Durham >> From hundreds of fish annually to nearly 9,000 per year, Butte Creek salmon are thriving, thanks to a project begun 20 years ago.
That project was celebrated Thursday at Gorrill Ranch on the Midway.
At the spot where Ralph Gorrill first pulled water from Butte Creek to grow his crops 100 years ago, 101 people stood or sat on hay bales as eight of the project’s leaders talked about getting water districts to work with government agencies, farmers, conservationists and public utilities to save the largest population of wild naturally-spawned spring-run chinook salmon in California.
Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior for the Clinton administration, helped bring the players to the negotiating table to get the Butte Creek Salmon Recovery Project, completed in the late 1990s.
“I’m really overwhelmed by the opportunity to come back after 20 years to see this extraordinary success,” he said.
In 1998, Babbitt brought a sledgehammer down on the concrete of McPherrin Dam on Butte Creek as the series of dams on the creek were removed or improved with fish ladders to aid the salmon in their trek upstream.
“The importance of it to me goes beyond just celebrating,” he said. “It instructs us about the future.”
With charm and wit Babbitt also told a story about how California Gov. Jerry Brown has pulled him out of retirement to work on a “new state-wide vision of water management.”
Thinking it would be a cushy consulting job that would take about a month, Babbitt said with a laugh that he has been working for the state of California for a year.
Environmental scientist Tracy McReynolds was a student aide on Butte Creek in the 1990s, and has been monitoring the fish population with the Department of Fish and Wildlife ever since.
From 1967 to 1991, Butte Creek averaged 360 adult chinook salmon in the spring run, with a low of 10, she said.
From 1995 to 2016, the waterway held an average of 8,918, with a high of 20,212 in 1998.
“This is a model and showcases for what can be achieved,” McReynolds said.
The project spans over 90 miles of Butte Creek.
Dams that fish struggled to get over were removed and fish ladders were built for others. An underwater siphon was constructed for the Western Canal Water District. Improvements to the Sutter Bypass Wildlife Area in Sutter County provide food and habitat for juvenile salmon and steelhead.
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California General Manager Jeffrey Kightlinger recalled how his water district first got involved in saving Northern California fish with the Bay Delta Accord in 1994, described by the Bureau of Reclamation as “a consensus-based framework to comply with water quality and endangered species requirements while strengthening California’s long-term economic health.”
After that, Babbitt came to the “The Met” and convinced it to contribute $30 million to restoration projects.
For the Butte Creek project, the district put in $3 million, the Western Canal Water District in Durham put in $3 million and the final third was covered by the Department of the Interior.
“It showed that Northern and Southern California can work together,” Kightlinger said.
The spirit of collaboration was a theme throughout every speaker’s remarks.
Ted Trimble, the manager for the Western Canal Water District, said he didn’t know how a partnership between farmers, the federal government and water districts would work, but it did.
“We made something special happen 20 years ago.”