Explosives engineers will blow up portions of 50-year-old levees above Upper Klamath Lake on Tuesday, hammering a swift river into a slow marshland for the benefit of a fish whose survival in part once halted irrigation to downstream farms.
The federally protected sucker depends on such wetlands, and the action represents a replumbing of a key section of the embattled federal water project in the agriculture-intense Klamath Basin.
“It’s a large, complicated project with extremely high expectations,” said Curt Mullis, field supervisor with the Klamath Falls office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “We’re hopeful and optimistic.”
The levees were built in the 1950s to convert rich bottomland soils into farmland and to channel the Williamson River directly into the Upper Klamath Lake. For half a century, farmers grew crops such as wheat, barley and alfalfa on great swaths of the drained land.
The levees’ destruction will come after 12 years of negotiations between interests that often have been at odds, including The Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the Klamath Tribes and the electric utility PacifiCorp, which operates dams on the Klamath River.
http://www.oregonlive.com/metro/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/119362651630280.xml&coll=7
And people wonder why its cheaper to get grain from China
Ok, I see!!! Between this phony baloney land-grabbing for re-selling to governments at top R.E. Developer prices after intimidating taxpaying landowners into becoming "willing sellers," and the N.R.D.C. who's most notorious attorney Robert Kennedy, Jr. is "EnvironMental Advisor" to Goobernaytor Schwartzensocialist who appoints to this CA Energy Commission... It should be coming as clear to everyone else on this website as it has been to me for over a decade, exactly what's being made to happen right here and a lot of other places too!!!