Photo by Sharyn Cornelius: South Cow Creek Valley resident Erik Poole explains to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission environmental panel what the loss of water from the Cow Creek Hydroelectric Plant will mean to area ranchers and their families. Pacific Gas and Electric Company's decommissioning plans for the Kilarc-Cow Creek project call for ceasing water deliveries to the valley's ranches that they have depended on for 100 years without providing any alternate source of water.

By Sharyn Cornelius

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) staff who wrote the recently released Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s Kilarc-Cow Creek Hydroelectric Project that recommends decommissioning the two power plants held a meeting in Redding on July 14, 2010 to hear what the public had to say about its document. They got an earful, to say the least. Well over 100 residents crowded into a room at the Holiday Inn to give the FERC representatives a severe tongue-lashing.

Bonnie Tetrick expressed the feelings of many of those present when she said, “We feel wronged by you. We feel you simply regurgitated the information PG&E gave you and ignored all the comments we made last October and filed in writing since them. Your DEIS didn’t even address most of the issues that are important to us and when it did mention them, the language was insulting and belittling.”

Though FERC Environmental Coordinator Car Lisa Linton tried to insist that the only purpose of the DEIS was to assess the environmental impacts of PG&E’s decommissioning plans under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) guidelines, several members of the audience who have broad backgrounds in environmental law begged to differ.

Frances E. Francis, a Washington, D.C. attorney who is representing the Tetrick Ranch and the Abbot Ditch Users (who receive their irrigation water through the Cow Creek Powerhouse), gave the FERC staff and the audience a brief tutorial on U.S. environmental law. She pointed out that The Federal Power Act (FPA) sets the standards for the FERC, and its directive is that “public interest [as opposed to fish resource agency interest] is prime.” She said that the FPA directs the FERC to “apply independent judgment” in deciding matters that come before it, [as opposed to just adopting the views of the applicant (PG&E) or the resource agencies], while the NEPA requires the lead agency to collect high quality data based on science, neither of which are evidenced in the DEIS. Francis also noted that NEPA “does not require a super priority for fish and was originally intended to protect, restore and enhance the quality of the human environment.” She gestured toward the audience. “You are seeing the human environment here tonight.” She urged the staff to “revisit their assumptions, get the facts, rethink and refocus their document so it reflects the public interest.”

Shasta County’s Director of Resource Management Russ Mull also took Linton and her staff to task. He said that their DEIS was “legally indefensible, full of conjecture and contradictions,” and if Shasta County had produced a similarly inept document, “it would be laughed out of court.” “Writing an environmental document is more than just filling in the blanks,” he said. Mull said he was especially concerned that there had been no hydrological studies done to determine whether dewatering the Kilarc fore bay would cause residential wells below it to go dry. “NEPA requires that you hire a hydrologist to evaluate that possibility,” he said.

Mull noted that not only did the document set up “straw man” alternatives to analyze and summarily reject, (such as keeping Kilarc fore bay open as a recreation area only and maintaining the flow of irrigation water through the Cow Creek Powerhouse without generating power from it), the staff failed to review two actual alternatives—the offers by Davis Hydro and Evergreen Shasta Power to take over operation of the power plants. “Under NEPA you must review all alternatives, not just the ones you have authority over,” he said.

Several ranchers in the South Cow Creek Valley said that the DEIS had drastically underestimated the effect that losing irrigation water would have upon the families who live there. Erik Poole explained that three of the ranchers use the water from the Cow Creek Powerhouse tailrace as their sole source for drinking water, while others have shallow wells that are recharged from the Abbott Ditch irrigation water percolating down through the soil. “If this water source is lost [through the decommissioning],” Poole said, “The quality of life in that valley will be destroyed. The ranchers will be forced to truck in drinking water or leave their homes.” Rancher William Farrell reported that he had drilled 12 wells on his property and all but one were filled with salt water. “If we lose the Abbott Ditch, we’ll lose our wells, too. And the green grass in our valley will turn to brown.”

Many of the speakers reiterated what has been said all along—that tearing out the diversion dams that send water from the Old Cow and South Cow Creeks to the turbines will not benefit endangered species of salmon as the resource agencies claim. Over and over people who know the area well swore that they had never seen a salmon above Whitmore falls in Old Cow or above Waggoner Canyon in South Cow, and biologist Robert Carey said that there was no historical record of steelhead in those areas until the Department of Fish and Game began planting them. Save Kilarc Committee Chairman Glenn Dye pointed out that the only fish that might benefit from the increased water in the bypass reaches of the creeks are brown trout who have adapted to live there. He added that in the Battle Creek fish restoration project, salmon are regaining 42 miles of habitat for the $80 million being spent, but here PG&E proposes to spend $14.5 million to return water to just six miles of creek that do not contain any salmon at all.

At the end of the three and one-half hour meeting Linton graciously thanked everyone who came and especially those who spoke. “We wanted to hear what you had to say.” She also said that the FERC was considering holding another local public meeting so that Shasta County Supervisors could be present.