Capital Press Letter

July 28, 2011

Nobody, and I mean nobody, addresses the fact that the coldest water in the Klamath watershed, the North Fork Trinity River, feeds the third largest reservoir in California, Trinity Lake. That water is drawn from that reservoir through turbines making electricity, and then captured below the dam in a "bumping" reservoir, and diverted to the Sacramento River via a tunnel through the Coast Range mountains, and down penstocks twice on its way, again making electricity, to the Sacramento, and then flows to the Delta, where the produced electricity is part of the power needed to pump that water upstream, uphill, along the San Joaquin River to the Westlands Irrigation District in the rain shadow of the Central Coast Range. ...

You take 68 percent of the annual flow of a river that once was the cold water influx that allowed Chinook salmon to survive August and September in the lower Klamath before the sun fell further to the south and shadowed the canyons, and fall frosts cooled the headwaters. That missing cold water is never mentioned, but Klamath farmers drawing warm water sure are. ...

The Klamath is a warmer river, and it was always the Trinity that kept the lower reaches cold until fall rains called the fish to the headwaters. The Klamath watershed is incomplete because the coldest tributary is diverted out of the watershed. Fix that, all you environmental experts.

John Thomas Jr.

Independence, Ore.