Water crisis reaches critical boiling point
TULELAKE >> Ben DuVal knelt in a barren field near the California-Oregon state line and scooped up a handful of parched soil as dust devils whirled around him and birds flitted between empty irrigation pipes.
DuVal’s family has farmed the land for three generations, and this summer, for the first time ever, he and hundreds of others who rely on irrigation from a depleted, federally managed lake aren’t getting any water from it at all.
As farmland goes fallow, Native American tribes along the 257-mile long river that flows from the lake to the Pacific Ocean watch helplessly as fish that are inextricable from their diet and culture die in droves or fail to spawn in shallow water.
Just a few weeks into summer, a historic drought and its on-the-ground consequences are tearing communities apart in this diverse basin filled with flat vistas of sprawling alfalfa and potato fields, teeming wetlands and steep canyons of old-growth forests.
Competition over the water from the river has always been intense. But this summer there is simply not enough, and the farmers, tribes and wildlife refuges that have long competed for every drop now face a bleak and uncertain future together.
“Everybody depends on the water in the Klamath River for their livelihood. That’s the blood that ties us all together . ... They want to have the opportunity to teach their kids to fish for salmon just like I want to have the opportunity to teach my kids how to farm,” DuVal said of the downriver Yurok and Karuk tribes. “Nobody’s coming out ahead this year. Nobody’s winning.”
With the decadeslong conflict over water rights reaching a boiling point, those living the nightmare worry the Klamath Basin’s unprecedented drought is a harbinger as global warming accelerates.
“For me, for my family, we see this as a direct result of climate change,” said Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, which is monitoring a massive fish kill where the river enters the ocean. “The system is crashing, not just for Yurok people ... but for people up and down the Klamath Basin, and it’s heartbreaking.”
Twenty years ago, when water feeding the farms was drastically reduced amid another drought, the crisis became a national rallying cry for the political right, and some protesters breached a fence and opened the main irrigation canal in violation of federal orders.
But today, as reality sinks in, many irrigators reject the presence of antigovernment activists who have once again set up camp. In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, irrigators who are at risk of losing their farms and in need of federal assistance fear any ties to far-right activism could taint their image.
Some farmers are getting some groundwater from wells, blunting their losses, and a small number who get flows from another river will have severely reduced water for just part of the summer. Everyone is sharing what water they have.
“It’s going to be people on the ground, working together, that’s going to solve this issue,” said DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association. “What can we live with, what can those parties live with, to avoid these train wrecks that seem to be happening all too frequently?”
Meanwhile, toxic algae is blooming in the basin’s main lake — vital habitat for endangered suckerfish — a month earlier than normal, and two national wildlife refuges that are a linchpin for migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway are drying out. Environmentalists and farmers are using pumps to combine water from two stagnant wetlands into one deeper to prevent another outbreak of avian botulism like the one that killed 50,000 ducks last summer.
The activity has exposed acres of arid, cracked landscape that likely hasn’t been above water for thousands of years.
“There’s water allocated that doesn’t even exist. This is all unprecedented. Where do you go from here? When do you start having the larger conversation of complete unsustainability?” said Jamie Holt, lead fisheries technician for the Yurok Tribe, who counts dead juvenile chinook salmon every day on the lower Klamath River.