Fish Before People: Environmentalists sue over Sacramento River and Shasta Dam
Fish Before People: Environmentalists sue over Sacramento River and Shasta Dam
A cadre of environmental groups filed a lawsuit yesterday against the Interior Department for allegedly mismanaging California’s water supplies to the detriment of salmon.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups argue that the Bureau of Reclamation has violated the Endangered Species Act during the past two years of drought by honoring water delivery contracts instead of putting fish first in Northern California rivers, and authoring a 2005 federal biological opinion for Sacramento River chinook salmon with a finding that the operation of state and federal water delivery projects in Northern California didn’t jeopardize salmon.
At the heart of the action are agricultural water contracts that the Bureau of Reclamation renewed in 2005 for a 40-year period which require that customers receive at least 75 percent of their contracted deliveries, even in low water years. Of note is the fact that the customers only took 65 percent of their allotment this year. The environmental groups are asking the Court to force the Bureau of Reclamation to reconsider the contracts.
In a prepared statement, the NRDC said that “The federal government’s mismanagement of limited water supplies in the ongoing drought is a near death blow for Chinook salmon and the thousands of people whose livelihood is tied to the salmon industry.” Farm groups replied that agricultural customers agreed to keep millions of gallons of extra water in Shasta reservoir this year in an effort to keep the releases cold for the salmon. As a result, rice farmers in the Sacramento Valley fallowed about 25 percent of their land.
“Once again, we hear the unproven innuendo that rice farmers waste water. That is simply not the case,” Tim Johnson, head of the California Rice Commission, said in a blog post.
Sacramento Bee Article: HERE.