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Basin's water troubles are more than fish vs. farmer By PAUL FATTIG The tempest brewing in the Klamath Basin is the Perfect Storm: powerful forces merging to explode like a cloudburst over the basin this spring, says Bob Hunter, attorney for the conservation group WaterWatch of Oregon. "You have one of the worst droughts on record, the first time the bureau is being forced to operate to meet the survival needs of endangered species," said Hunter, a Medford resident. "At the same time, the state is getting around to adjudicating water rights. It's all coming together at once - the Perfect Storm." The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced April 6 that it was withholding irrigation water to 90 percent of the 200,000 acres served by the Klamath Project to keep scarce water for endangered Lost River and shortnosed suckers in Upper Klamath Lake, the project's main reservoir, and threatened coho salmon in the Klamath River, which drains the basin. Just before the allocation was announced, a federal judge found the bureau violated the Endangered Species Act last year when it ignored the needs of the salmon in the Klamath River and gave farmers a full irrigation season. The ESA requires that water be used for endangered or threatened species. Based on evaluations by federal biologists, the bureau decided this spring to devote water in Upper Klamath Lake reservoir exclusively to the suckers and salmon. But environmentalists say the issue is more than fish. Several groups, including the Oregon Natural Resources Council, filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the bureau over its decision allocating all the water in Upper Klamath Lake for threatened and endangered fish, with nothing for farms or bald eagles. The largest winter population of threatened bald eagles in the lower 48 states rely on the Klamath wetlands. WaterWatch supports the action. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has concluded that failure to provide water through the Klamath Project to the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, the nation's oldest federal waterfowl refuge, would result in the eventual death of up to 950 bald eagles that spend the winter there feeding on waterfowl. Federal biologists have said a minimum of 32,000 acre feet of water was needed to flood enough of the refuge to provide habitat for at least 125,000 waterfowl, which is just 6 percent of the 1.8 million birds counted on the refuge in 1997, according to the plaintiffs. The litigation was the last resort, said Wendell Wood, Southern Oregon field representative for the ONRC. "The Klamath Basin water issue is not just about suckers versus farmers," Wood said. "It's also whether we have water for bald eagles, the national wildlife refuges and salmon and the many more economies that depend on them." The problem, Wood said, is that the government has promised more water than it can deliver. "We hear the farmers and the irrigators say, 'This is just not fair,' " Wood said. "But it's also not fair that we got only 20 percent of the snowpack this year. Fishermen and the tribes tell us it's not fair that their cultural resources and economies have been sacrificed year after year." It's not fair to blame the problem on suckers, salmon, the ESA or conservationists, he added. "The conservation community doesn't like being put in the position as being viewed as the bad guys," he said. "We're just saying the minimum of the endangered species' needs must be provided for." Hunter agreed. "Endangered species are a symptom of the problem - they are not the problem," he said. "Nor is the messenger the problem. "The burden is unfairly falling on the project users because we don't have any real regulation management of water rights," he added. Achieving a balance will be difficult but it can be done, he said. "Even before this 'Perfect Storm,' there were many people who wanted to sell out," he said, noting that the federal government ought to buy out willing farmers and turn that land back to nature. "There is a level of agriculture in the basin that can be sustainable," he said. "But anytime you have a drought of this magnitude, there will be problems." The conservationists stress that they support a governmental effort to provide money to drill irrigation wells for farmers left high and dry. "These are some of the most important, if not the most important, wildlife refuges in our entire national system," Hunter said. "We need to get back a little more to the natural hydrology." The area once had 350,000 acres of wetlands. Human intervention has shrunk the wetlands to some 75,000 acres. "At one point in time, these refuges had the largest concentration of waterfowl anywhere in the world," Hunter said. "It still has the pieces there. It is still of critical importance for waterfowl." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.