Extreme drought brought on by record-breaking heatwave dries up Klamath River on the California-Oregon border, leaving farmers struggling and tribes without fish as heat dome settles over the west coast
A severe drought that has dried up the Klamath River has upended the lives of farmers and local tribes living along the California-Oregon state line.
More than half of the West is facing 'extreme' drought conditions including wide areas of California and Oregon, a region scientists have said may be going through the worst drought period in centuries, the New York Times reported.
There is also an extreme heatwave in Canada that has stretched down to Washington and Oregon creating record temperatures while California is suffering from forest fires.
The 'once in 10,000 years' event is being caused by a heat dome, which means the warmth extends high into the atmosphere and impacts pressure and wind patterns.
A mountain of hot air is trapped by high-pressure conditions, further heating its and compressing it like a lid and wedging the high pressure between areas of low pressure, pushing cooler air away.
The drought has brought on a crisis to the diverse basin filled with flat vistas of sprawling alfalfa and potato fields, teeming wetlands and steep canyons of old-growth forests.
A severe drought that has dried up the Klamath River has upended the lives of farmers and local tribes living along the California-Oregon state line
The 'once in 10,000 years' event is being caused by a heat dome, which means the warmth extends high into the atmosphere and impacts pressure and wind patterns
The wild temperatures are stretching from the US west coast up to Canada where records have now been broken for three days in a row
As a result, farmland in the area has gone dry and fish, integral to the diet of the Native American tribes living along the 257-mile long river, have died off in droves or fail to spawn in shallow water.
This summer the Klamath River is running low on water and now farmers, tribes and wildlife refuges that have long competed for every drop face a bleak and uncertain future together, the Associated Press reported.
That includes Ben DuVal, whose family has farmed the land for three generations, and this summer, for the first time ever, he and hundreds of others who rely on irrigation from a federally managed lake aren't getting any water from it at all.
'Everybody depends on the water in the Klamath River for their livelihood. That's the blood that ties us all together. ... They want to have the opportunity to teach their kids to fish for salmon just like I want to have the opportunity to teach my kids how to farm,' DuVal told AP of the downriver Yurok and Karuk tribes. 'Nobody's coming out ahead this year. Nobody's winning.'
Many living in the area believe the Klamath Basin's unprecedented drought is an indicator of accelerated global warming.
'For me, for my family, we see this as a direct result of climate change,' Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe told the AP. 'The system is crashing, not just for Yurok people... but for people up and down the Klamath Basin, and it´s heartbreaking.'
Many living in the area believe the Klamath Basin's unprecedented drought is an indicator of accelerated global warming.
The drought has caused farmland to dry up and fish, integral to the diet of the Native American tribes living along the river, have died off in droves
The extreme conditions has led to California Governor Gavin Newsom to declare drought emergencies in 41 of California's 58 counties as its reservoir supplies dwindle.
'This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years,' Kathleen Johnson, an associate professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine told The Guardian.
Twenty years ago at the California-Oregon border when water feeding the farms were drastically reduced amid another drought, protesters breached a fence and opened the main irrigation canal in violation of federal orders.
But today many irrigators who are at risk of losing their farms and in need of federal assistance have rejected anti-government activists in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol out of fear any ties to far-right activism could taint their image, AP reported.
To compensate, some farmers are getting some groundwater from wells and a small number who get flows from another river are dealing with severely reduced water for just part of the summer.
For now, everyone is sharing what water they have.
'It's going to be people on the ground, working together, that's going to solve this issue,' DuVal, who serves as president of the Klamath Water Users Association, said. 'What can we live with, what can those parties live with, to avoid these train wrecks that seem to be happening all too frequently?'
To add to the issues facing the region, toxic algae has bloomed in the basin's main lake, a vital habitat for endangered suckerfish, a month earlier than normal, and two national wildlife refuges that are vital for migratory birds are drying out, AP reported.
Environmentalists and farmers are using pumps to combine water from two stagnant wetlands into one deeper to prevent another outbreak of avian botulism like the one that killed 50,000 ducks last summer.
The activity has exposed acres of arid, cracked landscape that likely hasn't been above water for thousands of years.
'There´s water allocated that doesn´t even exist. This is all unprecedented. Where do you go from here? When do you start having the larger conversation of complete unsustainability?' Jamie Holt, lead fisheries technician for the Yurok Tribe said.
Holt said she now counts dead juvenile chinook salmon every day on the lower Klamath River.
'When I first started this job 23 years ago, extinction was never a part of the conversation,' she said of the salmon. 'If we have another year like we're seeing now, extinction is what we're talking about.'
Klamath Lake is also home to suckerfish which are central to the Klamath Tribes' culture and creation stories and were for millennia a critical food source in a harsh landscape.
In 1988 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed two species of suckerfish that spawn in the lake and its tributaries as endangered.
The federal government must keep the extremely shallow lake at a minimum depth for spawning in the spring and to keep the fish alive in the fall when toxic algae blooms suck out oxygen, AP reported.
This year, amid exceptional drought, there was not enough water to ensure those levels and supply irrigators. Even with the irrigation shutoff, the lake's water has fallen below the mandated levels - so low that some suckerfish were unable to reproduce, Alex Gonyaw, a senior fish biologist for the Klamath Tribes, told the AP.
The youngest suckerfish in the lake are now nearly 30 years old, and the tribe's projections show both species could disappear within the next few decades.
Things are so bad that even when the fish can spawn, the babies die because of low water levels and a lack of oxygen.
The tribe is now raising them in captivity and has committed to 'speak for the fish' amid the profound water shortage.
'I don't think any of our leaders, when they signed the treaties, thought that we'd wind up in a place like this. We thought we'd have the fish forever,' said Don Gentry, Klamath Tribes chairman. 'Agriculture should be based on what's sustainable. There's too many people after too little water.'
The Karuk Tribe last month declared a state of emergency, citing climate change and the worst hydrologic conditions in the Klamath River Basin in modern history.
Last month, tribal fish biologists determined 97% of juvenile spring chinook on a critical stretch of the river were infected; recently, 63% of fish caught in research traps near the river's mouth have been dead, AP reported.
The die-off has been devastating for people who believe they were created to safeguard the Klamath River's salmon and who are taught that if the salmon disappear, their tribe is not far behind.
'Everybody's been promised something that just does not exist anymore,' Holt, the Yurok fisheries expert, told AP. 'We are so engrained within our environment that we do see these changes, and these changes make us change our way of life. Most people in the world don't get to see that direct correlation - climate change means less fish, less food.'