A Sign of Hope for San Joaquin Salmon

From the Los Angels Times

Gone from California’s San Joaquin River for 60 years, spawning spring-run Chinook salmon have been spotted near Friant Dam this spring. The L.A. Times called the appearance of the salmon, “a small victory in a tortuous effort: to revive one of California’s most abused rivers by restoring a portion of its long-lost water and salmon runs.”

According to the Times article, the San Joaquin’s spring-run Chinook once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The salmon were so plentiful that farmers fed them to hogs. Settlers were kept awake at night by splashing fish as they struggled upstream to their spawning grounds.

But the run dwindled as San Joaquin Valley agriculture sucked more and more water from the river system and hydropower dams blocked salmon from upstream passage. Then, in the 1940s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation erected Friant Dam as part of the Central Valley Project, a massive irrigation system.

Most of the upper river flow was sent into two giant canals that fed irrigation ditches up and down the east side of the San Joaquin Valley. Sixty miles of the San Joaquin — the state’s second-biggest river — died, its bed turning to a ribbon of dry sand.

In the late 1980s, environmentalists went to court to get back some of the San Joaquin’s water. Finally, in 2006 they won, and year-round flows were restored. Then the true work of reviving the river and its floodplain began.

“Restoration isn’t like a light switch, where you flick it on and flows are flowing and fish are coming back and birds are flying overhead and people are picnicking by the riverside,” said Monty Schmitt of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in the L.A. Times. “It is not something that happens all at once.”

The returning salmon bring hope, but not without controversy. It’s still unknown if there will be the estimated $1 billion in funding needed to complete the project. And farmers along the river worry that they’ll be impacted if the Chinook return, and blamed if they don’t.