Klamath's water woes run deep
followed by commentary of Barbara Hall, Klamath Bucket Brigade

N ow the thirst for water in the Klamath Basin is drying up wells and shrinking the water table. The day is here when the Bush administration must concede that there is too much demand for too little water in the Klamath.

It is not enough to keep raining federal tax money on the basin in hopes of avoiding hard decisions about a supply of water that is simply too small to adequately meet the demands of farmers, fish and wildlife. Millions of tax dollars that paid for emergency wells and a federal water bank have not resolved the underlying water crisis in the basin.

Instead, the government's decision to pay farmers to irrigate crops with billions of gallons of water from wells is quickly drying up the Klamath's groundwater. The water table has plunged as much as 20 feet in just three years, according to a report last Sunday by The Oregonian's Michael Milstein.

It has also left the Klamath as a rare place in this country where American taxpayers not only are subsidizing the crops that farmers are growing, but also paying for their irrigation.

None of this is sustainable. You can't forever chase a dwindling supply of groundwater by drilling ever deeper. You can't keep going to the well of government subsidies, either.

Yet the Oregon Water Resources Department keeps right on issuing groundwater permits, some for wells that could yield millions of gallons of water a day, even though the dangers of that policy seem obvious. And the Bush administration has shown no sign of conceding that it's time to begin reducing demand for water in the Klamath, even by allowing willing sellers to retire their farms and irrigation permits.

By now there is overwhelming evidence that there's not enough water to go around. In 2001, Klamath Project farmers suffered when water supplies were abruptly cut off to protect endangered fish in Klamath Lake and Klamath River. The next year farmers got full irrigation deliveries, but tens of thousands of salmon died in the too-low, too-warm Klamath River.

Every year the wildlife refuges of the Klamath Basin, some of the most important lands in the Pacific Flyway, are left without adequate water. Last summer the refuges went six straight weeks without any water deliveries.

There's a scramble now to consider other hugely expensive solutions to the water shortage in the Klamath. One irrigation district wants to drill large wells in north Klamath County and pour the water into Upper Klamath Lake for use by farmers. Another is pitching the idea for a new 19,000-acre reservoir on a former lake bed south of Klamath Falls.

Those ideas may hold some promise. So might many other efforts now under way in the basin, including projects to increase habitat for endangered suckers and potentially allow farmers to take more water out of Klamath Lake.

Yet it seems clear that the only real long-term solution is to bring water demand in line with the actual, sustainable supply in the basin. The water table is dropping as much as 5 feet a year. There's no future in that.

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The editorial board of the Oregonian should really check their facts before once again repeating old tired lies.  But as we all know, every time a lie is repeated and spun, it gains strength as the truth.  How many times do we have to put up with this before they start doing their homework and start reporting the truth? 

 

The only crop that is subsidized in the Klamath Project is wheat!  Onions, potatoes, mint, horseradish, alfalfa, and grass hay are not subsidized!  How many times do we have to repeat that?

 

And the government is not paying for our irrigation; only paying farmers to pump water from their drought wells to satisfy the NOAA/NMFS tribal trust ordered water bank. 

 

And the only reason we now have a "water shortage" in the Klamath Project is because of governmental laws such as the ESA and those tribal trust obligations.  And one section of the ESA says that reservoir water can't be used for endangered or threatened species.  What do you think Upper Klamath Lake is?  It's a reservoir built and paid for by the farmers in the Klamath Project.

 

Before 2001, there was plenty of water to go around - farmers, fish (both suckers and salmon), and refuges got water even in bad drought years.  The Klamath Project takes only 4 to 5% of the total water available in the entire upper and lower Klamath Basins.  I'm sick and tired of our farmers and ranchers being made the scapegoat for everything that happens in the entire 1.4 MILLION acres of the entire Klamath River Basin when the Klamath Project is only 220,000 acres.  Our measly 400,000 acre-feet of water is chicken feed compared to the average of 12 Million acre-feet of Klamath River water that flows out into the Pacific.

 

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Klamath's water woes run deep