The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors heard a series of dire warnings May 25 about what worsening drought conditions could mean for the North Coast, from catastrophic wildfire to entire communities running out of water and massive fish kills in local rivers.
Perhaps most alarmingly, a host of officials who addressed the board warned this is no anomaly. The weather is changing, said Craig Tucker, a natural resources consultant for the Karuk Tribe, explaining that nine of California s 11 hottest years on record and three of its driest have occurred since 2011. What we re living here is not really a drought but a new normal driven by climate change.
Originally published on May 14, 2021 7:05 am
It’s been an epically bad week for everyone who relies on water from the Klamath.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the 114-year-old Klamath water project, announced that for the first time ever, the “A” canal will be closed for the season – meaning no water will be drawn from Upper Klamath Lake for irrigators in the federally-managed Klamath Project.
Reclamation’s initial operations plan allocation for the Klamath Project projected 33,000 acre-feet would be available for more than 150,000 acres of farmland, a fraction of what irrigators would use in a typical year. But Wednesday the Bureau announced that the deepening drought and worsening hydrologic conditions in the Basin would no longer allow diverting even that much water from the lake.
click to enlarge Richard Heim, NOAA/NCEI
The federal government is strictly curtailing irrigation this year in an attempt to protect endangered fish important to Indigenous tribes. Farmers say this will make it all but impossible to farm, while tribal groups say the plan doesn t go far enough to save their fisheries.
In mid-April, a farming region in southern Oregon began to release water from the Klamath River into its irrigation canals. According to the local water authority, this was a standard move to jumpstart the farming season during one of the driest seasons in recent memory. But according to the federal government, it was an illegal maneuver that could further jeopardize the survival of multiple endangered species and food sources important to Indigenous tribes and fisheries in the region.
This story was originally published by The Counter
, a nonprofit newsroom covering the forces shaping how and what we eat. It is republished here by permission.
The federal government is strictly curtailing irrigation this year in an attempt to protect endangered fish important to Indigenous tribes. Farmers say this will make it all but impossible to farm, while tribal nations say the plan doesn’t go far enough to save their fisheries.
In mid-April, a farming region in southern Oregon began to release water from the Klamath River into its irrigation canals. According to the local water authority, this was a standard move to jumpstart the farming season during one of the driest seasons in recent memory. But according to the federal government, it was an illegal maneuver that could further jeopardize the survival of multiple endangered species and food sources important to Indigenous tribes and fisheries in the region.
A floating blockade stretches across the Klamath River waiting to stop boats carrying Yurok and Karuk tribal officials and Berkshire Hathaway executives upriver on Aug. 28, 2020. It was a Friday in late August when four jet boats made their way up the Klamath River under a cloudless blue sky. The boats carried three tribal chairs. From the Karuk Tribe, there was Russell Buster Attebery, who d found pride as a boy catching salmon from the river and bringing them home to his family, and later come to believe some tribal youth s troubles from suicides to substance use could be traced back to their never having had that opportunity, growing up alongside a river now choked with algae and diminishing fish populations. There was Joseph James from the Yurok Tribe, who d come to see the river s declining health as a slow strangulation of his people river people who have lived along its banks and relied on its salmon as the bedrock of their diet since time im