FROM SACRAMENTO — The "water buffaloes" like to frame their fight as farmers vs. fish. It is not. It's about farmers and fishermen.
A California water buffalo is someone who instinctively battles to develop water -- so named, I'm told, after the beast that reputedly can smell water from 200 miles away.
The fight isn't necessarily about "versus" either because farmers and fishermen often are in the same boat, dry-docked for lack of water.
Up and down the San Joaquin Valley, farm fields have been fallowed and field hands can't find work because there isn't enough water to irrigate crops.
"I represent communities that are threatened to be blown away like tumbleweeds," Assemblyman Juan Arambula (I-Fresno) complained at a legislative water hearing Tuesday.
Along California's central and northern coasts, salmon season has been closed for the second straight year because, in large part, water conditions have become so mucked up in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that baby fish can't survive before heading to sea.
Commercial fishermen and their crews can't work. Recreational anglers can't fish, hurting charter boat owners.
"The delta is a black hole" for salmon, legislators were told by Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin river system -- encompassing California's Central Valley -- historically has been the second-largest salmon producer on the West Coast, second only to the Columbia River. And Columbia salmon tend to migrate north to British Columbia and Alaska. Salmon that make it through the delta and out the Golden Gate have supplied 90% of the catch off California, and 50% off Oregon.
The delta also is the largest estuary on the West Coast of America, north and south, Grader said in an interview.
"Estuaries are places where salmon gain strength before going to sea," he continued. "We've been seeing salmon actually losing weight in the delta. They become weakened, get lost because of [reverse river] flows, become entrained in pumps or wind up in forebays where they're easy prey to predator fish."
What Grader describes is pretty much the fault of water management in the delta during the past half-century -- something all sides currently are trying to fix.
In 1950, more than 1 million chinook salmon -- also called king salmon -- returned during the fall to spawn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin system. Last fall, only 66,000 returned.
