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A blow for fish
Group
breaches Klamath levees, turns farmland back into wetlands
Mateusz Perkowski
Capital Press
November
02, 2007
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Strategically
placed explosives breach levees surrounding a 2,500-acre portion
of the Williamson River Delta Preserve north of |
A
decade's worth of work was reversed within minutes as a series of
explosions on Oct. 30 ruptured earthen levees that half a century ago
transformed 2,500 acres of marsh north of
To help restore the populations of two endangered sucker fish species,
more than 100 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil were strategically
detonated along four sections of the levee system, the culmination of a
two-year, $6 million project coordinated by The Nature Conservancy,
which owns the entire 7,400 acre Williamson River Delta Preserve.
Reclaiming the wetlands serves a broader purpose as well, said Mark
Stern, The Nature Conservancy's Klamath-area conservation director. The
"It's really working toward improving the ecosystem and all the
species in it," Stern said.
Klamath Project irrigators may also benefit from sacrificing farmland to
the Williamson River Delta Preserve and other restoration projects, said
John Crawford, a Tulelake farmer and a trustee of The Nature Conservancy
in
"Do we like all those thousands of acres going out of agriculture?
Absolutely not," he said. "But we hope it provides some
certainty for those acres that remain in agriculture, and more
flexibility as it pertains to the Endangered Species Act."
The levee breaching tears down work that was done in the 1950s, when the
Henzel family used a floating dredge to scoop peat soil from the bottom
of the lake and pile it into 22 miles of levees. To complete the
project, the dredge ran night and day for years, operated by a crew of
five men who lived on the vessel.
Though the peat soil became suitable for cultivating grains, seed
potatoes, alfalfa and other crops, the delta which the
Instead of being allowed to mature in the delta waters, feeding on algae
and zooplankton growing in the pools, the young fish were thrust
straight from the river into the much less survivable
Now the property is owned by The Nature Conservancy. Because the land is
privately owned, as opposed to managed by a federal agency like the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service, it can be used for multiple purposes instead
of being completely locked off, Crawford said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies helped plan and
fund the project, but The Nature Conservancy controls how it's managed
and will likely continue to make acreage available to agriculture, he
explained.
As for the impact the restored delta will have on irrigation water
availability, the outlook is tentatively positive. Breaching the levees
will provide about 17,000 new acre feet of storage capacity to the lake,
Stern said.
On the other hand, more water will be needed to fill the lake, so the
extra storage capacity won't do much good without strong snow packs and
stream flow.
Filling the lake to meet the minimum requirement established by the 2002
U.S. Fish and Wildlife biological opinion would also be more difficult,
but the agency is reevaluating its water level requirements for 2008 to
take the project into account, explained Curt Mullis, field supervisor
for the Fish and Wildlife Service's
Though a drought year would cause problems, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
sees the delta project as a step forward for both fish and farmers,
Mullis said.
"We're cautiously optimistic that more water storage will give us
more flexibility with lake level management," he said.
The Williamson delta and other conservation projects have given
He just hopes farmers' goodwill and compromises won't be forgotten.
"We don't want it all. We never wanted it all. We want to share to
make things better," Crawford said.
Agricultural support for the Williamson River Delta Preserve and other
projects isn't unanimous, however.
After watching the blasts spew dirt hundreds of feet into the air,
Candace Owens was noticeably less impressed than most of the other
observers at the event.
"I think this is a travesty," said Owens, who raises cattle
with her husband, John, in
Owens' two sons, Bryan and Nathan, also cattle ranchers, said that
breaching the levees and re-flooding the delta reflected a disturbing
trend within the
"They just keep pushing forward," Nathan Owens said.
While he isn't opposed to preserving the environment in the
Farming can coincide with conservation - as evidenced by the migrating
birds that depend on crops for sustenance - so preservation efforts are
most useful when they don't leave agriculture out of the mix, the Owens
said.
"Farmland is shrinking everyday from development," Nathan
Owens said. "I'm all for not developing this, but turning it back
into a swamp is not going to help."
As the farmland in the Williamson River Delta is submerged by water, a
piece of the
"Four explosions and they took it all away," he said.
Staff writer Mateusz Perkowski is based in
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