The tiny Chinook salmon turned up dead downriver just two days after they were released from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s brand new Fall Creek Fish Hatchery, built to supply the Klamath River as it undergoes the largest dam removal in history.
The $35 million state hatchery, on a tributary just upstream of Iron Gate dam in Siskiyou County, was constructed to help the river’s threatened coho and dwindling fall-run chinook salmon, a mainstay of commercial and recreational fishing and tribal food supplies.
The hatchery’s first release ended with an unknown number of the 830,000 young Chinook salmon found dead, their eyes bulging, in a federal sampling trap about 9 miles below the dam.
State officials called it “a large mortality,” but said there’s no official count yet and released no additional details about the size of the die-off.
California’s fish and wildlife officials said they suspect “gas bubble disease,” a condition similar to decompression sickness in scuba divers, is to blame — likely caused when the salmon traveled through a 9-foot-wide tunnel out of Iron Gate dam to reconnect with the Klamath downriver.
Gas bubble disease in fish is caused by “environmental or physical trauma often associated with severe pressure change,” officials said.
Jason Roberts, inland fisheries program manager with the state agency, said it’s an outcome that state, federal, and tribal scientists involved in the decision didn’t anticipate.
“The basin co-managers made the best decision they could with the information that they had, and unfortunately, it did not go well,” Roberts said. “I don’t think anyone thought water going through this tunnel would cause gas bubble disease, or we obviously wouldn’t have done it.”
The bill, if approved, would place a bond before voters aimed at helping ports build capacity to assemble, construct and transport wind turbines and other large equipment. Long Beach and Humboldt County have plans to build such expansion projects.
Port expansion is considered critical to the viability of offshore wind projects, which are a key component of the state’s ambitious goal to switch to 100 percent clean energy. The California Energy Commission projects that offshore wind farms will supply 25 gigawatts of electricity by 2045, powering 25 million homes and providing about 13 percent of the power supply.
The first step to building these giant floating platforms has already been taken: The federal government has leased 583 square miles of ocean waters about 20 miles off Humboldt Bay and the Central Coast’s Morro Bay to five energy companies. The proposed wind farms would hold hundreds of giant turbines, each as tall as a skyscraper, about 900 feet high. The technology for floating wind farms has never been used in such deep waters, far off the coast.
An extensive network of offshore and onshore development would be necessary. Costly upgrades to ports will be critical, along with undersea transmission lines, new electrical distribution networks and more.