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Reply to Erica Terence article in the Huffington Post

"Razing Dams From the River That Raised Me"

reply by Mark Baird, Scott Valley Protect Our Water 8/28/12

Followed by Huffington Post article

Erica Terence is a product of the Black Bear Commune. She is not a scientist nor is she trained in Biology. Erica is the spokesperson for a group which is a front organization of the Karuk Tribe. The Karuk tribe stands to gain huge sums of money in the destruction of the Klamath Dams. The Karuk Tribe gained Federal Recognition by fraud. Quite simply they have stolen a treaty known as Treaty R from the Shasta Tribe. The Karuk Tribe is led by S Craig Tucker who is not a native American. He is a Green Corp Trained community agitator. Lets look at some of Erica's “facts”.

Erica is afraid the Klamath is dirty water. Why did she according to her own account spend her life in the river if it is so dirty? The FERC re licensing report on page 53 and again in the comments section states the water in the Klamath River is cleaner when it leaves Iron Gate Dam than it is when it enters the lake.

The Klamath River is polluted by nature. It is a volcanic basin high in Phosphorus, period, Add the nitrogen from millions of migratory birds who deposit droppings in the lake and you have conditions in the Klamath as they have been for millions of years. The best way to clean a nutrient rich river is to use the water to irrigate crops and to then export the nitrogen and phosphorus in the crops which the land provides to feed this nation and the world. Tearing out the dams will do nothing to reduce the phosphorus and nitrogen in the upper Klamath basin. Remember the dams are down stream of the natural source of the nutrients which Erica is complaining about.

The Klamath is called an upside down river because it is the only volcanic basin in the United States which drains to the ocean. Upside down means the water is naturally high in nutrient rich phosphorus and nitrogen at the head-water and gets cleaner as it goes to the ocean. The dams help to clean the water. They act as sinks for the nutrients which occur in the water and the algae help the process out.

Salmon runs are at record highs on the Klamath River right now. Erica says the dams have destroyed the once mighty run of Salmon. Who should we believe? Erica or every fisherman who is catching record numbers of Salmon off the coast right now. Fishermen and tribes are killing hundreds of thousands of fish right this moment near the Klamath estuary. The few fish that can make it past the gauntlet of death prepared by the commercial fishermen and the unregulated gill nets the tribes use are no where near enough to satisfy the greed of the fishing interests on the coast.

If it were not for a very productive fish hatchery there would in all likely hood be nowhere near enough fish for all of those fisherman to sell. The commercial catch of Salmon is 400 percent of the catch ten years ago. Fishermen kill fish, not dams. All on the web folks. Just look up Klamath Salmon runs.

Hydro electric power is the cleanest greenest electricity produced on earth. These dams are well maintained and they work when the wind is not blowing and they produce power on cloudy days. Hydro power works 24 hours a day, seven days a week to provide 70,000 customers in Northern California and Southern Oregon. How will Erica and the Karuk tribe turn on their lights after they remove the dams?

The environmental socialists would have you believe it is cheaper to tear dams down than to maintain them. This is not true.

Reasonable modifications which have been suggested to DOI and BOR have been made repeatedly. Dr Paul Houser has begun a whistle blower action because the Secretary of the Interior made up his mind to remove dams no matter who is harmed and no matter what the science or the voters want. Consider the 20 million cubic yards of sediment trapped behind the dams. Dennis Lynch from Department of Interior and Besdik from BOR as well as Mark Stopher from CDFG have all admitted that no one knows what will happen when this sediment is released.

The sediment could choke out the fishery for one hundred years. They say it is an experiment that we just have to try to find out. We the people directly affected by this nonsense do not wish to experiment with our lives and homes.

Erica Terence and the River keepers do not mind because she does not own any property on the river. She says the river raised her but she has no home on the river to lose if her grand experiment fails or if there are unintended consequences from the grand experiment. Leaf Hillman the convicted felon who is the President of the River keepers as well as the head of the Natural Resources Department of the Karuk Tribe, wants a slice of the Two Billion in government money which comes from dam removal. Yes it is true, this has nothing to do with the environment. Follow the money!

Erica says 6000 jobs will be created in Siskiyou County from this massive project. Please Erica, tell us exactly what these jobs will be, how long will they last, we local people get the jobs or will it be outside contractors and will the jobs be here afterward?

Erica, please tell us about the lives which have already been devastated by you and the Karuk tribe.

Please explain how the people who live around Iron Gate lake will be better off now that their property is worthless. Please tell us why they are better off looking at a mud hole than they were looking at a beautiful lake with a world class warm water fishery right out their front door. What will happen to these people in your utopian world, Erica?

Erica Terence says ripping out the dams will open up three hundred miles of Salmon Habitat. She is a liar. Look at the topography. Educate your selves please! The Keno reef is a natural barrier just above the reservoir and according to all historic accounts, Salmon never got past it.

Erica and the Karuk Tribe support an agreement which will line the pockets of special interest groups represented by large irrigators in the Upper Klamath Basin. They stand to gain 2.1 Billion Dollars if their environmental hoax succeeds. Look at the KBRA/KHSA on line, and notice the only dams that are not slated to be removed are the dams which supply the corporate farmers in the Klamath Basin. How will the Salmon get to the three hundred miles above the dams Erica does not wish to destroy? How is buying the Klamath Tribe a 92,000 acre forest with taxpayers money going to save one single fish.

79.9 percent of the people who are directly affected by the removal of these dams voted to keep them. Measure G in Siskiyou County passed by a landslide.

Erica, do you, S Craig Tucker, Leaf Hillman, and his Karuk Tribe know what is better for us than we do? Are you benevolent dictators and the voters do not matter in your socialist/environmental world?

Erica loves the tell us about the Toxic algae? If the Algae is so toxic, how did Erica manage to survive being “raised by the river”?

Why would she want to be “raised by the river”? The dams have been on the river for one hundred years, long before Erica began her life. Why would Erica want to spend her young life in a toxic river?

Whoops Erica, we may have caught you telling a lie again. We have called every hospital in Northern California and Southern Oregon and not one single one of them have ever recorded one single case of illness related to algae. Algae is a normal in river water. Algae is found all over the world. Look at the Mississippi. Why do they call the Missouri River the Big Muddy? Where does Erica imagine algae comes from? Look up Klamath Blue Green algae on the internet. There are at least 8 companies who make vitamin pills out of Erica's so called, toxic algae.

The FERC re licensing report on page 53 and again in the comments section states the water in the Klamath River is cleaner when it leaves Iron Gate Dam than ii is when it enters the lake. The Klamath River is polluted by nature. It is a volcanic basin high in Phosphorus. Add the nitrogen from millions of migratory birds who deposit droppings in the lake and you have conditions in the Klamath as they have been for millions of years.

The Klamath is called an upside down river because it is the only volcanic basin in the United States which drains to the ocean. Upside down means the water is dirty at the headwater and gets cleaner as it goes to the ocean.

Erica Terence says ripping out the dams will open up three hundred miles of Salmon Habitat. She is a liar. Look at the topography. Educate your selves please! The Keno reef is a natural barrier just above the reservoir and according to all historic accounts, Salmon never got past it. Erica and her friends support an agreement which will line the pockets of special interest groups represented by large irrigators in the Upper Klamath Basin. They stand to gain 2.1 Billion Dollars if their environmental hoax succeeds. Look at the KBRA/KHSA on line and notice the only dams that are not slated to be removed are the dams which supply the corporate farmers in the Klamath Basin.

 

Are you environmentalist so easily led? Erica says dam removal will provide stable hillsides, how is that? Is it not the way of nature to take earth from a mountain and release it in a river delta. What is the definition of a river delta?

Why are river deltas found all over the world if Erica is right? The Ganges river delta contains an entire country. I bet those people do not want all hillsides to be perfectly stable, for ever and ever as Erica describes her utopian world.

Does Erica propose to stop natural processes. Are the River keepers/ Karuk tribe proposing that we stop nature itself? Is that what she learned in school on the Black Bear Commune?
 

The Karuk tribe claims to be the keeper of the environment “since time immemorial”, at least that is the story they like to tell when they want more taxpayer dollars for something. They are not very knowledgeable about geology, biology or hydrology.
 

Eric and her Karuk handlers are experts at making people feel guilty over natural environmental processes and they are certainly experts at getting an endless supply of government money.
 

Mark Baird

Scott Valley Protect Our Water
 

WE WILL NOT SUBMIT NOR WILL WE SIGN AWAY OR ABDICATE OUR CONSITIUTIONAL RIGHTS TO PROPERTY OR THE LIBERTY TO USE THAT PROPERTY TO ANY ONE, ANY AGENCY OR ANY GROUP. GOVERNMENT SERVES ONLY ONE FUNCTION, TO PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE. GOVERNMENT DERIVES ALL OF ITS JUST POWER BY CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.

WE WILL NOT SUBMIT!

 

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Erica Terence: Razing Dams From the River That Raised Me

Razing Dams From the River That Raised Me

Director, Klamath Riverkeeper

August 27, 2012
Looking back, I can see that I was spoiled growing up, though my family wasn't rich by American standards.

I had a cold, clean river bubbling past my house that contained fish bigger than me. Even when I traveled to Haiti at 13 years old, I didn't comprehend how lucky I was.

In the mountains just outside Port-au-Prince, people bathed in streams so polluted and foul, I couldn't fathom how it would facilitate cleanliness.

Only as an adult, whom the Klamath River called back home, did the truth finally wash over me: without people and communities to speak for stable mountainsides, adequate supplies of clean, free-flowing water, and a diversity of wild fish runs, we could easily have rivers like the ones I saw in Haiti.

2012-08-27-Dampicture_KRK.jpg

My childhood also taught me that we need to fish, swim and raft our rivers to appreciate their magnificence and remember how to protect them.

That's why Klamath Riverkeeper, the nonprofit organization I represent, led 50 children, tribal members, anglers and other community members on a paddle down eight miles of Klamath River canyon last weekend.

Like me, many in this group have been swimming and fishing in this watershed since we were kids, drifting through rapids and hopping rocks endlessly. We grew up in a place relatively untainted by development. Now we take our children, nieces and nephews to the river, so they can learn about catching currents and eddies and how water moves around resistance on its way to the sea.

2012-08-27-RaftingBoats_KRK.jpg

Despite our longtime enjoyment of the Klamath River, it's not a secret that today's River faces many problems.

But it's also one of the most restorable rivers in America. In fact, we're about to conduct one of the largest dam removals on the planet. Removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath will change the landscape so significantly that we could easily see it from the moon.

This dam removal will reopen more than 300 miles of prime salmon and steelhead habitat and reduce toxic algae and fish disease in the river. In doing so, it will restore income to hundreds of commercial salmon fishermen, who have suffered closures due to declining salmon runs in recent years. And it will create at least 6,000 new jobs in economically struggling Siskiyou County, according to a recent environmental impact statement (EIS) by the federal government.

2012-08-27-Raftingclose_KRK.jpg


The EIS also states that a dam-free Klamath will produce 70,000 more fall run Chinook salmon. Klamath dam removal will save the power company that owns the dams, PacifiCorp, and its ratepayers more than $100 million. It will also save the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster relief spending to bail out unemployed farmers and fishermen in any given drought year.

This dam removal agreement and its companion watershed restoration agreement took years of collaboration, listening and compromising to achieve. It's an answer created by the local people who came together in overcoming the conflicts and competing water needs from the upper and lower parts of the basin to build a plan to remove the dams by the year 2020. The result is the Klamath settlement that the Klamath Basin Economic Restoration Act (KBERA) introduced in Congress last fall, which now awaits a hearing in Washington, D.C.

Forty years ago, with the passage of the landmark Clean Water Act, Congress recognized our right to fishable, swimmable waters. The Klamath settlement transcends partisanship and breaks down barriers to help us realize this dream of clean, healthy streams in our watershed. Because, we know just how important it is to have a clean river flowing with huge fish.

Images courtesy of the author

 

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