Major California river adding water

FRESNO, Calif. — A decade ago, environmentalists and the federal government agreed to revive a 150mile stretch of California’s second-longest river, an ambitious effort aimed at allowing salmon again to swim up to the Sierra Nevada foothills to spawn.

A major milestone is expected by the end of the month, when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says the stretch of the San Joaquin River will be flowing year-round for the first time in more than 60 years.

But the goal of restoring native salmon remains far out of reach.

The original plan was to complete the task in 2012. Now, federal officials expect it will occur in 2022. And the government’s original estimate of $800 million has ballooned to about $1.7 billion.

“I think we all had hoped we’d be further along,” said Doug Obegi, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which led the lawsuit that produced the deal with the government to bring back salmon. “Restoring the state’s second-largest river was never to be a cakewalk.”

California is enduring a fifth year of drought, and many farmers have experienced sharp curtailments in water allotments from the government. Doubts have risen about the wisdom of spending money on an intricate system of passages to get salmon around the river’s many dams and siphoning off more water from agriculture.

For thousands of years, decomposing salmon bodies have been feeding nutrients into the soil of the San Joaquin Valley, helping make it one of the nation’s most prosperous farming regions.

The San Joaquin River spans 366 miles. It starts as snowmelt high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, cascades down through granite canyons and fills a reservoir at Friant Dam east of Fresno.