Resurrecting a River

Parched for more than half a century, California’s San Joaquin -- and its salmon -- are coming back

Deep in California's Central Valley, about 20 miles west of Fresno, a parched trough cuts through the tiny town of Kerman. Not much grows there -- just one or two scrubby bushes and a small stand of tobacco trees covered in dust.

A passerby would never guess that California's second-longest river, the San Joaquin, once flowed here. Its 330-mile journey provided clean water and abundant fishing from high in the Sierra Nevada mountains down to the fertile San Francisco Bay-Delta.

Retired farmer Walt Shubin has lived by the banks of the San Joaquin for nearly all of his 79 years. As a teenager in the 1930s, he watched the Chinook salmon run the river each spring.

"They made a noise like cattle, they were so big," Shubin recalls. "They left a wake like a motorboat."

The salmon died off after California's Bureau of Reclamation built the 319-foot Friant Dam in 1942, diverting most of the river's water into irrigation canals. More than 60 miles of the river -- including the Kerman trough -- have been dry ever since.

What is left of the river runs thick with chemical waste from farms.

But on Thursday, for the first time in more than 60 years, the Friant Dam will open, and freshwater will flow through the entire river once again.

RESHAPING THE LANDSCAPE

In 1988, the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with a coalition of environmental groups and commercial fishermen, sued the Bureau of Reclamation. NRDC and its allies said the bureau was violating California's Fish and Game Code, which requires dam owners to "keep in good condition" the fish below their dam.

After a drawn-out battle, the coalition won in 2004. In 2006, the parties reached a legal settlement designed to prepare the river for the return of the now-endangered Chinook salmon -- one of North America's largest freshwater fish -- which once swam from the Pacific Ocean to the river's upper reaches to spawn.

Fixing a river doesn't come cheap. The project will cost between $400 and $650 million in federal and state government funds.

Some of the area's 15,000 farmers, many of whom rely on water diverted above the dam, question the necessity of restoring fresh water to a region that has managed to live without it for more than half a century -- particularly given California's current budget crisis.

Farmers also worry about the changes that a thriving river will bring to the landscape, says Jason Phillips, the San Joaquin restoration project manager at the Bureau of Reclamation.

"People have been farming right up to the river, even driving through it," he says. "They're not used to having endangered species issues to deal with."

Those unaccustomed to living by a real river might face some initial inconvenience, says Dave Koehler, director of the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust, a nonprofit that has been fighting for the river's restoration since 1988. But he says the project will ultimately yield economic benefits to the entire river community.

Downstream farmers will be able to irrigate their fields with fresh river water, instead of paying to clean polluted groundwater, proponents say. Commercial fishermen will benefit if the salmon populations rebound. And perhaps most importantly, the new flows are expected to improve water quality in the Bay-Delta, the source of drinking water for 22 million Californians.

BRINGING BACK THE FISH

Starting Thursday, Friant Dam will release up to an additional 200 cubic feet of water per second. If you pulled the plug on an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the flow would be enough to drain all the water in about seven minutes.

It's also just enough to moisten the dry stretches in places like Kerman. But in the spring, the water from the dam will quadruple, and the parched ditches will fill from bank to bank.

It shouldn't take long for vegetation to come back.

"A cottonwood can grow to 25 feet in five years," says Monty Schmitt, a senior NRDC scientist who has worked on the San Joaquin project for almost a decade. Schmitt expects birds and mammals to follow: great blue herons, snowy egrets, Swainson's hawks, wood ducks, coyote, fox.

And salmon. Scientists will harvest eggs from other Central Valley rivers, raise the young in a hatchery near Friant Dam and release them into the river by December 2012.

There's a lot to be done before the salmon can return, though. During the first two years, flows from the dam will be intermittent so that the restoration team can carve a path for the fish, erecting screens so they won't get stranded, and creating a ¾-mile bypass around the historic Mendota dam.

Overgrowth will be cleared and channels widened to hold all the new water. Scientists will have to ensure that it stays cool, because salmon require water temperatures of 70 degrees or below.

It might seem like a lot of work for a bunch of fish. But as Schmitt likes to remind people, "It's about more than just salmon."

FERTILIZING AN ECOSYSTEM

The fish will benefit the entire ecosystem, feeding animals and fertilizing plants, says Jon Rosenfield, a biologist with the Bay Institute conservation group.

"When returning salmon die," Rosenfield says, "their carcasses are dragged out of the water by rodents and birds, and the nutrients are distributed across the watershed."

Scientists have even found the ocean's chemical signature in grapes planted alongside salmon-rich rivers, providing evidence that the returning fish have enriched the soil.

On a recent Saturday, the late summer sun scorched Lost Lake Park, a recreation area on a verdant stretch of the San Joaquin -- one that hasn't been parched by restricted flows from the dam. A handful of families picnicked on the banks in the shade of cottonwoods and alders.

Schmitt hopes the now-dry sections of the river will one day draw crowds like this one.

So does Walt Shubin, the 79-year-old farmer, who remembers paddling down the river in a boat he made in high school shop class, scaring ducks and geese that fed on the tall grasses.

"When the river is wet," Schmitt says, "Walt and I will go canoeing."