on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The Biocrat

In 2001, Detrich switched from timber to fish and water. The Yreka office had been set up in 1986 to administer the Klamath River Basin Fishery Resources Restoration Act, which appropriated $21 million to undertake a 20-year project. Late in that game, Detrich became the executive officer for the Klamath Task Force, which advised the government on restoration actions, and the Department of Interior’s representative on the Klamath Fishery Management Council, which advised the Pacific Fishery Management Council on harvest regulations relative to Klamath stocks, so they could determine what harvest could be allowed each year.

When the act expired, it wasn’t reauthorized.

“I think the act was effective in that it carried out a valuable restoration program,” Detrich said. “I think when we look at trends in salmon over time, we have to wonder whether it was effective. We spent money on restoration, we spent money on staff, we spent money on meetings for people to get to know each other and talk, but salmon populations continued to decline.”

Plus, the political environment was on boil. In 2001, in a drought, farmers in the upper Klamath Basin had been cut off from most of their irrigation water after the FWS had ruled that protected salmon needed that water in the river. Farmers drummed up a clanging revolt of bucket-yielding supporters, cut a fence and opened a headgate on a dam. The next year, though the drought persisted, farmers got their water. Tens of thousands of adult Chinook salmon, and some protected coho, died from a disease fostered by low flows, crowded conditions (it was a big run that year), and overly warm water. Political heavies, like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, were accused of having injected themselves into the scene to get the farmers their water. And a biologist with the FWS’s sister agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, Michael Kelly, claimed he’d been told to change his biological opinion, which said the fish needed the water.

Detrich wasn’t involved in the decisions that led to the rotating farm-fish crises of 2001 and 2002. He was administering the restoration work on the Klamath, he said, but the regional office in Klamath Falls was handling the ESA regulations governing fish flows, and making the decisions. But, he added, people tend to oversimplify the biological impact of the fish kill.

“People turn it into a disaster, but I don’t think the data demonstrate it was,” he said. “It was certainly a political turning point. It was an emotional disaster that I will not minimize. But there was still a fairly decent salmon harvest that year and we made the spawning objective.”

But in the big picture, Detrich said, there was no doubt that salmon were in trouble. And finally everyone decided to make a deal.

“A rancher in Shasta Valley, when I got moved into the Klamath arena, stated it to me pretty clearly,” he said. “And this is perhaps an oversimplification, but he said, ‘For the last hundred years we’ve been transfering water from fish to ag, and that has been an economic transfer. Now there is an effort to return some of that water back to fish; that too is an economic transfer. So, whatever your economic and religious and cultural values are, those things govern how you feel about that transfer.’”

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