Dams

Hauling truckloads of hitchhiking juvenile salmon around dams is one silly way to save a species. And it doesn't work either. As four dams were built along the lower Snake River in southeastern Washington from the late 1950s to early 1970s, it took only a few years for the river's healthy salmon populations to plummet. By the mid-1990s, the populations of four types of salmon had been declared endangered or threatened. The federal expenditure of $8 billion since then for fish ladders, hatcheries, habitat restoration and, yes, trucks and barges to transport the salmon around the dams has not restored the fish.

A levee break early Saturday sent up to 8 feet of icy water coursing through hundreds of homes in the northwestern Nevada town of Fernley, the largest catastrophe tied to the weekend storms that have lashed California and Nevada. The flooding stranded thousands of people, some of whom were carried out of their neighborhoods in pontoon boats or helicopters. No injuries were reported, but more than 1,500 people were displaced, officials said Saturday night.

SACRAMENTO -- After more than three years of negotiations, a collection of long-quarreling Klamath Basin farmers, fishermen and tribes announced a breakthrough agreement Tuesday that they said could lead to the nation's most extensive dam-removal project.

When it starts at 10,000 feet and slices through the mountains in the canyon that bears its name, the Cache la Poudre River is a shock of water in this dry land. But by the time it winds its way out to this laid-back college city of 120,000 people, most of its water has been grabbed by farmers and other cities that control the maze of canals and diversion dams that turn the river into a trickle.

California's capital city may be best known for politics, but it has another claim to fame: It's America's most flood-threatened city not named New Orleans. A recent state report predicts that the right combination of unlucky weather conditions could put some parts of the city under more than 20 feet of water, causing a $25-billion disaster that would cripple state government and ripple through the California economy.

Flooding continued to rip apart small towns along the Mississippi River on Friday as urban areas were spared -- the flood highs in St. Louis were about 10 feet below expected near-record levels. Some small communities were protected by levees that were not designed to hold back such high waters and couldn't resist the river. Others had no protection at all and saw the Mississippi claim what it wanted.

A federal judge struck a largely symbolic blow for imperiled salmon and steelhead Friday, declaring that the state's vast water-export system is putting the fish at risk but rejecting environmentalists' key demands for change. U.S. District Judge Oliver W.

Use it or lose it is the rule of California water rights, and after 43 years, the would-be Auburn Dam -- subject of one of the state's bitterest water feuds -- is about to lose it. The proposed plug on the gold-sprinkled American River northeast of Sacramento has been declared dead many times since Congress authorized it in 1965, and there may be no reviving it now. The state is poised to take back the legal right it granted to the federal government to store water behind the dam.

India completed construction of a $7.7-billion dam that environmental groups say will uproot the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Authorities hailed the completion of the Sardar Sarovar Project in the Narmada Valley of Gujarat state nearly two decades after the dam was begun. They called it an answer to thirst and irrigation and power needs of millions in the nation's vast, parched west.

In proposing two big, expensive dam projects this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a novel argument to justify the old-fashioned public works projects. Advocating $4 billion in bonds to build reservoirs in Northern and Central California, the administration emphasized not population growth or the specter of future drought, but global warming.