REDWOOD NEEDLES
REDWOOD NEEDLESPresented by the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter Newsletter, The REDWOOD NEEDLES
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By Roanne Wither, Mendo-Lake Group
What most are not aware of is that many of the little tributaries - from Marin to southern Humboldt - that used to funnel winter rain water into the salmon spawning tributaries and rivers have been systematically bulldozed and dammed to create so-called "small" onstream reservoirs for wine grape vineyards.
Permits for many more of these onstream reservoirs have been applied for. In order to obtain additional water to fill and re-fill many of these reservoirs, numerous individual water right diversions to one or more nearby creeks have also been applied for.
Historically, these reservoirs and water diversions were located in the bottom of the watershed near the mainstem of a river. Many of these have damaged or destroyed salmon spawning habitat.
In more recent years, as wine grapes are planted on the formerly undisturbed hillside forest and range land, what little water remained at the top of the watersheds is now being captured.
At the hillside top of the watershed, the onstream reservoir captures the first rain. When this reservoir is full it spills the water into the creek below. This water is then captured in the next grape grower's onstream reservoir, and the next, so on down the creek until finally (in many instances), little or no water runs into the salmon spawning tributary located near the bottom of the watershed.
This is the scenario for most of the wine-grape vineyards you see from the road. (Consider the impact of the ones you can't see plus all the new ones going in.)
Many of the tributaries near the mainstem river are now called "historic" spawning tributaries meaning no salmon have been observed spawning in them for several years. (Ironically, the few places where salmon spawning can be currently documented is in creeks lacking such diversions surrounded by land owned by the corporate timber companies. But of course there is no assurance these won't be obliterated in an upcoming logging operation.)
Many of the onstream reservoirs were built without permits. The wine grapes growers know this is illegal, but potential fines for this activity is simply factored in the cost of doing (what we all know to be a very lucrative ) business. After all, the water itself is "free."
Surprising as it may sound, what started the problem in the first place is that the Division of Water Rights (in its "How To" manual) literally encourages wine-grape growers (and others) to bulldoze these rainfall fed tributary streams into earthen dam reservoirs. Up until this year, Fish and Game approved. We've "officially" known that salmon spawn in tributaries for 25 years.
On the Navarro River, in Mendocino County, 130 of these onstream reservoirs were constructed without any permits what-so-ever. Many more are proposed. On the Russian River 100 applications for permits to construct onstream reservoirs in combinations with other water diversion permits are in process. This is true to a similar or lesser degree for all the Marin to southern Humboldt county salmonid spawning watersheds.
The Division of Water Rights was poised to approve these onstream reservoirs and diversions, one and all, as illegally built, as newly proposed, and as proposed for enlargement, when Sierra Club* recently filed suit on one of the first onstream reservoir projects "officially" approved in the Navarro watershed. This has tentatively kept the Division's reservoir/diversion approval "program" from taking final effect in the Navarro watershed.
Because the Russian River watershed has a dedicated watchdog, Stan Griffin of Trout Unlimited, who is engaging in the Division's water right "protest process," the final approval of the reservoirs and diversions there have also been halted, for the time being. Other watersheds, lacking volunteers who have the time to engage in the lengthy and complex protest process are not protected.
As you read this, wine grape growers are bulldozing even more streams to construct new reservoirs, all hidden from the public view. To date, none engaging in this outlaw activity have been fined if an application for a permit is filed after-the-fact.
Cumulatively (altogether) the impact is devastating in the Navarro salmon spawning watershed, a coho salmon watershed, and once one of the most popular steelhead fishing rivers in the nation.
"But there's too much water in the winter," the growers will tell you. "All that water floods into the ocean and is wasted."
Possibly, down in the river mainstem, there may be some "extra" water. But in the tributaries that feed the mainstem the conglomeration of existing onstream reservoirs, plugged road culverts, ancient creek channels that have been bulldozed for vineyards, and multitude of different landowners, its impossible to tell without in-depth review of each sub-watershed. So far, the Division of Water Rights refuses to conduct this review of "cumulative impacts" before it approves a proposed reservoir or diversion.
As long as the winter rain delivers enough to water cover the backs of the salmon back they'll keep bucking the current to travel as high as possible up a tributary to spawn. The further up they swim, instinct tells the salmon, the more likely their young will survive.
As long as the tributary streams runs long and deep, the juvenile salmon can widely disburse to take cover in many pools behind their food source on fallen logs. Forced to crowd together in a few pools means they must compete for food and oxygen. Many will die as a result.
For tens of thousands of years salmon have adapted to and survived California's dramatic, and ever reoccurring droughts and floods because there were enough alternative branches to their sometimes unsuitable main spawning tributaries. This way, the salmon were even able to survive the freewheeling logging practices of first half of the 20th century.
In the last decade, we have learned much about the mysterious life of this extraordinary creature. We now know, for example, that the fecundity of our coastal watersheds (137 coastal freshwater and land species) depends on the salmon's unique transport of ocean minerals deep into the land when they spawn and then die.
We know that logging and agricultural practices continue to choke the watercourses with soil, and this smothers the salmon eggs. The water that combined from the small channels high up in the hills of the watershed is what supplied the peak water flows necessary to cleanse the sediment from the downstream spawning tributaries.
The Division of Water Rights' "science" for determining how much of this water will be allocated to wine grapes and how much will remain for the salmon has been strongly disputed by such experts as National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the Department of Fish and Game, the state's Science Review Panel (Dr. Peter Moyle and Mathias Kondolf), Dr. William Trush, Dr. Robert Curry, and others.
To date, the Division continues to ignore the state's top scientists in favor of the wine industry.
*Sierra Club, through its Mendocino-Lake Group and Redwood Chapter, was asked to take the lead by its co-litigants, Navarro Watershed Protection Alliance and California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, in order to advance 10 years worth of tireless but thwarted tributary protection advocacy into the court system for relief. Stephan Volker is our attorney. Sierra Club, et al vs State Water Resources Control Board, and [grape growers/reservoir applicants] Ted Bennett and Deborah Cahn, No. 827861-6, June 19, 2000.
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