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Dumb fuggs, and that's a nice way of expressing my feelings (and my wife's) towards the person(s) responsible for releasing nearly a million chinook salmon fry from a new hatchery built above one of the dams to be removed this summer.

No, the turbidity didn't kill them, a problem known as "gas bubble disease", basically the bends for fish, did them in. They sent the fish down a tunnel at Iron Gate Dam, which is like sending a diver down under pressure, and then when the fish come up the pressurized nitrogen in their blood causes trauma.

Direct from CDFW webpage:


https://wildlife.ca.gov/News/Archiv...ubble-disease-in-klamath-river#gsc.tab=0

There's other news articles out there I haven't looked at yet. My wife found this one. Y'all are welcome to check the others out.

Some of you might recall I made my second career raising and diagnosing fish disease, transporting juvenile salmon, and some other endangered fishes. To say this pisses me off is a gross understatement.

Any fish person knowing of the conditions those fish would have to go through, going through a tunnel at a dam, should have known not to release them without at least testing a sample to see what the incidence of gas bubble trauma and/or mortality might be. Part of the issue with it is that in some cases the fish can't get back underwater even if alive, making them highly susceptible to predation

I'm hoping to find out if the person(s) responsible have been fired, as in my mind it's a fireable offense. Wife and I wonder if perhaps the decision was made above the hatchery level, perhaps even bureaucratically? I'll be writing to our local State reps and Senator. Probably our Fed Congressman as the hatchery was just newly built and sometimes Fed funds are provided for that and the feeding and care of threatened and endangered fish.

It's almost like these fuggers are trying to royally screw things up. More than likely though, it's an incompetent person put in the lead of a project without the experience to know WTF they're doing.

Rant over...........................for the moment. ...........................Who knows, I might be back if I find out there are no repercussions for the guilty party/parties.

I touched on this this morning on the other dead thread. But didn't have all the facts straight (as usual).
What I wonder is...the original Fall Creek hatchery and rearing ponds were built in 1919, apparently used successfully, on and off for years...so how were those fish released....did they go through the Irongate tunnel? Or were they trucked below Irongate and released directly into the river?
No matter what, somebody needs a new line of work...I doubt it's cheap to hatch and rear 830,000 fingerlings.

Sorry to hear this. Sounds like they should have been more careful. I'm not a fisheries expert but I know this has been a problem at some of the Columbia River dams.

They're "government experts" and are immune to any consequences for their actions, same as in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Communist China, et al.

Well it does serve the purpose of those that want only "native" fish in the rivers, not hatchery fish. It is a growing movement in the NW - as if there are any native fish still around.

Like Ft. Walton Beach/Destin Water&Sewage - oops we spilled 300,000 gallons of raw sewage into Choctawhatchee Bay again. Sorry-bout that .

Must have been earlier this morning when you posted. I went back a couple/few pages and didn't see that thread.

It cost them some to spawn and hatch them, not much for rearing if the story is correct in that they are "fry". They may not have even been first feeding, they may have just released them when they absorbed their egg nutrients after hatching.

Not sure about the old hatchery, wife and I had to look it up as I hadn't heard of it before, just the Iron Gate one. Didn't know they had one above it. How tall is Iron Gate? Does it have spillways that get used regularly or is most water passed through the generators? Maybe they just sent them down with the water through the dam and not the tunnel?

Where did they get their broodstock in the old days? Iron Gate has no ladder as I recall. Did they trap adults below the dam?

And yeah, trucking those fry around the dam would have been the smart move. Probably would have only taken a few trucks depending on the capacity of them. First thing my wife and I thought of.

Dumbscheidts is all I can say

Someone decided to do that.
The firing should commence at least one level above his/their heads.
Maybe more.
Someone hired them, oversaw them.

There is not much info on how the old Fall Cr hatchery was provided with brood stock. As a kid, I recall seeing some mechanical traps on the river, big old metal floating contraptions with a rotating wheel...maybe they trapped the breeding fish and trucked them around 2 dams with no fish ladders up to the old Fall Cr facility. The brand new Fall Cr hatchery will rely on trapped fish until a new channel is established in a few years after the dams are gone. They picked Fall Cr because the water is ice cold and clear as crystal year round (it's also the city water supply for Yreka Ca since '66).Then in the early 60's the Irongate hatchery was built (there never was a ladder there over the dam...just into the hatchery), as far as fish returned results go, it was a huge success. The 'tunnel' referred to is just a bypass to dump water not used by the hydro plant. The dam has been drawn down to minimum levels for months, chock full it's 210 feet deep. The spillway is just used during floods.
I think you hit the nail squarely...if the fry were already in the trucks for release...who decided to dump them in the bypass tunnel intake rather than truck them another few hundred yards and dump them at the boat ramp below the dam?
This is not a very good first effort from the brand new state of the art hatchery.

And these idiots think the can manage a planet?

For those of you not in the fish "industry", gas bubble disease is not some obscure, rare, or mysterious thing. It is literally fish rearing 101. The FIRST thing you do when rearing young fish is to measure the gas pressure of your water. Well, maybe the second, after temperature. We know what it is, we know the causes, we know the remedies. I could haul those fry around that tunnel with one truck and trailer on two or three trips, one day's work, tops.

Only a dolt or someone ENTIRELY unqualified for the position would make a decision like this. Like Geno, my blood pressure seriously spiked just reading it. It's dumbfuggery that can only be explained by malice or complete idiocy. This is stuff we've known for nigh on a century. Absolute, complete, utter morons on your payroll.

I would like to see more government officials held accountable for their actions. The one that really made me sick was the Orrivill Dam disaster. The thing I like about Trump is he calls out these idiots. Thanks for the good info.

That was extremely well said Dutch.

I've just about finished a letter to my Reps, ......................................


Can I quote you?

Thanks for all that info,

I was thinking the hatchery was closer to the dam and they just released the fish at the hatchery. Do you know they were actually trucked to a point above the dam? That was not in the DFW story.

Not sure what "minimum level" is for the reservoir, but even 60' or so of having to go through a tunnel with no acclimation or time to off gas would lead to problems in my experience.

Is there another way to stock ?

Geno, go right ahead, I kept MOST of what I was thinking out of it to protect the public's sensibilities......


Of course there are. Dozens of studies are done on the effectiveness of different stocking strategies of all kinds of species. What size, what location, what time of year, all the variables are studied at nauseam. I'm working on stocking programs for both the state of Nevada and Washington this Spring, and they have data as long as your arm as to what works, and what doesn't.

Historically, like literally 100 years ago, Federal hatcheries hatched eggs and flushed them into the rivers in the hopes that some of them would survive. Today, we can rear salmonids to much larger sizes (8, 10, 12'') very effectively. Fish are trucked back and forth from the capture / spawning sites to the hatcheries. For example, the Reds that come up the Pahsimeroi in Idaho are spawned and fertilized there, and then trucked down to Springfield for rearing (that hatchery, btw, has huge degassing towers to prevent gas-bubble disease) for production. Then they are trucked by the semi-load back to the main stem of the Salmon for the flush down the river. At some point after that, they might have been caught, put on one of Geno's barges, and floated through the locks on the Columbia.

They have got this down to a science, and in the case of the Salmon river reds, it's probably still not enough.

Everything the government touches turns to schit.

Unfortunately, and I really hope I'm wrong, you may be correct about that Dutch.

And yes, I probably saw more than one smolt and adult while I was up there.

regarding the stocking. Yep, so many studies and so much data on returns and survival it's getting hard to choose which might be the best in any given circumstance. Seems every system is different and many times almost every stream in a given watershed is different. Definitely if there are an abundance of predatory fish, raising them to a larger size helps with survival to a point. Then there are other studies that show letting the small fish get larger in their native streams increases adult returns. Who's to know.

They stock trout around here and cut the 02 off on the trucks to make the fish sick it’s a fact

Remember this when any government employee attempts to seem competent.