Drip drop opinions

The Russian River flowed for millions and millions of years, eons before the earliest of Pomo people established fishing villages here 10,000 years ago and called the river Ashokawna.
Through millenia, the river carved a snake-like course through the rocky upper reaches between Ukiah and Cloverdale. It meandered widely across the volcanic soils of the Alexander and lower valley below Healdsburg, mixing fertile soils with the ancient minerals of exploded mountain tops and leveling out future farmlands and vineyard landscapes.
The river narrowed and deepened to create a westward course through primitive redwood stands of the coastal range, finally disgorging all its collected rain, runoff, organic debris, silt and living microbes into the Pacific Ocean. Winter storms and summer droughts ordained a lopsided balance of nature.
The Russians, Europeans and the rest of us came much, much later. But our influence has been mighty and calamitous.
Our record here represents the narrowest wink of time in the river’s history. Yet we stand ready now to cast new artificial (manmade) controls and covenants on the waterway we made unwild less than two centuries ago.
This week the Sonoma County Water Agency opened two months of public comment on its 3,600-page proposal for its Fish Habitat Flows and Water Rights Project. This plan will dictate how the agency operates its releases from Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma. It seeks to satisfy federal protections for endangered salmon species while extending the agency’s right to divert enough water to supply its 600,000 human customers throughout Sonoma and Marin counties through the year 2040.
The six-volume Environmental Impact Report (EIR) about fish habitat, agricultural practices, recreation uses and municipal water demands would be very controversial in 1958 or 1983 or even 1921, but this is 2016.
Those earlier years were when the Coyote, Warm Springs and Scott dams were erected in the upper watershed of the Pomo’s Ashokawna, a source of colossal seasonal runs of salmon, steelhead and chinook.
Those historic fish runs have been gone for a half century now, well before the population of Sonoma County doubled between the late 1970s and today. There is little controversy because there are few fish remaining.
The current set of proposals and new definitions for acceptable river flows and pumping levels are not aimed to restore the great fisheries; they are written to protect a sliver of the river’s natural balance while guaranteeing to quench the thirst of the water agency’s paying customers.
If enacted, the plan would reduce summer flows in the river’s main stem to mimic historic patterns for salmon migration and spawning. One of the goals is to slow the current and increase the chance that a freshwater lagoon could form at the mouth of the river in Jenner. Newly hatched steelhead use such habitat to feed and grow before entering the ocean. Lower flows are also proposed for Dry Creek below the Warm Springs Dam.
As public testimony begins, river residents have already raised concerns about impacts to water quality, increased algae blooms and impacts to the local river-based recreation industry.
More testimony leading up to a public hearing on Sept. 13 before the Board of Supervisors is expected to pit vineyard growers’ uses against expanded fish habitat protections. The plan also includes increasing river diversions for various water agency customers such as the Occidental Community Service District and the Town of Windsor.
Obviously, there are enough competing interests and points of view to fill a 3,600 page report. (Visit or download at www.scwa.ca.gov/environmental-documents.) And, the last four years of historic drought and “natural” summertime low flows have heightened everyone’s interest and sense of skepticism.
If opinions were drops of water there would already be plenty of flow for both the fish and our many human thirsts.
— Rollie Atkinson