SACRAMENTO — A federal science panel on Tuesday recommended that U.S. wildlife regulators take a far more sweeping approach to prevent extinction of threatened fish in the Klamath Basin, a region racked in recent years by one of the West's most contentious water wars.
After nearly two years of study, the National Research Council's scientific committee suggested a series of aggressive steps ranging from reviving long-drained lakes and wetlands to better controlling erosion from logging, restoring coldwater flows into tributaries, shuttering a hatchery and toppling dozens of dams.
But the 12-member panel stuck by a controversial finding it first announced in an interim report last year: that, based on the scientific evidence, increased flows in the Klamath River and higher water levels in Oregon's Upper Klamath Lake are not justified to protect coho salmon in the river and the lake's two species of sucker fish.
Controversy swept the fertile agricultural basin straddling the Oregon-California border in 2001 after federal officials increased water allotments for fish and slashed irrigation deliveries to farmers. Environmentalists, Indian tribes and others have been wrangling ever since with farmers and the Bush administration, which boosted water deliveries to agriculture in 2002 but then drew blame for a fish die-off that claimed 33,000 salmon and steelhead trout in the Klamath River.
Both sides in the debate welcomed the report's call for solutions throughout the sprawling Klamath River watershed, which spreads from the Cascade Mountains of Oregon south into the dense northern woods of California.
Bush administration officials reacted with caution, but said the report justifies many of their actions and relieves them of blame in the fish kill while pointing the way for solutions that don't focus on simply taking water from farmers.
"While it may be a lot harder to take the broader approach, it is more fair," said Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the Interior Department's deputy director. "If it obligates everyone in the basin to work harder, that's too bad, but that's the appropriate approach. The easy answers aren't always the right answers."
Agricultural interests in the Klamath Basin welcomed the research findings as validation of their long-held belief that farmers have borne too much blame for problems with the fish.
