Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [328]
No one could even guess how many tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, of juvenile salmon perished at the pumps’ vast graveyard during the first several years of the drought. But the perverse irony was that, as the future California salmon fishery was being decimated as never before, the fishermen in 1988 hauled in the biggest harvest since 1945. As Zeke Grader had predicted two years earlier, the numbers of returning salmon that year—mostly fall run from the 1986 class that zoomed out to sea on the February flood tide—were greater than all but the oldest commercial fishermen could remember. The offshore catch that year totalled 1,400,000 fish, weighing more than fifteen million pounds—a bonanza worth about a hundred and fifty million dollars. Sport fishermen hauled in hundreds of thousands more, and another couple of hundred thousand spawners—about as many as the depleted rivers could handle—swam to upriver redds. As newspapers published photographs of salmon boats listing into port with huge piles of salmon on board, Zeke Grader was devoting whole issues of Fridays to a new, antithetical prognosis: that the salmon industry would suffer catastrophically in the years ahead. It’s possible his own constituency wasn’t listening by then.
But he was right.
In the 1960s, about a hundred and thirty thousand winter-run salmon returned to the Sacramento River to spawn—the remnants of a run that probably numbered in the half-million range before the state and federal projects were built. By the early seventies, the winter run was down to about twenty thousand fish. By 1987, it was down to two thousand. By 1991, the biologists counting the fish may have come close to outnumbering the fish; 191 spawners made it to the Red Bluff Diversion Dam. The spring run, much harder to count, was probably down to two thousand survivors—mainly due to depleted rivers, which were partly the fault of the drought, and unnatural Delta flows, which were not. By then, the fall (hatchery) run, which made up most of the huge 1988 catch, had crashed too. In 1992, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council imposed the most stringent quotas in history on the commercial fleet, and they applied, to varying degrees, from central California to the Canadian border because California salmon tend to head north once at sea. The offshore California harvest in 1992 was about 150,000 fish. A lot of boats never bothered to go out; if they had, the whole season would have yielded a few dozen fish per boat, worth less than the fuel required to catch them. But even boats in Washington State were forced to languish at dockside for weeks because farmers in California, twelve hundred miles away, were granted normal deliveries of subsidized water during the first several years of the worst drought in that state’s history.
As it turned out, however, the hand of justice could be as perverse as the kiss of irony. In 1991 and again in 1992, the CVP and SWP water contractors finally experienced the same sort of water rationing—and worse—that salmon and fishermen had endured since the drought’s first week. The State Water Project made no deliveries to agriculture in 1991—none. Most of the Bureau’s customers saw their water supply reduced by 75 percent. In 1992, an election year, they got a little more water through the direct intervention of someone who had received millions of dollars in San Joaquin Valley PAC money, the president of the United States. Many growers shifted from surface water to groundwater, but they paid a price (groundwater can be several times more expensive); meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of acres were taken out of production. Tens of thousands of people—mostly farm-workers—lost their jobs, welfare caseloads rose astronomically, and in some agricultural counties unemployment rates brushed 30 percent.
Because the reservoirs had been so drastically depleted