A settlement was reached in a federal lawsuit that accused the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation of violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing endangered steelhead trout to die in Hilton Creek.
Specifically, nonprofit California Trout said the bureau was liable for the deaths of at least 393 juvenile steelheads in 2013 and 2014 when the water pumps in Lake Cachuma (also known as Cachuma Reservoir) failed numerous times to pump water into Hilton Creek after lake levels dropped to the point where water couldn’t be gravity fed into the creek.
The lawsuit, which was filed in October 2014 in Los Angeles federal court, reached a settlement Oct. 21, according to court records.
The settlement calls for the bureau to complete repairs to an automated emergency backup pumping system. The bureau was sued because it operates the pumps in the reservoir, which the bureau created after the construction of Bradbury Dam in the 1950s.
Working on a deadline of Jan. 31, 2016, the bureau is required to have the system operational by then, according to Nicole Di Camillo, one of the attorneys for the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara who is representing California Trout in this case.
Di Camillo said that the pump failures were known since early 2013, but added that the bureau began working on the emergency system in September 2014.
“From our perspective, that process was dragging on quite a bit,” Di Camillo told the Sun.
Steelhead trout were placed on the federal list of endangered species in 1997, and a biological opinion from the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2000 said that the trout needed constant water flow in order to develop in their habitats.
Despite the loss of nearly 400 steelheads as a result of the pump failures, more than 600 were also rescued, Di Camillo said.
The fish is a type of rainbow trout that lives a life similar to that of a salmon. Steelheads are born and develop in freshwater streams then migrate to the ocean for their adult years and return to their original hatching grounds to reproduce.
When explaining the importance of the steelhead trout in court, California Trout’s Candice Meneghin told the judge that steelheads are an overall indicator for the Santa Ynez River Watershed’s ecological health.
With most of the steelhead activity occurring in tributaries such as Hilton Creek, it means the ecosystem is “functioning as it should be,” Meneghin said.
Meneghin added that the Santa Ynez River steelheads stand out from other fish because they are able to withstand higher levels of heat and stress and could even possibly resist climate change.
And then there’s the problem with the drought and the perception that scarce water resources are being wasted on fish. Not exactly, according to Di Camillo, because the water that gets released downstream benefits anything in its path, including farmers.
“There always tends to be this ‘fish versus people’ rhetoric,” Di Camillo said. “The fish aren’t going to steal our water.”
There’s been an active steelhead recovery plan for several years now. In January 2012, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration unveiled a plan to restore the steelhead trout back to its original population that once numbered in the tens of thousands ranging from the Santa Maria River to south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2015.