Tom Philp, PRESS DEMOCRAT
For California water managers, the Sierra snowpack has always been like money in the bank. With steady kisses of spring sun, snowmelt reliably flows ever downward until reaching the state’s vast network of reservoirs downstream.
But in the spring of 2021, in what turned out to be the second year of a scorching three-year drought, something happened to a meager snowpack. Much of it unexpectedly vanished into the sky or ground. Summer, as it now tends to do, had arrived early.
Faced with a cruel choice of who gets the limited water and who goes without, human decisions designated the remnants of California’s once-massive salmon population as the losers. The operators of the state’s largest reservoir, behind Shasta Dam, had already begun to honor contracts that guarantee farmers a lot of water, come drought or deluge. That meant less water in the Sacramento River to keep its inhabitants alive.
When adult salmon returned from the Pacific Ocean that winter, they swam upstream to below the dam where they would traditionally spawn. But the low flow in the river was lethally hot. Nearly all the salmon eggs failed to produce offspring.
The tragic loss of these salmon is one of too many examples of how California keeps harming an iconic fish species it is supposed to protect. A drought is a setback for salmon in the best of times. Here is how the last one could not have been worse, thanks to human mistakes.
Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/11/10/philp-from-droughts-to-human-errors-california-salmon-near-extinction/