The Sacramento Delta: A Gordian Knot - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 212

second year, in 2009, about twenty-six hundred jobs and $270 million were lost . (he
Monterey Fish Market's Paul Johnson calculates that the two-year closure cost the fish-
ing industry some twenty-three thousand jobs and $2.8 billion in revenue.) The com-
mercial salmon fleet dropped from five thousand boats in 1985 to four hundred boats
by 2010. A tightly restricted fishing season was open in the spring of 2010, but catches
were anemic.
Dave Bitts , a Stanford University graduate who forsook an academic career to fish
out of Humboldt Bay, said he wasn't surprised by the bans: “Fishermen are born with
an extra helping of hope. But I never had much hope for this season,” he told the Los
AngelesTimesin 2008. “Going fishing this year would be like a farmer eating his seed
corn. For a sliver of a season and a tiny catch, it's not worth it…. It's painful to watch
what's happening to the fish, and the fisherman.”
FOOD AND WATER
On our second day in the Delta, Gleick and I were standing on top of Friant Dam ,
just north of Fresno, which impounds the once powerful San Joaquin River and creates
a fifteen-mile-long reservoir called Millerton Lake. We were here to look at the dam
that had destroyed the San Joaquin's chinook salmon fishery and investigate the site of
Temperance Flat Dam, which Governor Schwarzenegger wanted to build at Miller-ton's
northern end. If it is built, Temperance Flat will dwarf the dam we stood on.
Friant Dam is a vast concrete crescent, 319 feet high, that bisects the San Joaquin
Valley. On either side of the dam, a smooth concrete-lined canal sluiced water to irrig-
ators far away. On the left, the Friant-Kern Canal angled south; to the right, the Madeira
Canal bore water to the north. Running from the dam's spillway, the San Joaquin River
flowed tamely along a narrow channel in the wide valley, where big rocks had been
pockmarked and sanded smooth by centuries of unconstrained torrents. Since the dam
was built in 1942, the valley has grown lush with trees and bushes.
The San Joaquin begins as Sierra Nevada snowmelt, pools in three lakes near
Yosemite National Park, gathers momentum as it tumbles past Fresno, turns north
across the Central Valley, and empties into the Delta, which carries it out to the Pacific.
At a length of 350 miles, it is the second-longest river in California and once boasted
one of the state's richest ecosystems.
The river's chinook salmon fishery was one of the biggest on the West Coast, and the
fish were once so plentiful that farmers used salmon as hog food. But when Friant Dam
was completed, and its two irrigation canals began diverting up to 95 percent of the
river's water to irrigate about a million acres of agriculture, the salmon run was decim-