Redwood Reader

59. Trinity River Flows Restored
The San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trinity River must be allocated for fish twenty years after Congress mandated restoration of the river and its salmon. Agricultural, power and urban users were upset as much as 9% of currently appropriated water would be sent down the Trinity system to the Klamath for fisheries habitat restoration. Judges sounded angry it had taken twenty years for the water to start flowing in sufficient quantities as ordered by Congress and another ten since Congress ordered larger fish producing flows. Major fish kills have occurred on the Klamath downstream from the Trinity in the last few years, water conditions have been shown to be the cause.
This is clearly a case of those who grabbed something being unwilling to part with enough of it to allow natural processes to occur. The Yuroks are not about to be compensated for their losses over a century. No account is made of loss of commercial or sports fishing revenue. The claim of vital energy production falls flat, generating 1% of the State’s need. Agriculture was not considered by federal law in the first place and so had no say in the case.
In general, it is time to wake up and smell the coffee for those who are comfortable with the way things are despite insults to our natural systems. Agriculture can greatly reduce its water needs by using drip irrigation, glomalin accruing no-till farming, and better on site retention. A lot more water is lost to evaporation because large bodies of still water in high summer have large evaporation rates. Underground storage and shaded rivers reduce this loss.
Dams have been shown to interfere with fish passage, change water temperatures and eventually fill in with sediment, creating more problems. Each dam seems to have its own special interest group afraid of its losses , even where the dam is illegal or the current use is not what the dam was chartered for.
Groups opposed to dams have been able to accumulate large amounts of data showing the problems with dams on rivers throughout the country and the world. It is time for new thinking on every aspect of precipitation capture and storage, particularly in built up areas with large amounts of water absorbing land roofed, paved and landscaped into net water users rather than producers.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-trinity14jul14,1,1421464.story?coll=la-news-environment

Court OKs Trinity River Plan
The ruling upholds a federal order to increase flows to restore salmon habitat. It reduces supplies to farmers.From Associated Press, July 14, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appellate court approved a congressional plan Tuesday to increase flows into the Trinity River to restore fish habitat, reducing water to California farmers and hydroelectric plants. Most of the water in the Trinity, which originates in Northern California's Trinity Alps and flows west into the Klamath River, has been diverted for decades to service a fast-growing state where much of the water is located far from where people live and farm.
In 1984, Congress mandated restoration of the 112-mile-long Trinity River to combat dwindling supplies of salmon, steelhead and other aquatic life. In 2000, after years of studies, the Department of the Interior approved a plan to increase Trinity water. The plan was backed by Indian tribes who use the waters for sustenance fishing, while farming and hydroelectric power interests opposed it. The Trinity is a major artery in the Central Valley Project's system of dams, tunnels, canals and reservoirs that supply 200 water districts serving 30 million people in the agricultural rich Central Valley. It churns turbines for nine power generating stations.
The plan approved Tuesday diverts as much as 9% of the water project's capacity, depending on rain and snow amounts. The utilities argued the Interior Department's plan would decrease water flows that eventually reach the Central Valley, and that the government did not study the impact it would have on the millions of water users downstream. A spokesman for 600 California agricultural customers said farmers would probably get less water under the plan.
"That's water that is all part of a flow regime that is an important part of this large, complex interconnected water system," said Tupper Hull of the Westlands Water District, a Fresno-based agricultural water supplier that challenged the plan. A spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Jeff McCracken, said the government did not study what, if any, impact the plan would have on farming because the law did not require it. "It's a fairly significant yield of water out of the system," McCracken said. "If there were an endless supply, this wouldn't have gone to court."
Westlands is considering asking the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its ruling, Hull said. Hydroelectric utilities contended the government should further study the effect on energy production in light of California's energy crisis.
A three-judge 9th Circuit panel, however, was not persuaded, and reversed a lower court ruling that halted portions of the plan. The unanimous court said it was time to complete the "flow plan for the Trinity River." "Twenty years have passed since Congress passed the first major act calling for restoration of the Trinity River and rehabilitation of its fish populations, and almost another decade has elapsed since Congress set a minimum flow level for the river to force rehabilitative action," Judge Alfred Goodwin wrote.
Goodwin said less than 1% of California's energy production could be undermined. The Yurok Tribe, which straddles the Klamath in Humboldt and Del Norte counties downstream of the Trinity before it drains into the Pacific Ocean, celebrated the decision. The state's poorest tribe, which fishes the river for a subsistence living, was hit hard in 2002 when thousands of salmon died because of low flows. "The fish that use the Klamath also spawn in the Trinity. So a healthy Trinity River is important to a healthy Klamath River," the tribe's attorney, Scott Williams, said.
In the 1800s, Williams said, the 5,000-member tribe gave up thousands of acres in exchange for a promise its fishing would be protected. "It's been decimated by decades of dams, logging and diversions," said Williams, adding that the decision is a move "toward repairing that broken promise."
The plan calls for diverting 368,900 acre-feet of water to 815,200 acre-feet a year, depending on precipitation. Flows would be released from the Trinity Dam at different rates throughout the year to mimic natural flows. An acre-foot of water is enough to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot, and contains 325,821 gallons, enough to supply one or two families for a year. The California Farm Bureau did not immediately comment on the decision.