Report supports higher Klamath flows

By David Whitney - dwhitney@mcclatchydc.com
November 28, 2007

WASHINGTON - A National Research Council report Wednesday supported higher water flows down the Klamath River to protect salmon runs, siding with authors of a controversial 2006 study that Bush administration critics said it had tried to suppress.

"The science that fish need water is becoming clearer than some people believe," said Glen Spain, spokesman for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

But the research council report also found fault with two new Klamath River scientific studies generally, including the one from 2006, saying they examine in detail portions of the complex river system but miss the complete picture on why it's in such crisis.

"Science is being done in bits and pieces, and there is no conceptual model that gives a big picture perspective of the entire Klamath River basin and its many components," said University of South Carolina geography professor William L. Graf, chair of the 13-member review committee.

The Klamath River, which used to be the third most productive salmon river in the West Coast, in recent years has been a battleground over water and the Endangered Species Act, pitting farmers relying on irrigation in the upper basin in Southern Oregon against salmon fishermen enduring economic hardship because of disastrous runs.

In 2001, water was cut off to irrigators to provide more for fish. The next year, more than 30,000 adult salmon returning to fresh water to spawn died in a lower stretch of the river after being infected by pathogens thriving in the warm, shallow-flowing river.

Since those divisive and devastating days, the two new reports have been released - one by the Bureau of Reclamation in 2005 projecting what river flows might look like if up-river irrigation wasn't a factor, and another sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs looking at how much water should flow down the river to help fish.

The council report found fault with both studies, but felt that the conclusions of the BIA-funded study, conducted by Thomas Hardy and R. Craig Addley of Utah State University, had come up with new river flow patters that river managers should adopt, at least temporarily, while a more comprehensive investigation of the river is conducted.

"The prescribed flows could be helpful to fish," Graf said in a telephone news conference.

The new report by the research council, an arm of the National Academies of Science, is not likely to result in any immediate changes by the Bureau of Reclamation in the way it manages water in the upper basin.

"There's nothing in here that provides compelling reasons to change our operations," said bureau spokesman Jeffrey McCracken, who said its decisions are based on biological opinions, contracts with irrigators, agreements with Indian tribes and other factors. 

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Source:  http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/527508.html