Subject: California dams come down (fwd)

From: Victor Guest <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 23:18:19 WST

From: [email-masked]
Subject: California dams come down
To: Recipients of CHRM-GENERAL <[email-masked]>

CALIFORNIA DAMS COME DOWN - Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt symbolically
sledgehammered into a concrete dam on Butte Creek that bars salmon from
spawning. 50 officials and local farmers attended the ceremony at McPherrin
Dam, 25 miles south of Chico, California Tuesday. It marked the start of a
project to remove two dams and restore 20 miles of Butte Creek to a free
flow for the first time since the 1920s. The dams should be gone this
summer. Butte Creek, which flows into the Sacramento River, is one of four
streams that still have spring-run chinook salmon. The fish cannot return
upstream to lay eggs with dams in the way. Local ranchers did not oppose
removal of the dam since they can get water from a different source. "I
think it represents a spirit of hope for California to find a better
balance between agriculture, recreation and the environment," Babbitt said.

Copyright (c) 1998 Environment News Service (ENS).

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From: Victor Guest <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1998 08:48:03 WST

Errors-To: [email-masked]

With the enviromental disasters being reported world wide, re dams etc.
it seems important to keep everyone aware of the pressure from engineers
and Industry to keep doing the same DAM things.
Vic
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Don't believe everything you read. I live about 40 miles from Butte Creek
on the other side of the Sacramento Valley, and the state and federal dam
builders are intensively studying our area as a one of four possible sites
for another dam project. For the past two months we have had three or
parties of specialists a week studying our ranch for frogs, plants, birds,
rodents, indian remains, etc; all as preliminaries to selecting the final
place. Rather depressing prospect, but all of the field crews have been
very nice and informative...and they say it is wonderful to come out here
because of all the diversity and interesting things they usually don't see.
Fat lot of good that will do us, if some bureaucrat feels whimsical.
Frank