Like we said in Part One, two of the dozens of dams in the Sacramento San-Joaquin watershed stand out as especially damaging to the Valley's Chinook: Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River north of Redding, and the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River a bit east of Fresno. And the drought is just making everything a whole lot worse. Whether we're polluting the water or diverting it into aqueducts, the Central Valley's Chinook salmon have come out the poorer. Over the subsequent decades, Chinook have had to contend with our increasing tinkering with their home streams. Here's another: about 95 percent of the eggs laid by the last batch of Endangered Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon failed to become viable young fish heading downstream, and it looks like we've had a similar failure in the subsequent Fall run.Īs we discussed in the first part of this series on Chinook salmon in the San Francisco Bay Delta and its tributary rivers, a century of dam building has devastated the fish's historic numbers. If you wanted an indication of how well the Bay Delta's Chinook salmon population is faring in the last few years of drought, here's one: the Sacramento River has been so low that Northern California Fish hatcheries are trucking their young fish hundreds of miles away from the hatcheries to release them way downstream. Read Part 1, Damming The Chinook to Near-Extinction. Stay with /baydelta for all the project's stories. And at its core is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta. An explanatory series focusing on one of the most complex issues facing California: water sharing.
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