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What a crock!
Don’t give in
by Mark Baird, Siskiyou Daily News Letter to the Editor June 8, 2011

Mark Baird of Scott Valley is vice president of Scott Valley Protect Our Water and the new owner of KSYC Radio.
 
The dams did not create the entropic conditions. The Klamath basin is a naturally warm-water, high-phosphorus tule marsh. John Fremont’s journal cites the water in the upper basin as so foul that the horses would not drink it. The Keno reef, a natural geographic barrier, prevented the migration of salmon to the upper basin, not the dams.

The hatchery at Iron Gate was built to mitigate the loss of 30 or so miles of habitat. John fails to point out that the water is cleaner below the dams than it is above. The Klamath is called an upside-down river because it is naturally dirty in the basin and becomes cleaner as it heads toward the ocean. This is the exact opposite of the vast majority of rivers. The dams act as phosphorus sinks which help to clean the water.

Why does Mr. Spencer fail to note that the science foundation report says dam removal will do little or nothing for the coho salmon? Why does John fail to point out that there are 100 million cubic yards of naturally polluted, high-phosphorus, high-nitrogen sediment trapped behind the dams? Sediment which, if released by dam removal, will kill the fisheries for decades if not permanently?

Why does John fail to mention that ocean conditions drive “returning spawners,” and not dams? Why does John fail to mention that the Pacific decadal cycle drives the ocean conditions that send cold-water fish north to the Gulf of Alaska?

The commercial catch of salmon is 400 percent of what it was 10 years ago. These environmental communists will even go so far as to suggest that the 8 million perfectly good hatchery fish, sent down the Klamath to the ocean every year, are genetically inferior to so-called “wild fish.” I would love to see the genetic data demonstrating that the egg from a wild mother becomes something else when it is hatched artificially.

John, how is a dam at fault when 8 million fish leave a river and only a small percentage can or will come back after three or four years in the ocean? What a crock!

Why is the environmental left so bent on dam removal over the objections of the voters in the affected area? Follow the money! A couple of billion dollars in the pockets of special interest groups who claim they represent the Klamath basin.

We the people of Siskiyou County have voted and almost 80 percent of us want OUR dams to stay.

I have an idea, Mr. Spencer: why don’t you start a campaign to remove Shasta and Whiskytown dams and see how far you get? Better yet – why not pull out all the dams? According to dam removal experts like Mr. Spencer, that will magically give all of us more water (yes, folks, the dam removal people are saying that removing Klamath dams will give everyone more water), as well as magically heal the “environment.”

Yes, the environmental left, bent upon destroying agriculture and the human environment in rural California, has a crock full of stories about environmental justice and environmental water and equal rights for “Mother Earth” – what a crock!

Wake up, California; this state is broke and dam removal on the Klamath River will do none of the above. What it will do is to remove flood control from the Lower Klamath River and destroy some perfectly good, clean-energy-producing facilities that serve 75,000 customers in California.

The environmentalist lie is that dam removal has not been decided upon yet. Why did the PUC just approve a rate increase for PacificCorp in to help mitigate the cost of dam removal?

Can you afford to give in to this type of environmental blackmail?

I cannot and I will not!

 
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              Page Updated: Friday June 10, 2011 02:26 AM  Pacific


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