Senator
Whitsett’s May Newsletter
Government agencies have
functionally closed 700 miles of the
Pacific
Coast
to commercial salmon fishing and have drastically curtailed the salmon sport
fishery in the same area. Spurred on by the hysterical misinformation of
certain environmental advocates,
many media outlets and opportunistic politicians cannot wait to blame the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
irrigators.
Coos
Bay
Meeting with Fishermen
In a May 5th
meeting in
Coos
Bay
,
Upper
Klamath
Basin
irrigators met with about 50 southern coastal salmon boat owners and coastal
political leaders including Senator Joanne Verger, and Representatives Wayne
Kreiger and Arnie Roblan.
In the nearly five hour meeting arranged by
Klamath County Commissioner Bill Brown and Coos County Commissioner John
Griffith not a single fisherman blamed conditions in the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
for the salmon fishery closure. In fact, these fishermen blamed a perfect
federal regulatory storm and fishery mismanagement by state and federal
agencies. They compared their current plight to the unjustified 2001shut off
of irrigation water to the 1400 farm families in the Klamath Project. They
said that projected inadequate salmon runs are a government contrived
regulatory crisis. A calamity has only been manufactured by applying
management that alleges that hatchery fish are somehow different than natural
fish. No genetic or visible difference exists between natural and hatchery
fish other than the man made markings on the hatchery fish. This travesty
continues in defiance of a court order prohibiting such regulatory slight of
hand. Additionally, they identified sea lion predation, unfavorable ocean
conditions, and the up to 600 foot long international factory fishing and
canning vessels working off our Oregon and California coasts as other
significant causes of this year’s low salmon numbers. In fact, they
characterized these huge vessels that continue to fish off our coast as “the
most efficient fish killing machines ever devised by man”. Their
conservative estimate of the salmon predation by the 300 or more resident sea
lions at the mouth of the
Klamath River
was about 25,000 fish during the fall Chinook salmon run. These
multigenerational fishing families have recognized for decades that changing
ocean conditions result in dramatic periodic differences in coastal salmon
populations.
The professional fishermen
attending the meeting stated unanimously that environmental activist Glen
Spain’s Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen Association neither represents
them or their interests, nor the interest of any other fishermen that they
know.
Collectively we came to
understand that farmers and fishermen are not the enemy and that we must stand
united in our opposition to the open attacks on our cultures and our
economies. The meeting ended in mutual pledges by the irrigators and the
fishermen to work together to save our natural resources industries. To that
end planning is ongoing to identify and create media events that will focus on
the fishermen’s plight and concentrate on the real causes of the decline in
Klamath River
Chinook salmon runs. To that end, the
Klamath
Basin
farmers and
County
Commissioners
are hosting the fishermen and coastal political contingent this Thursday, June
1st in
Klamath Falls
. The Klamath Relief Fund has been reactivated to provide aid to these coastal
businessmen because their financial plight has been imposed on them by their
own government in a virtual rerun of the events in 2001 that destroyed the
businesses of many basin farmers.
The Facts About
the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
The frenzied propaganda and
the news reports blaming the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
ignore certain facts.
The Bureau of
Reclamation’s Upper Klamath Basin Undepleted Naturalized Flow Study compares
what Klamath River flows would have been without agricultural development in
the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
, to what the flows have historically been during the past 50 years. The
report clearly demonstrates that all the irrigation practices in the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
reduce the
Klamath River
flow at Keno by no more than 3% of their annual natural flow. It further
demonstrates that during the late summer and early fall of dry years the
Klamath Project and off project irrigation development actually creates more
flow in the
Klamath River
at Keno.
The water being required by
federal regulations to enhance
Klamath River
stream flow is water stored for irrigation. The right to use that water to
irrigate belongs to the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
irrigators. No additional water can be made available without reallocation of
that irrigation water. Last year and again this year the upper basin
irrigators’ Water Bank has allocated 100,000 acre feet of irrigation water
to instream
Klamath River
flow. Dr. William Lewis, the chair of the National Research Council’s
Committee on Threatened and Endangered Species in the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
, stated emphatically that the eutrophication of
Upper Klamath Lake
is irreversible. He said that the process has been ongoing for millennia and
will continue until the lake is completely infilled, and that restoring the
lake to its original size would serve only make it larger and shallower,
thereby increasing the rate of eutrophication and making the water quality
worse. He predicted that releasing more mid-summer warm lake water would not
help the Coho and might actually harm them.
Recently completed studies
by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries demonstrate that
many of the volcanic rocks in the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
are abnormally high in phosphorous content. This is true of the volcanic rocks
in the Upper Sprague, the Upper Williamson, the
Lost
River
sub basin, and the Fort Klamath/Wood River watersheds. Not surprisingly, the
erosion of these rocks over millennia has resulted in the deposition of up to
6,000 feet of phosphorous rich sediment in
Upper Klamath Lake
. The recent DOGAMI mapping and rock analysis in the Upper Basin clearly shows
that the phosphorous came down the rivers in sediment originating in those
phosphorous rich volcanic rocks and that the process will continue
uninterrupted for future millennia.
Geologically,
Upper Klamath Lake
is nearing its end stage of infill and eutrophication and now averages only
about five feet in depth.
Upper Klamath Lake
is located in a very windy area. According to studies by the United States
Geologic Survey each wind event re-suspends millions of tons of this
phosphorous rich sediment in the lake. Incredibly, the Oregon Department of
Environmental Quality rejected these facts in establishing the natural
background source of phosphorous in
Upper Klamath Lake
. Instead, they adopted the study by Dr. Jacob Kahn who chose eight springs
adjacent to the lake and predicted that the mean phosphorous concentration in
those eight springs should be equal to the natural background phosphorous
concentration in the rivers flowing into the lake. They ignore the fact that
Kahn’s prediction fails to explain how several thousand feet of phosphorous
rich sediment infilled
Upper Klamath Lake
.
At the end of the last ice
age, virtually all of the valleys that make up the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
were submerged by
Lake
Modoc
. As this ancient lake receded to what is now Upper Klamath Lake, Tulelake,
and the
Lower Klamath
Lake
it left behind a relatively flat lakebed. For instance, in its course from the
head of the
Langell
Valley
to Tulelake the
Lost
River
averages only one foot of fall per mile. The
Sprague
River
in its course from near Bly to
Upper Klamath Lake
averages less than one foot of fall per 1,000 feet.
These rivers flow very
slowly through this flat terrain, and the flow is further slowed substantially
by their natural sinuosity. As a direct result of the slow flow, the river
water is exposed to the summer heat for relatively long periods. Heat always
moves from a warmer area to a cooler area. The cooler water absorbs heat from
the warmer air and the warmer river bed. In a slow moving stream, this
transfer of heat is governed by the difference between the temperature of the
water and the temperature of the surrounding air and its riverbanks and the
time the water is exposed to this temperature gradient. In this manner the
summer flow of the rivers has been heated for millennia and will continue to
be heated for millennia to come. The process is largely independent of shade.
The
laws of thermodynamics clearly show that neither restoration of river
sinuosity nor planting trees to shade the rivers will improve river water
temperatures.
Upper Klamath Lake
is heated further because it is shallow and because the winds continually mix
the water preventing meaningful temperature stratification. Neither of these
criteria can be changed by restoration efforts. In fact, making the lake
larger, and on average shallower, will only serve to increase water
temperature and decrease water quality.
The four limiting factors
for the growth of Blue Green Algae are warm water temperature, phosphorous,
relatively still shallow water, and sunshine. For millennia during the summer
months in the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
all these factors have had no limit.
Blue Green Algae are
extremely efficient nitrogen fixers. Given
adequate phosphorous, water temperature, sunlight and time they will harvest
nitrogen from the air to support their super abundant growth.
Sediment cores obtained from
Upper Klamath Lake
prove that various species of Blue Green Algae have flourished and dominated
in the lake for thousands of years. The natural boom and bust cycle of Blue
Green Algae growth creates periods of extremely low dissolved oxygen and
periods of extremely high ammonia content. Both of these periodic conditions
can be highly lethal to fish species. Regardless of these naturally occurring
water quality issues the nutrient rich
Upper Klamath Lake
continues to provide an excellent fishery for its signature Red Band Trout.
Seasonal water quality in
the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
cannot be significantly improved because the geologic conditions that have
driven these water quality conditions for thousands of years continue to
exist. While fully understanding this obvious seasonal poor water quality, Dr.
William Lewis, chair of the National Research Council Committee on Endangered
and Threatened Fishes in the Klamath River Basin stated that the 2002 fish
die-off in the Lower Klamath River could not be explained by either a unique
low flow or by high water temperature. He said that the California Department
of Fish and Game conclusions were dubious, that the cause of the fish die off
was not known, and that another cause other than flow and temperature should
be determined.
Conclusion
It is unquestionable that
there is a problem with the
Klamath River
salmon. That problem is not being caused by irrigation and farming practices
in the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
. The quality of the water leaving the
Upper
Klamath
Basin
has not changed significantly in the last two hundred years. If salmon thrived
here prior to the development of the irrigation projects, given the
opportunity, they should thrive here now.
Senator
Doug Whitsett
