The Water Wars

In the year two thousand one, this basin became a battlefield in a war over water. A severe drought met a hard truth, the same water could not save both the farms and the fish. Federal biologists warned that the endangered Lost River and shortnose suckers, sacred to the Klamath Tribes, and the threatened coho salmon downstream, needed the water to survive.

So for the first time ever, the Bureau of Reclamation shut off irrigation to about one thousand two hundred farms. Furious farmers gathered at the head gates of the main A Canal here in Klamath Falls and forced them open, again and again, backing down only when federal marshals arrived. That May, some eighteen thousand people formed a bucket brigade, passing water hand to hand as a protest.

The next year the government reversed course and sent the water to the farms. That autumn, warm, low, disease ridden water in the lower river killed tens of thousands of adult salmon in one of the largest such die offs in the country's history. Estimates of the toll range from around thirty thousand to seventy thousand fish.

The wound cut every direction, farmers, tribes, and fishing families all set against one another over a river that no longer had enough to go around.