Oregon tribe opposes water release for farmers

PORTLAND, Ore. — A Native American tribe in Oregon said Tuesday it is assessing its legal options after learning the U.S. government plans to release water from a federally operated reservoir to downstream farmers along the Oregon-California border amid a historic drought.

Even limited irrigation for the farmers who use Klamath River water on about 300 square miles of crops puts two critically endangered fish species in peril of extinction because the water withdrawals come at the height of spawning season, The Klamath Tribes said. This summer’s water allocation plan, released by the Bureau of Reclamation last week, will send about 50,000 acre-feet of water to farmers in the Klamath Reclamation Project — less than 15 percent of what they would get in a normal year.

It’s the third year in a row that extreme drought has affected the farmers, fish and tribes that rely on the 257-mile-long Klamath River in a region where, even in a good year, there’s not enough water to satisfy competing demands. Last year, no water flowed through the Klamath reclamation project’s main irrigation canal, and the water crisis briefly became a political flashpoint for anti-government activists.

At the same time, critically endangered sucker fish central to the Klamath Tribes culture and religion didn’t have enough water to spawn, and thousands of downstream juvenile salmon died without reservoir releases to support the Klamath River’s health.

The Klamath Tribes said in a statement that the decision to release any water to about 1,000 farmers in the federal agricultural project was “perhaps the saddest chapter yet in a long history of treaty violations” and placed the blame for the water crisis on “120 years of ecosystem mismanagement at the hands of settler society.”

The inland tribes, based in Chiloquin, Ore., include the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin peoples of southern Oregon and northern California. The Klamath have fought to keep enough water in the reservoir and surrounding rivers for two distinct species of sucker fish to survive and breed, with limited success.