Dos Palos dam key to restoring salmon run


By Mark Grossi
mgrossi@fresnobee.com





E-Mail Print reprint or license0 Comments
Text Size:










DOS PALOS -- The fish-friendly makeover of the San Joaquin River is expected to start with a $35 million renovation at Sack Dam near Dos Palos in 2013.

That will be too late to meet a 2012 deadline for reviving chinook salmon runs in the river. It will be years before similar projects will turn the river into a thoroughfare for salmon, as it was six decades ago.

But even without fixing the dam, federal officials may still return long-dead salmon runs to the river next year. They could just capture and haul the fish around dams.









Fresno Bee Staff Photo - (The Fresno Bee) - San Joaquin River east of Dos Palos








And that worries west San Joaquin Valley farmers who have no say on a possible delay of the deadline. The West Siders want the renovation at Sack Dam completed before the salmon restoration.

The project will prevent legally protected salmon from straying into their irrigation ditches and dying — which farmers fear will trigger fines.

"It will be a train wreck if this project isn't finished before they start this fish restoration," said Chase Hurley, general manager of the Henry Miller Reclamation District, which delivers water to farms and wildlife refuges in the area.

This is the latest hot-button issue in the 2-year-old effort to rebuild the state's second-longest river decades after Friant Dam dried it up.

A river-restoration agreement was signed in 2006 by federal officials, environmentalists and east Valley farmers, ending an 18-year lawsuit.

East-side farmers were involved because they are giving up irrigation water stored at Millerton Lake so the San Joaquin can be restored. West Siders are miles downstream and not included, but the river runs through their farmland.

By most accounts, the restoration agreement has an ambitious timetable.

West Siders have long worried that high-priority fixes would not be made in time for the 2012 salmon deadline.

Any decision about delaying the deadline would be made by the groups that signed the restoration agreement — which won't include the west-side farmers.

But West Siders want a voice, too. Aside from possible liabilities for protected fish, they worry about seepage damage to their property along the river.

One farmer has spent $250,000 of his own money on a drainage system to protect his crops from being saturated and stunted.

West Siders add that the restoration is too expensive and too slow. About $100 million in state and federal funds has been spent just on environmental studies, monitoring wells and project designs.

"Not one shovel of dirt has been turned," said Cannon Michael, vice president of Bowles Farming Co., based in Los Banos. "Not one project has been completed."

The Sack Dam project will include a fish bypass channel around the dam and a fish screen on nearby Arroyo Canal to keep salmon out of farm water systems.

Officials will install a modern dam that can be raised to capture water during irrigation season and lowered in winter months when irrigation stops.

Just upstream of the dam, Arroyo Canal is the only place where river water comes into the irrigation system for 45,000 acres of farmland and wildlife refuges in the area, said Hurley of the area reclamation district.

"If there's no salmon coming through the river, we can keep operating for many years just the way it is," he said. "But the improvements need to be made if they are going to start up those salmon runs."

The improvements won't be ready until late 2014, according to federal officials. But capturing and hauling the fish around the dam would allow the restoration effort to meet the Dec. 31, 2012, deadline, officials said.

"We could get the fish around barriers," said Alicia Forsythe, restoration project manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. "But no decision has been made either way yet."


Read more: http://www.modbee.com/2011/12/18/199...#ixzz1gzXCnyDj