Friant Dam and the River That Was Dried Up
Near Fresno, California
For sixty years, the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam ran dry. Not low. Not diminished. Dry. For about sixty miles below the base of the dam in the foothills east of Fresno, the riverbed was an empty channel. Farmers pumped what water remained. The salmon runs that had sustained Yokuts communities for thousands of years ended completely. The river, for practical purposes, ceased to exist.
The Friant Dam was completed in nineteen forty-two as part of the Central Valley Project, the federal Bureau of Reclamation's largest California water infrastructure program. Its purpose was to store Sierra Nevada snowmelt in Millerton Lake and then release it through two canals, the Madera Canal to the north and the Friant-Kern Canal to the south, delivering irrigation water to farms in those corridors. The system worked precisely as designed. The farms received water. The river downstream of the dam received almost none.
The fish that vanished were Chinook salmon. The San Joaquin salmon runs had been among the largest in California's Central Valley system. By the nineteen fifties, after the dam closed the fish off from their spawning grounds and reduced the downstream flow to near zero, the salmon population in the San Joaquin below Friant effectively collapsed. What had been a river ecosystem became a dry ditch lined with agricultural drainage.
A lawsuit filed in nineteen eighty-eight by a coalition of environmental groups and fishing interests challenged the Bureau of Reclamation's water allocations as insufficient to maintain the river. The case, Natural Resources Defense Council versus Rodgers, eventually produced a settlement in two thousand six that required the Bureau to restore enough flow in the San Joaquin to support a returning salmon population. The restoration process began in two thousand nine. It required removing accumulated gravel bars, rebuilding fish ladders, and negotiating with water contractors who had been receiving the water the river now needed back.
As of two thousand twenty-three, Chinook salmon have been documented spawning in portions of the restored river for the first time in more than half a century. The restoration is ongoing and contested. The water it requires comes from the same allocation that irrigates a significant portion of California's tree fruit and vegetable production. The river and the farms want the same water. The settlement established a legal framework for dividing it. Whether that framework is adequate to sustain both the fish and the farming is a question that the current data has not yet resolved.
