update on Klamath/Trinity water situation

[troutless]

Fish win this round:

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/J...on-4754645.php

[troutless]

in the judges words:

http://earthjustice.org/sites/defaul...oveForward.pdf

[Digger]

Great news for a change!
I wonder why the Tribe really decided 20k af was enough, in lieu of the 60k
was there deal struck?

I hope there is a large return of King's as they estimate.

[Mike O]

Great news for a change!
I wonder why the Tribe really decided 20k af was enough, in lieu of the 60k
was there deal struck?

Westlands pays well?

[Jeff F]

Great news! But just curious.......won't the Klamath-bound fish hit a wall of warm water above Weitchpec? Well, hopefully the river will be colder by mid-Sept.

[Darian]

Good news.... Apparently, the initial estimate of ACF to be released was reduced to 20,000 due to the delay in implementation while the TRO/decision was made.

I, too, was curious about what happens to the fish going above the confluence but, according to the text, it seems that the Salmon arriving now tend to congregate in the lower river for a period before going up-river and under normal weather patterns, the air/water temps are in acceptable ranges by late September when the they do start to migrate.... Cool stuff.

[goby]

They'll get some water starting tomorrow. The Hoopa have a river ceremony every year and flows go up to about 2700 (from 450). So the Trinity will be pretty much unfishable for a week.

[ycflyfisher]

I’m left feeling this isn’t quite the “victory” that everyone seems to think it is. It could be. Time will tell.

First, I think the notion that Josh Strange and Yurok Fisheries may have sold out to the water apologists is pure paranoia. I can’t see that happening. Josh is one of those individuals that has an extremely “overqualified” educational background for a field biologist coupled with a ton of real world field experience and he could literally write his own ticket and make tons more money working for an agency or in the private sector compared to what he earns working for Yurok Fisheries. I don’t think anything more needs to be said here.

That said, I don’t see any good reason to think that Josh may be wrong in his assertion that 20kaf is enough to disrupt the lifecycle of Ich or other parasitic pathogens and render the likelihood of a fishkill similar to what happened in 2002 down to an acceptable level of risk. Josh is probably the best qualified individual on the planet to make the determination of what is the smallest allocation for refugia flow augmentation that brings the risk down to an acceptable level.

The problem I have is that the refugia flow augmentation is something that has been implemented several times since 2002, most recently in 2012 and in 2003 and 2004 also.

The water apologists never, until this season contested the refugia flows. Last year, like this season the river got an initial refugia augmentation of 30+kaf. I think it’s pretty obvious that they probably wouldn’t have had a problem if Reclamation didn’t decide to change the initial allocation to the more recent 62-109 “whatever it takes” kaf. I do think it’s good that Rec did demonstrate that they were going to bat for the rivers so I’m not seeing that there’s any real agency villains here. The river conditions this year are nothing short of horrific, much worse than 2002 in the August time frame. Also definitely different than what happened leading up to the events of 2002 in terms of Reclamations actions.

I do think this decision by judge O’Neil is potentially precedent setting and I think it’s likely that 20kaf (if it proves to be effective) becomes the new “normal” in terms of refugia flows in the future. As stated, I can’t see a reason to doubt Josh Strange’s conclusion about what is required, but I don’t think you need to be a fisheries professional that works on the Klamath everyday to see that 30+kaf mitigates the risk down to an even lower level.

The water apologists didn’t expect to “win” this case and get all the refugia flows shut down. That isn’t realistic. What they expected they could do is delay the refugia flows that did start on August 15th and would have continued into the last week in Sept, and get that set back to most likely back down to the original allocation. What they did accomplish was the aforementioned delay and potentially gain the establishment of a new “normal” that’s 50+% lower than what was the norm.

It’s hard for me to see this one as a “win” because the water apologists in reality got more than they probably expected to get and the river is more than likely left with less protection in terms of refugia flows than it had.

[ycflyfisher]

Great news! But just curious.......won't the Klamath-bound fish hit a wall of warm water above Weitchpec? Well, hopefully the river will be colder by mid-Sept.

The lower river in general, is where the real concern lies. Once the fish leave the estuary, they don’t get any significant thermal refugia until they get to the mouth of Blue Creek which is ~15 miles up river. After Blue, they’ve got to go another ~10 miles until they get to Pecwan Creek. It’s that ~25 mile death stretch where the majority of the concern lies.

When the fish get stressed because they have to swim for days to get to water conditions where they feel comfortable, they don’t cover as much water in their upstream progression on a ‘per unit time” basis. As a result, you get fish resting more frequently and in large pods in warm water.

Ich is a parasite with a rather unusual life cycle. It isn’t like fleas on a dog, where a dog gets infested with a half dozen fleas, and a few weeks later it’s a walking colony of 1000s of fleas that exploded exponentially without leaving the dog. Ich needs to attach to a host fish in a few days or it dies. If it attaches, it feeds on the fish for a few days until it’s mature enough to advance to the next stage of it’s lifecycle. At that point it detaches from the host and settles to the bottom where it replicates in abundance and it’s progeny starts the lifecycle all over again. The time required for it to complete a full life cycle decreases as the temperature of the water increases. So if you’ve got warm water, combined with fish that are podded up for extended periods of time, that creates an environment where a greater percentage of Ich can successfully complete it’s lifecycle, more life cycles in the same unit of time, host fish that are being infested at a much more significant rate, and exponentially more ich in the river. High levels of infestation becomes lethal. Ich is always in the river but it takes a combination of poor water conditions and fairly high fish density (abundance) for Ich to become problematic.

Once the fish get above Pecwan Creek, they more frequently encounter tribs in the lower river that are of sufficient enough flow and cold enough where they can de-stress. Once they get above the confluence with the T, the tribs become even more abundant.

That said, I do think there is some amount of legit concern that if in river conditions are horrific enough coupled with high fish abundance, we could still have a fish kill up river of Pecwan Creek. I think it is much less than in the lower river and if it were to happen, it would more than likely be much smaller in magnitude.

[cyama]

Obviously you did not read the decision YC. There are provisions to provide more water if needed and to monitor the fish as they move upstream. Hopefully they all do their jobs...