The dramatic die-off of 33,000 salmon last fall along the Klamath River in Northern California was directly caused by the Bush administration’s decision to pump extra water from the river to farmers, biologists from the California Department of Fish and Game have concluded.
The environmental disaster in September left one of the state’s major rivers stacked with rotting salmon, some up to three feet long, from the mouth of the Klamath River near Crescent City to 36 miles upstream. It was the largest die-off of adult salmon ever recorded in the West.
Seeking to control a political embarrassment, the Bush administration said at the time that not enough science was available to conclude what killed the fish.
The 63-page report, issued late Friday night, marks the first official documentation suggesting causes for the die-off. It concludes that fall Chinook salmon, steelhead trout and endangered coho salmon died because the U.S. Department of Interior diverted so much of the river’s water to farming interests in 2002 that the fish crowded tightly as they returned to spawn from the ocean and fell prey to disease. The die-off killed 25 percent of the river’s fall Chinook run, the report found.
State biologists also concluded that unless the federal government leaves more water in the river starting in March “there is a substantial risk of future fish kills.”
— Paul Rogers, Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)