The BulleTin • Wednesday, april 14, 2021 A3
TODAY
Today is Wednesday, April 14, the 104th day of 2021.
There are 261 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
In 1912, the British liner RMS Titanic collided with an
iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time
and began sinking.
In 1759, German-born English composer George
Frideric Handel died in London at age 74.
In 1828, the first edition of Noah Webster’s “American
Dictionary of the English Language” was published.
In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot and
mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth during
a performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s
Theater in Washington.
In 1910, President William Howard Taft became the
first U.S. chief executive to throw the ceremonial first
pitch at a baseball game.
In 1965, the state of Kansas hanged Richard Hickock
and Perry Smith for the 1959 “In Cold Blood” murders
of Herbert Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and two of their
children, Nancy and Kenyon.
In 1981, the first test flight of America’s first opera-
tional space shuttle, the Columbia, ended success-
fully with a landing at Edwards Air Force Base in
California.
In 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 warplanes mistaken-
ly shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters
over northern Iraq, killing 26 people, including 15
Americans.
In 1999, NATO mistakenly bombed a convoy of
ethnic Albanian refugees; Yugoslav officials said 75
people were killed.
In 2004, in a historic policy shift, President George
W. Bush endorsed Israel’s plan to hold on to part of
the West Bank in any final peace settlement with the
Palestinians; he also ruled out Palestinian refugees
returning to Israel, bringing strong criticism from the
Palestinians.
Ten years ago: North Korean confirmed it was hold-
ing an American who was detained in November
2010, reportedly for proselytizing. ABC canceled two
of its longtime soap operas, “One Life to Live” and
“All My Children.”
Five years ago: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
aggressively challenged each other’s judgment
during a Democratic debate in Brooklyn, New York.
One year ago: President Donald Trump announced
that he was cutting off U.S. payments to the U.N.
health agency, the World Health Organization. Loui-
siana again delayed its presidential primary, resched-
uling it for July 11. (The late date made the primary
irrelevant to the selection of the nominees.) NASCAR
driver Kyle Larson was fired by the Chip Ganassi Rac-
ing team, two days after he used a racial slur on a live
stream of a virtual race.
Today’s Birthdays: Country singer Loretta Lynn is
89. Retired MLB All-Star Pete Rose is 80. Actor Peter
Capaldi is 63. Actor-turned-race car driver Brian For-
ster is 61. Actor Robert Carlyle is 60. Actor Catherine
Dent is 56. Baseball Hall of Famer Greg Maddux is
55. Actor Anthony Michael Hall is 53. Actor Adrien
Brody is 48. Actor-producer Rob McElhenney is 44.
Rock singer Win Butler (Arcade Fire) is 41. Actor Nick
Krause is 29.
— The Associated Press
LOCAL, STATE & REGION
SOUTHERN OREGON DROUGHT
Tensions rise for tribes, farmers in
battle over shrinking water supply
BY GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press
One of the worst droughts in
memory in a massive agricultural
region straddling the California-
Oregon border could mean steep
cuts to irrigation water for hun-
dreds of farmers this summer to
sustain endangered fish species
critical to tribes.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclama-
tion, which oversees water allo-
cations in the federally owned
Klamath Project, is expected to
announce this week how the sea-
son’s water will be divvied up after
delaying the decision a month.
For the first time in 20 years, it’s
possible that the 1,400 irrigators
who have farmed for generations
on 225,000 acres of reclaimed
farmland will get no water at all —
or so little that farming wouldn’t
be worth it. Several tribes in Or-
egon and California are equally
desperate for water to sustain
threatened and endangered spe-
cies of fish central to their heri-
tage.
A network of six wildlife refuges
that make up the largest wetland
complex west of the Mississippi
River also depend on the project’s
water, but will likely go dry this
year. Two of the tribes, the Klam-
ath and Yurok, hold treaties guar-
anteeing the protection of their
fisheries.
The last — and only — time
that water was cut off for irriga-
tors, in 2001, some family farms
went out of business and a “bucket
brigade” protest attracted 15,000
people who scooped water from
the Klamath River and passed it,
hand over hand, to a parched irri-
gation canal.
Tribes, for their part, say the
Gillian Flaccus/AP
Hunter Maltz, a fish technician for the Yurok tribe, pushes a jet boat into the low
water of the Klamath River in March 2020 as Keith Parker, a Yurok tribal fisheries
biologist, watches.
“Some people say that because
of those fish, our people are still
here. They’re the canary in the
coal mine. If they die out, it shows
you that something is going very
wrong here in the Basin.”
— Don Gentry,
Klamath Tribes chairman
fish are intertwined with their ex-
istence going back millennia. The
Klamath believe the sucker fish —
the first fish to return to the river
after the winter — were created
to provide for and sustain their
people. Further downstream, the
Yurok define the seasons by the
fish runs.
“Some people say that because
of those fish, our people are still
here,” Don Gentry, chairman of
the Klamath Tribes, said of the
sucker fish. “They’re the canary
in the coal mine. If they die out, it
shows you that something is going
very wrong here in the Basin.”
In 1988, two species of sucker
fish were listed as endangered un-
der federal law, and less than a de-
cade later, coho salmon that spawn
downstream from the reclama-
tion project, in the lower Klamath
River, were listed as threatened.
The water necessary to sustain
the coho salmon downstream
comes from Upper Klamath Lake
— the main holding tank for the
farmers’ irrigation system. At
the same time, the sucker fish in
the same lake need at least 1 to 2
feet of water covering the gravel
beds that they use as spawning
grounds.
In a year of extreme drought,
there is not enough water to go
around. Already this spring, the
gravel beds that the sucker fish
spawn in are dry and water gauges
on Klamath River tributaries show
the flow is the lowest in nearly a
century. A decision late last sum-
mer to release water for irrigators,
plus a hot, dry fall with almost no
rain has compounded an already
terrible situation.
The Klamath Water Users Asso-
ciation sent a warning to its mem-
bership last week saying there
would be “little to no water for
irrigation from Upper Klamath
Lake this year.” It is holding a pub-
lic meeting Wednesday to provide
more information.
Meanwhile, sucker fish in the
Upper Klamath Lake are hovering
near dried-up gravel beds, fruit-
lessly waiting for water levels to
rise so they can lay eggs, said Alex
Gonyaw, a senior fisheries biolo-
gist for the Klamath Tribes.
“You can see them sort of mill-
ing around out in the lake water.
They’re desperately trying to get to
this clean, constant lake water that
they need,” he said. “It’s going to
be like 2001. It’s going to be, hope-
fully not catastrophic but very,
very stressful for people and fish.”
Some are hoping this year’s
crisis will help all the interested
parties hash out a water-sharing
compromise that could save both
the ecology and economy of the
Klamath River Basin before it col-
lapses entirely.
“This is the reality of climate
change. This is it. We can’t rely on
historical water supplies anymore.
We just can’t,” said Amy Cordalis,
counsel for the Yurok Tribe and
also a tribal member. “It’s no one’s
fault. There’s no bad guy here —
but I think we’d all do well to pray
for rain.”