two dams opened in the early 1960s on the Trinity River, the Klamath’s largest and most important salmon tributary. Today, 75% of Trinity water is rerouted to the Central Valley. Chinook salmon numbers there have nose-dived as much as 90%.

By 2000, as many as 1,400 farms depended on federal irrigation water from the Klamath project to grow crops on 220,000 acres along the Oregon-California border.

The current crisis began last year with a historic drought, coupled with decisions in court and by regulators that favored two rare upriver fish and the downriver coho salmon over farmers. The Bureau of Reclamation was forced to reduce irrigation flow by 90%, leaving 1,200 farmers without water. With many farmers forced to quit planting their fields, civic leaders warned that the local economy was teetering on the brink of ruin.

The protests caught the attention of the White House. President Bush vowed to do everything he could to deliver water to farmers this year. Interior Secretary Norton and Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman personally presided over the March 29 opening of the irrigation head gates.

Norton, in particular, has come under sharp criticism downriver.

She oversees three agencies with conflicting Klamath agendas: the Bureau of Reclamation, which provides water to farmers; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees rare species; and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is supposed to look out for the interests of Native Americans.

Central to the Klamath riddle is the Endangered Species Act, as well as a 2000 court ruling that gives the imperiled fish and the tribes first priority to Klamath water.

For the Yuroks, like the salmon, the river is the way home. Traditionally, when a member died, the tribe placed the body aboard a boat and took it upstream, stopping at sacred spots along the river to perform ancient death rites. They sometimes follow this ritual today.

“We know the river is our life,” tribal elder Moore said. “We travel on it. It brings us food. That’s why we’re careful with the river.”