Ben Pitterle, with Los Padres ForestWatch, wrote an article that stacks one half-truth upon another having to do with a court case involving water releases from Twitchell Reservoir. Forest Watch and the Environmental Defense Center successfully sued the operators of Twitchell which will force the dam to release water to, ahem, benefit steelhead trout runs on the Santa Maria River!
Yes, that same Santa Maria, CA river that is normally dry for years at a time! The contention that the Santa Maria River can sustain trout runs is absurd. That is, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said it best, “We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying”!
First, let’s start with the title of Ben’s piece, “The Supreme Court Sides With Environmental Groups in Twitchell Dam Steelhead Protection Case”. The truth is the Supreme court did not side with the environmental groups as the Supreme Court refused to hear the case! That is a non-decision that happens a thousand times every year because the US Supreme Court only has the time and opportunity to hear a fraction of the cases appealed to it.
Second, we need to speak of the morphology of the Santa Maria River. First, the Santa Maria River is not truly a river anymore, it is primarily a flood control channel designed to bypass the City of Santa Maria. That is, historically, the Cuyama River and the Sisquoc River merged to form the Santa Maria River that served to flood the Santa Maria valley from time to time. Typically, the river liked a path somewhere near Main and Cook Streets! Like the environmentalists who filed this suit, it is best said that the path of least resistance makes crooked rivers and men! To avert catastrophic flooding of the valley and the city, the Santa Maria River was converted to a flood control channel, complete with manmade artificial levees to protect the city and the valley (but not the City of Guadalupe tragically). The channel runs primarily along the bluffs of the Nipomo Mesa until it is well past city limits.
Third, the Cuyama River was damned to capture as much water as possible for the purpose of recharging the Santa Maria underground aquifer. Even though this aquifer is as dry and empty as the Santa Maria River in normal years, the enviros want the water wastefully released for non-existent fish runs instead of using the water in dry years to replenish Santa Maria with drinking water and farmers with irrigation water.
Fourth, the Santa Maria River can never facilitate steelhead trout runs for the following reasons. Steelhead trout are rainbow trout that can theoretically migrate from spawning grounds in the mountains above the Santa Maria Valley to the ocean and back, a trip of some 70 plus miles away! While in the ocean they are transformed to much larger steelheads, but they need very cold (45 to 55 degrees) and very clean water, lots of it, to survive the migration coming and going. Because the Santa Maria River bottom is sandy and thereby highly permeable, the water never gets deep enough to stay that cold. Moreover, in nearly all flood events that create runoff that is deep and cold enough, the water is very muddy, meaning it has so much dirt and debris in it that the fish suffocate!
The natural rivers in America that support steelhead trout runs are those that run nearly all year long down from mountainous areas, typically with very deep and strong flows of very cold water that originates from snow melt! Our semi-arid climate beset by routine droughts is therefore not conducive to restoring trout runs.
Andy Caldwell