McCloud River just went off-color again

[StevenB]

The McCloud river below the Dam is reported to be very off color. Folks fishing there yesterday bailed out today because of the lack of visibility. PG&E appears to have done a high volume draw down of McCloud Reservoir (report is about 20 Feet).
Whatever the cause, the river is toast again.

No more details at this time. The turbidity gauge on CDEC has been showing unreliable numbers for quite a while now so it is no help.

[Pupa]

Thanks Steven. What a bummer. CFS has only bumped up 20 so very confusing as to why turbidity would shoot up so high...

[StevenB]

Reports from yesterday is that the turbidity has already improved some,
water is reported as off-color but still fish-able, have not seen it myself
and have no specific reports on inches of visibility, so this is all second-hand.

Concerning the cause of the issue:

Our best guess at this time is: this is a result of the mud flow that happened in the Mud creek drainage in 2021( or was it 2014?).

One known result of that mud flow is that the upper end of McCloud lake was filled in with a whole bunch of
fine sediment.

The theory is that now when PG&E does a quick draw down of the lake it stirs up all that sediment and
thus adds turbidity to both the lake and the river.

This differs from the "normal" effects of Mud creek increasing the turbidity as it has in the past in that both the lake and the river go off, while the usual turbidity increase which often happens in late summer (due to the increase in mud creek's flow from the heat) usually only effects the river and not the lake because the silt flows thru the lake along the thermocline and is not visible at the lake surface.

We have no idea if this is the actual cause of the problem, but it sound possible. If only we had a professional agency like maybe CA DFW who monitored the river and got to the root of the problem.

[StevenB]

Mac is fish-able, reports are 5 or so feet of visibility.
Looks like the Turbidity gauge is reporting better now?
Least ways it is reading 3 ish instead of 30+.