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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JULY 3, 2021
Drought upends life at Oregon, California border
Tribes see fi sh
die in droves
ath River basin in modern
history. Karuk tribal citizen
Aaron Troy Hockaday Sr.
used to fi sh for salmon at a
local waterfall with a tradi-
tional dip net. But he says
he hasn’t caught a fi sh in the
river since the mid-1990s.
“I got two grandsons that
are 3 and 1 years old. I’ve
got a baby grandson coming
this fall. I’m a fourth-gen-
eration fi sherman, but if
we don’t save that one fi sh
going up the river today, I
won’t be able to teach them
anything about our fi shing,”
he said. “How can I teach
them how to be fi shermen if
there’s no fi sh?”
By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press
TULELAKE, Calif. —
Ben DuVal knelt in a barren
fi eld near the California-Or-
egon state line and scooped
up a handful of parched
soil as dust devils whirled
around him and birds fl it-
ted between empty irriga-
tion pipes.
DuVal’s family has
farmed the land for three
generations, and this sum-
mer, for the fi rst time ever,
he and hundreds of others
who rely on irrigation from a
depleted, federally managed
lake aren’t getting any water
from it at all.
As farmland goes fal-
low, Native American tribes
along the 257-mile long
river that fl ows from the lake
to the Pacifi c Ocean watch
helplessly as fi sh that are
inextricable from their diet
and culture die in droves or
fail to spawn in shallow
water.
Just a few weeks into
summer, a historic drought
and its on-the-ground con-
sequences are tearing com-
munities apart in this diverse
basin fi lled with fl at vistas of
sprawling alfalfa and potato
fi elds, teeming wetlands and
steep canyons of old-growth
forests.
Competition over the
water from the river has
always been intense. But
this summer there is simply
not enough, and the farmers,
tribes and wildlife refuges
that have long competed
for every drop now face a
bleak and uncertain future
together.
“Everybody depends on
the water in the Klamath
River for their livelihood.
That’s the blood that ties us
all together. ... They want to
have the opportunity to teach
their kids to fi sh for salmon
just like I want to have the
opportunity to teach my kids
how to farm,” DuVal said
of the downriver Yurok and
Karuk tribes. “Nobody’s
coming out ahead this year.
Nobody’s winning.”
With the decadeslong
confl ict over water rights
reaching a boiling point,
those living the nightmare
worry the Klamath basin’s
unprecedented drought is a
harbinger as global warming
accelerates.
“For me, for my fam-
ily, we see this as a direct
result of climate change,”
said Frankie Myers, vice
chairman of the Yurok Tribe,
which is monitoring a mas-
sive fi sh kill where the river
enters the ocean. “The sys-
tem is crashing, not just
for Yurok people ... but for
people up and down the
Klamath basin, and it’s
heartbreaking.”
Roots of a crisis
Twenty years ago, when
water feeding the farms was
drastically reduced amid
another drought, the cri-
sis became a national ral-
lying cry for the political
right, and some protesters
breached a fence and opened
‘It’s like a big, dark
cloud’
Nathan Howard/AP Photo
Jamie Holt, lead fi sheries technician for the Yurok Tribe, maneuvers a boat near a fi sh trap in the lower Klamath River.
the main irrigation canal in
violation of federal orders.
But today, as reality sinks
in, many irrigators reject
the presence of anti-gov-
ernment activists who have
once again set up camp. In
the aftermath of the Jan. 6
insurrection at the U.S. Cap-
itol, irrigators who are at risk
of losing their farms and in
need of federal assistance
fear any ties to far-right
activism could taint their
image.
Some farmers are get-
ting some groundwater from
wells, blunting their losses,
and a small number who get
fl ows from another river will
have severely reduced water
for just part of the summer.
Everyone is sharing what
water they have.
“It’s going to be peo-
ple on the ground, work-
ing together, that’s going
to solve this issue,” said
DuVal, president of the
Klamath Water Users Asso-
ciation. “What can we live
with, what can those parties
live with, to avoid these train
wrecks that seem to be hap-
pening all too frequently?”
Meanwhile, toxic algae
is blooming in the basin’s
main lake — vital habitat
for endangered suckerfi sh
— a month earlier than nor-
mal, and two national wild-
life refuges that are a linch-
pin for migratory birds on
the Pacifi c Flyway are dry-
ing out. Environmentalists
and farmers are using pumps
to combine water from two
stagnant wetlands into one
deeper to prevent another
outbreak of avian botu-
lism like the one that killed
50,000 ducks last summer.
The activity has exposed
acres of arid, cracked land-
scape that likely hasn’t been
above water for thousands
of years.
“There’s water allocated
that doesn’t even exist.
This is all unprecedented.
Where do you go from here?
When do you start having
the larger conversation of
complete unsustainability?”
said Jamie Holt, lead fi sher-
ies technician for the Yurok
Tribe, who counts dead juve-
nile Chinook salmon every
day on the lower Klamath
River.
“When I fi rst started this
job 23 years ago, extinction
was never a part of the con-
versation,” she said of the
salmon. “If we have another
year like we’re seeing now,
extinction is what we’re
talking about.”
The extreme drought has
exacerbated a water con-
fl ict that traces its roots back
more than a century.
Beginning in 1906, the
federal government reengi-
neered a complex system of
lakes, wetlands and rivers in
the 10 million-acre Klamath
River basin to create fertile
farmland. It built dikes and
dams to block and divert riv-
ers, redirecting water away
from a natural lake span-
ning the California-Oregon
border.
Evaporation then reduced
the lake to one-quarter of
its former size and created
thousands of arable acres in
an area that had been under-
water for millennia.
In 1918, the U.S. began
granting homesteads on the
dried-up parts of Tule Lake.
Preference was given to
World War I and World War
II veterans, and the Klamath
Reclamation Project quickly
became an agricultural pow-
erhouse. Today, farmers
there grow everything from
mint to alfalfa to potatoes
that go to In ‘N Out Burger,
Frito-Lay and Kettle Foods.
Water draining off the
fi elds fl owed into national
wildlife refuges that con-
tinue to provide respite each
year for tens of thousands
of birds. Within the altered
ecosystem, the refuges com-
prise a picturesque wetland
oasis nicknamed the Ever-
glades of the West that teems
with white pelicans, grebes,
herons, bald eagles, black-
birds and terns.
Last year, amid a grow-
ing drought, the refuges got
little water from the irriga-
tion project. This summer,
they will get none.
Speaking for the fi sh
While in better water
years, the project provided
some conservation for birds,
it did not do the same for fi sh
— or for the tribes that live
along the river.
The farmers draw their
water from the 96-square-
mile Upper Klamath Lake,
which is also home to suck-
erfi sh. The fi sh are central
Celebrate! July 4, 2021
to the Klamath Tribes’ cul-
ture and creation stories and
were for millennia a criti-
cal food source in a harsh
landscape.
In 1988, two years after
the tribe regained federal
recognition, the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service listed
two species of suckerfi sh
that spawn in the lake and
its tributaries as endangered.
The federal government
must keep the extremely
shallow lake at a mini-
mum depth for spawning in
the spring and to keep the
fi sh alive in the fall when
toxic algae blooms suck out
oxygen.
This year, amid excep-
tional drought, there was
not enough water to ensure
those levels and supply irri-
gators. Even with the irriga-
tion shutoff , the lake’s water
has fallen below the man-
dated levels — so low that
some suckerfi sh were unable
to reproduce, said Alex Gon-
yaw, senior fi sh biologist for
the Klamath Tribes.
The youngest suckerfi sh
in the lake are now nearly
30 years old, and the tribe’s
projections show both spe-
cies could disappear within
the next few decades. It
says even when the fi sh
can spawn, the babies die
because of low water levels
and a lack of oxygen. The
tribe is now raising them in
captivity and has committed
to “speak for the fi sh” amid
the profound water shortage.
“I don’t think any of our
leaders, when they signed
the treaties, thought that
we’d wind up in a place
like this. We thought we’d
have the fi sh forever,” said
Don Gentry, Klamath Tribes
chairman.
“Agriculture
should be based on what’s
sustainable. There’s too
many people after too little
water.”
But with the Klamath
Tribes enforcing their senior
water rights to help sucker-
fi sh, there is no extra water
for downriver salmon —
and now tribes on diff erent
parts of the river fi nd them-
selves jockeying for the pre-
cious resource.
The Karuk Tribe last
month declared a state of
emergency, citing climate
change and the worst hydro-
logic conditions in the Klam-
The downstream tribes’
problems are compounded
by hydroelectric dams, sepa-
rate from the irrigation proj-
ect, that block the path of
migrating salmon.
In most years, the tribes
200 miles to the southwest
of the farmers, where the
river reaches the Pacifi c, ask
the Bureau of Reclamation
to release pulses of extra
water from Upper Klamath
Lake. The extra fl ows mit-
igate outbreaks of a para-
sitic disease that proliferates
when the river is low.
This year, the fed-
eral agency refused those
requests, citing the drought.
Now, the parasite is kill-
ing thousands of juvenile
salmon in the lower Klamath
River, where the Karuk and
Yurok tribes have coexisted
with them for millennia.
Last month, tribal fi sh biol-
ogists determined 97% of
juvenile spring Chinook on
a critical stretch of the river
were infected; recently, 63%
of fi sh caught in research
traps near the river’s mouth
have been dead.
The die-off is devastating
for people who believe they
were created to safeguard
the Klamath River’s salmon
and who are taught that if
the salmon disappear, their
tribe is not far behind.