$180 million improvement plan begins on Battle Creek

Ground clearing has begun on a three-year project to improve the anadramous fish habitat in the Battle Creek watershed, according to Jim Smith, project leader at Red Bluff Office of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The Battle Creek Salmon and Steelhead Restoration Project, as its named, has been in the planning stages since 1999 and cost $180 million to plan and implement, according to Bureau of Reclamation Public Relations Officer Pete Lucero. The figure also includes projected costs of the project not yet funded.

The Restoration Project entails the removal of five dams and the installation of fish screens and fish ladders at hydro-electric diversion dams in the project area east of Cottonwood. The improvements will increase streamflow by ten times and hopefully, in 15 years, increase the winter-run Chinook population in Battle Creek from virtually nil to about 2,500, according to Jim Smith, project leader at Red Bluff Office of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Several agencies, including Bureau of Reclamation, California Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service and Pacific Gas & Electric united in 1999 to work on the watershed together.

"It's pretty exciting," said Smith, a member of multi-agency Greater Battle Creek Watershed Working Group who all contribute to the project.

Currently, winter run Chinook salmon are an endangered species, Smith said, with their only spawning habitat in the Redding area below Keswick Dam.

"That's the only population," Smith said, adding that the species' population is subject to extinction from drought or a single catastrophic event.

The winter run Chinook spawn in the summertime, and the eggs require water temperature below 56 degrees - not an easy order to fill with summer temperatures often topping 110 degrees, Smith said. And that's what makes the Battle Creek watershed so important.

Battle Creek is fed by cold springs from the Mt. Lassen area with water at about 50 degrees, he said. The first phase of the $100 million project will see the removal of the Wildcat dam near Manton on the north fork of Battle Creek, Smith said. Fish screens and fish ladders are also scheduled to be built at Eagle Canyon and North Feeder hydro-diversion dams, Smith said.

Work on the south fork of Battle Creek will begin in the second phase, which has yet to be funded, Smith said.

Downstream at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery, Battle Creek fish counts should improve in about four to five years, Smith said.