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By Root 1721 0

that idea, either—the bay and the Delta normally can use all the fresh water they can get—except that at least one of the reservoirs upstream had been illegally planted with a species of fish called white bass, which got flushed down by the floodwaters and were already flourishing in the reincarnated Tulare Lake. White bass are a voracious, opportunistic, highly adaptable type of rough fish and love to eat young salmon and striped bass. (Salmon and white bass have never managed to coexist, anywhere.) Unless a fish screen below the pumps could guarantee that 100 percent of the white bass would be removed before entering the San Joaquin, the bay and Delta’s two most valuable commercial and sports fish would be threatened with extinction. Just a handful of escaped white bass of opposite sexes could be enough to seal their doom.

Even though no fish screen has ever operated 100 percent effectively, the Corps of Engineers, ignoring a cacophony of protest from sportsmen in several states, issued another “emergency” permit on Friday, October 7, 1983, to allow the pumping to begin. The growers hadn’t even waited for the permit; the pumps were all in place and ready to operate, and television reporters who arrived to take a look at things were scared away by armed guards. The pumps howled to life minutes after the permit was issued. The California Department of Fish and Game had strung a gill net across the river below the fish screen, just in case. On Saturday morning, not twenty-four hours after the pumping began, the net yielded four white bass. The pumps were shut off, and Fish and Game—as if to underscore the catastrophic consequences of releasing white bass—poured a thousand gallons of rotenone, a virulent pesticide, into six miles of river around the fish screens. Everything in that stretch of river—crappies, black bass, white bass, catfish, crayfish, ducks—died a ghastly death. A week later, Fish and Game performed a second mass poisoning. Then, satisfied that there was no danger to humans, it allowed the pumps to start up again. Every legal effort to stop them failed. Virtually all of the water was pumped out of the lake, and although there is no evidence yet that white bass got into the San Joaquin River and migrated down to the Delta and bay, they could just as well be there; no one knows. If they are—and some sportsmen think it is inevitable that white bass will reach the Delta—then the last remnant of central California’s once prolific salmon fishery may soon be a thing of the past.

It would have been one thing, this whole game of Russian roulette with the most important anadromous fishery in the state, if the drowned lands in Tulare Lake were pumped out so they could grow valuable food. Most of them, however, have been planted in cotton for years. And as the lake was being pumped out, they were not even growing cotton. In March of 1983, just four days after the levee was breached and the floodwaters began to fill Tulare Lake, several of the big corporate farmers applied to the Department of Agriculture for enlistment in the Payment-in-Kind (PIK) program, which had recently been created to relieve the nation’s chronic problem of surplus crop production. Thanks to PIK, they would receive free grain from bulging silos in exchange for not planting crops. The Boswell Company alone got $3.7 million worth of wheat in exchange for keeping fourteen thousand acres idle. (Boswell has consistently received more money from agricultural price support programs than any other farmer in the entire nation.) No one knows how much the other farmers got, but most of the eighty thousand acres of the old lake bed were registered in PIK—even as they were underwater.

In his personal epitaph on the Kings and Kern saga, written in 1951, Harold Ickes lambasted the Corps as “spoilsmen in spirit ... working hand in glove with land monopolies.” He called it a “willful and expensive... self-serving clique... in contempt of the public welfare” which had the distinction of having “wantonly wasted money on worthless projects” to a degree “surpassing