Threatened salmon die after utility temporarily shuts canal

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Threatened salmon die after utility temporarily shuts canal
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER, Associated Press | June 19, 2015 | Updated: June 19, 2015 7:51pm

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — More than one-tenth of the largest wild population of threatened salmon in the Central Valley died after repair work near a power plant led Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to cut off a cooling flow of water into a creek, wildlife and utility officials said Friday.

PG&E, the state's largest utility, restored the water flow on Wednesday to a remote stretch of Butte Creek, home to the largest of three surviving wild populations of Central Valley spring-run Chinook salmon.

The death of 277 of the fewer than 2,000 adult chinook in the creek underscored the vulnerability of one of California's most iconic species in a drought year marked by record low amounts of cooling snow melt.

Salmon populations from Monterey on the central coast to the Oregon border are showing problems related to low, warm water conditions created by the driest four years in state history.


Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/science/article/Threatened-salmon-die-when-utility-temporarily-6338079.php?cmpid=rrhoustontx

[daleanime]

1. kick, kick, kick....

[peacebird]

2. Irresponsible bastards. They couldn't find a way to mitigate this?

[Enthusiast]

3. More suckage.

Idiocracy has arrived.

[madamvlb]

4. Unbelievable.

[calikid]

5. Oh this is just peachy.

I spent many a sunny summer afternoon lounging in some of Butte Creeks pools while going to school at Chico State. The creek terminates about thirty minutes from my home and had recently been the spot of a major chemical dump by meth cookers.

[TimeToEvolve]

6. this is corporate "responsibility" at its best..

mistakes have been made and nobody will be held responsible..

[oldandhappy]

7. I emailed them

Please join me. They need to hear us!

[LeftyMom]

8. I guess PG&E is branching out from blowing up neighborhoods.

Good for them, it's important to pick up new skills.

[Igel]

9. The better was the enemy of the merely tolerable, it seems.

Some people didn't read the article, me thinks. The snip from the article easily leaves one with the impression that the salmon weren't really considered in any of this. My initial assumption is that the repair work was done because the power plant needed it and the fish were an irrelevancy, not that the canal's very reason for existing was to ensure a "cooling flow of water into a creek" for the salmon. Excuse me, my bias was showing.

The cooling canal functioned to keep the water in the creek cool for the salmon and was leaking. It would do an inadequate job of cooling the water. The water was going to be too warm and would kill some salmon; a warmer-water pathogen would make things worse. So some salmon would die. I'm sure they'll argue over how many fish would have died: A shorter time period with higher temperatures that killed a lot of fish quickly, or lower but still too-high temperatures that would kill fewer fish per day but last longer.

The rush to repair the canal triggered by an imminent warm spell. What happened may have resulted from thinking was that the repair would save more fish than it caused to die; perhaps the repair work took longer than expected; perhaps somebody was so concerned with the regulatory hassle that might ensue when the lack of a functioning canal killed fish to stop and think that closing the canal might kill fish and create a larger regulatory hassle. Maybe what happened will create less of a hassle anyway: A good faith effort might be seen as less culpable than neglect.

It's one of those, "Just don't sit there, do something" kinds of things we run into. Fight or flight. The alternative is, "Just don't do something, sit there." Which, sadly, is often the correct response.

[The Second Stone]

10. It's too bad that the idea of trucking in ice hasn't been invented yet

because if someone had bothered, Chinook would not have lost a tenth of their entire population in few hours.

Oh, wait, trucking in ice was possible. It just wasn't done. PG&E was just saving money for commercials on TV that remind us that they want us to forget that they blow up neighborhoods by being too cheap to maintain their gas lines. At least some execs got bonuses back in the day for putting off that maintenance.