On Oct. 6, a watershed and fish advocacy organization filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, alleging that the bureau violated the federal Endangered Species Act by allowing steelhead to die in Hilton Creek.
California Trout, represented by the Environmental Defense Center (EDC), filed the paperwork in Los Angeles federal court, saying that the bureau caused the deaths of hundreds of endangered Southern California steelhead trout below the Bradbury Dam and Cachuma Lake.
“The bureau has a responsibility under the Endangered Species Act,” said Nicole Di Camillo, an EDC lawyer. “We have been kind of watching to see what the bureau was going to do to fix it.”
More than 350 steelhead died in 2013 and 2014 because of issues the bureau had with a pumping system that’s supposed to keep water flowing into Hilton Creek. The pumping system was a stopgap measure designed to kick in if lake levels got too low to gravity feed water into the creek. The constant water flow is a requirement of a biological opinion written by the National Marine Fisheries Service because steelhead are listed as an endangered species. The pumps failed several times in 2013 and 2014, entirely killing flow to the creek, which caused fish to die.
Di Camillo said the bureau was slow to respond to the situation, and although the pumps are now fixed and there’s an emergency backup plan in place, work on that backup system hasn’t yet begun. Tim Robinson, the fisheries manager for the Cachuma Operations and Maintenance Board, said the bureau awarded a contract in September for installation of the emergency system.
The emergency system would kick in should the pumps currently feeding Hilton Creek go down again, siphoning water out of what is essentially a drain plug at the bottom of Bradbury Dam. The drain is there as a way to empty the lake into the Santa Ynez River, so a pipe would pull water directly out of the bottom of the lake and feed it into Hilton Creek.
“The idea is to run a pipe from the bottom of the lake over to Hilton Creek as a temporary solution,” Robinson said. “Some day, over the horizon, they’ll figure out a way to make it more permanent.”
The bureau is the agency that’s ultimately responsible for water flowing from Bradbury Dam, and therefore is the agency responsible for keeping water moving into Hilton Creek and keeping steelhead trout alive and swimming. The operations manager of the bureau’s South-Central California Office was unavailable for comment before the Sun went to press.
Di Camillo said the bureau has yet to make the permanent fixes necessary to ensure more steelhead don’t die, which is the reason why California Trout decided to file a lawsuit.
“An emergency system isn’t a permanent solution,” Di Camillo said. “The whole point of the Endangered Species Act is to not keep the species on life support forever, but actually restore their population so they don’t have to be subject to the act anymore.”
A press release from the EDC said Kurt Zimmerman with California Trout’s Southern California program hopes that filing the lawsuit will encourage the bureau to make the necessary repairs as quickly as possible.
This article appears in Oct 16-23, 2014.