WILD BLOG: California Delta pumpings sucks ... LITERALLY
Aug. 6, 2008

The Pacific Ocean is awfully big. Maybe that’s why federal fisheries managers and California water managers are hiding behind it.

Word out of Sacramento last week was no surprise to those of us who follow salmon politics: the Pacific Fisheries Management Council officially put the kibosh on the ocean Chinook seasons off the California and Oregon coasts in response to the ongoing collapse of the Sacramento River.

Looking at the numbers, we knew it was coming: less than five years after a record 775,000 Chinook returned to the Sac system, the 2008 run model calls for fewer than 60,000 fish back to the rivers of the Central Valley. And with fewer than 2,000 jacks returning to the Sacramento last fall, the immediate future doesn’t look much better.

What makes this collapse even harder to stomach is the “why” of it all. I’ve seen multiple quotes in various media from PFMC spokespeople blaming the struggling Sacramento runs on a sour Pacific Ocean. And while an inhospitable ocean is certainly a contributor to the overall problem, this is the biggest case of tip-toeing since Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers.

The Sacramento’s biggest problem lies a helluva lot closer to home than the Pacific Ocean. As in, a few short miles inland of San Francisco Bay in the town of Tracy, where a series of gargantuan pumps has been sucking the life out of the California Delta for years.

The Harvey O. Banks Pumping Plant is a marvel of modern engineering, a series of high-volume pumps that can draw as much as 6,800 cubic feet per second out of the Delta, to be sent to nearby San Francisco metro residents, and along the California Aqueduct to 25 million residents in Los Angeles, San Diego and agricultural interests throughout the SoCal region. Politicos and lobbyists are quick to re-direct the spotlight away from the Tracy pumps to the ocean, but the reality is unavoidable: when they fire up the pumps at Harvey O. Banks, it REVERSES THE TIDE IN PARTS OF THE DELTA AND SAN FRANCISCO BAY.

Let me repeat that: pumps turn on, tide changes. Can you even fathom that?

As those millions upon billions of gallons of water get sucked out of the Delta, the ecosystem is thrown into complete disarray. Nevermind that the Tracy pumps have chopped, diced and pureed smelt, salmon, steelhead and stripers by the hundreds of thousand over the years. Nevermind that the mortality on fish handled in the pumps’ screening facility is enormous. As one water management official so condescendingly put it: “It is what it is.”

But barring dramatic changes in management of the Tracy pumps, the continuing environmental degradation of the Delta’s pumping will eventually lead to the extinction of one species (smelt) and the destruction of another (Chinook salmon). The reasons presented in press releases and interviews will be the same then as they are now – “Inhospitable ocean! El Nino!” – but that’s hiding from the truth.  

Hiding behind the ocean is easy, it seems. More on this later.