Science clears Cheney in Klamath salmon die-off

Posted: August 03, 2007

by: Jerry Reynolds / Indian Country Today

WASHINGTON For the lions of oversight had vanished by the time a scientist's testimony solved the riddle of the Klamath River salmon die-off of 2002. So had the television news cameras, most reporters and much of an audience that once numbered 100 strong. A comparative few heard William M. Lewis Jr., currently a professor of biology and a researcher in environmental sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, former chairman of the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council Committee on Endangered and Threatened Fishes in the Klamath River Basin, give an account of committee findings that ruled out any real likelihood of a direct connection between a politicized water management decision and the Klamath salmon die-off.

Lewis gave an admittedly conservative estimate of salmon mortality at the mouth of the Klamath River in Oregon in September 2002: 32,897, compared with other estimates that have ranged from 70,000 to almost 80,000. Of those, 1 percent, or 384, were coho salmon, protected under the Endangered Species Act; the rest were fall-run chinook salmon. The salmon did not die because of low water flows in the drought-stricken Klamath River. After comparing low river flows in previous dry years that did not produce a salmon die-off, ''The committee ... concluded that mortality was the result of an unusual combination of conditions, probably including unusually low flow plus the absence of a cool pulse of flow that even a brief precipitation event might have provided.''

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