Yuba named endangered river
Local attraction heads toward top of nonprofit's list
Liz Kellar
The Union
05/17/2011
A national nonprofit group has named the Yuba River one of America's most endangered rivers.
Conservation group American Rivers put the entire Yuba on its list because the outdated Englebright Dam is preventing salmon recovery on the only major river draining the Sierra Nevada that still has wild runs, said spokesman Steve Rothert.
The Yuba River is one of California's last refuges for spring-run Chinook salmon, but the Englebright and Daguerre Point dams block the migration of salmon and steelhead to more than 100 miles of historic spawning habitat in the upper Yuba.
American Rivers and the South Yuba River Citizens League are calling on the Army Corps of Engineers to consider all options, including dam removal, for moving fish around the 280-foot high Englebright Dam and 25-foot high Daguerre Point Dam.
“These dams have locked salmon and steelhead at the bottom of the valley for 70 years,” Rothert said. “There is enormous potential on the Yuba to recover wild salmon, and the time is now to seize the opportunity.”
Englebright Dam was built in 1941, primarily to store debris resulting from hydraulic mining operations. Since the end of hydraulic mining, the dam primarily prevents debris from being washed downstream. Due to the dam's height of 280 feet, the installation of fish passage facilities, such as ladders, was never considered.
The Army Corps of Engineers is planning a $100,000 study of the two dams, to be completed in 2012. It will investigate the possible improvement of fish passage at Daguerre Point Dam and assess fish passage feasibility at Englebright Dam.
A fish ladder to be built on Auburn Ravine, a creek in Placer County, to allow salmon and steelhead trout to bypass a Nevada Irrigation District measuring station could become a model for possible passage around Englebright Dam, NID officials said during a meeting in late April.
Officials from SYRCL for years have been pushing to find a fish passage to the upper Yuba.
The National Marine Fisheries Service recognizes that passage above the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Englebright Dam on the Yuba should be the primary measure to recover endangered salmon in the Northern Sierra region, but a “biological opinion” released by the federal entity in 2007 did not discuss the Englebright Dam.
“The Corps and the Fisheries Service were ordered by (a federal judge) to re-do the existing biological opinion,” Rothert said. “The 2007 opinion was thrown out as inadequate, so the service is developing a new biological opinion that's due in December.
“We're hoping — and expecting — that the fisheries service, in this opinion, will require the Corps to provide a strategy or technology to get the salmon over the Englebright Dam.”
The feasibility study proposed by the Corps is a “nice coincidence,” Rothert said, adding that a draft plan should be issued within a year or so.
