Chiloquin Dam decision an important step

for Upper Basin

September 27, 2006

Removing Chiloquin Dam from the Sprague River is important from a couple of standpoints. Thus the vote by members of the Modoc Point Irrigation District to accept a federally financed effort to do so and keep the district functioning is a key step forward.

The dam's removal would deal with a specific need of the fish, but also with the ability of people in the Klamath River Basin to solve water problems. Both points are important - perhaps even vital.

Two species of fish - both of them suckers - have been put under the special protections of the Endangered Species Act, which basically says the federal government can undertake no activities which would further endanger a listed species.

That mandate has a lot of importance in the Basin because of the strong federal presence through such agencies as the Bureau of Reclamation. Suckers also have a strong cultural and religious importance to local American Indian tribes, which has to be part of decisions affecting the status of the fish.

Spawning habitat lost

When it comes to fish, the focus is on water and habitat.

Before the Chiloquin Dam was built in 1914 to divert water for irrigation, suckers used to swarm above the dam site to spawn. The dam put that area off limits to most suckers.

Reopening the area to spawning eventually should increase the number of suckers, and, it's hoped, lead to removing suckers from the special federal protections, which among other things, requires that Upper Klamath Lake water levels be held to a certain height. That's in addition to restoring something to the Basin which was once here in abundance.

Upper Klamath Lake is the main reservoir for the Klamath Reclamation Project, and provides water for about 180,000 acres of agricultural land. Every year the Bureau of Reclamation has to make decisions in consultation with other federal agencies on how much water will be released.

Those amounts are profoundly affected by federal efforts to protect endangered and threatened fish species at both ends of the Klamath River - suckers in the upper basin and salmon in the lower basin.

Improving habitat and survival for suckers deals with a lot of the problem, though by no means all of it. Klamath Basin water problems are complex. They spring from a federal government that promised more water for a variety of uses than is really available.

It takes luck to make even a year with average precipitation work. It's certainly proper for the federal government to finance the solution to a problem it created. After the dam's removed, it will be replaced by a pumping station, and the federal government will create a $2.4 million fund to pay for its future maintenance.

The problem's complexity and scope points to the second reason the irrigation district's vote to take out the Chiloquin Dam was important.

If there was one part of the effort to solve water problems to which there was near universal agreement among Tribes, federal agencies and Klamath Project irrigators, it's that the dam should go.

If the upper basin had failed at this, the outlook for dealing with the water problem's other elements would have looked bleak at best. Its success, though, says that solutions are possible.