Cattle ranchers in Siskiyou County who are under a drought emergency order imposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in January now find themselves in the midst of a massive flood.
A torrent of water from heavy rains, called “atmospheric rivers,” in February has inundated the farms and ranches in the Scott River and Shasta River valleys, where the governor’s executive order—which authorizes the California State Water Resources Control Board to enforce emergency regulations and place water-use restrictions—remains in effect.
Newsom has renewed the drought emergency for several years in a row, and the farmers and ranchers say it is high time for the governor to end it.
The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Feb. 18 to declare a local flood emergency.
Siskiyou County Supervisor Jess Harris (District 1) told The Epoch Times that Siskiyou is the only county that is still under the drought emergency order, despite raging floodwaters.
“It’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever seen,” Harris said. “The state has a drought emergency on us, and we have a flood emergency at the county level.”
The floodwaters have breached irrigation canals; washed out roads and city streets; and inundated the Shasta, Scott, and Klamath rivers with debris, according to the county, which also warns of flooding along the tributaries of these rivers with warmer weather and runoff from snowmelt on the way.
Drought Emergency?
In May 2021, Newsom declared a drought emergency in several counties throughout California, including the Klamath Basin, citing critical low river flows. He extended emergency regulations to all 58 counties in October 2021, urging all Californians to voluntarily conserve water by reducing consumption by 15 percent, according to the state water board.Nearly three years later, on Sept. 4, 2024, the governor rescinded many of the order’s provisions because of significant precipitation and improved conditions in several watersheds, particularly in the Sierra Nevada range.
The water board maintains that the emergency regulations are necessary after “years of dry conditions.” that are still impacting native fish such as the coho salmon, Chinook salmon, and steelhead trout.
The Scott and Shasta rivers are key tributaries in the Klamath River watershed, crucial water sources for Siskiyou County and habitat for “federally and state-threatened coho salmon” which are of “immense economic, ecological and cultural importance” to native-American tribes and the surrounding communities, the release states.
Precipitation in the Klamath watershed improved significantly in 2023 and 2024 following drought conditions in 2021-22 when flows in the Scott and Shasta rivers dropped below minimum levels set by the board from 2021 to 2024. Although rain and snowfall are above average so far this year, conditions could change, according to the water board.
“Successive years of dry conditions have severely impacted critical fish populations … requiring us to take measures to protect their very existence,” E. Joaquin Esquivel, state water board chairman, said in the statement. “Continuing the emergency regulation enables us to maintain minimum flows in the Scott and Shasta rivers and to help with the recovery from long-term drought impacts.”
If the state is wrong, and it turns out there is ample water for farming and ranching, the governor’s refusal to lift the emergency regulations will needlessly impact the local economy for another year, Harris said.
“They’re risking the livelihoods of thousands of people. A 30 percent water-use curtailment is a 30 percent reduction in income for ranchers because you have 30 percent less acres that you can hay,” he said. “That’s like asking the government to take a 30 percent pay cut. They have no issue with applying that to the ranchers and saying that the lack of fish is all their fault.”
Without Newsom’s executive order, the water board wouldn’t have the authority to impose water-use curtailments, and the state would be violating adjudicated water rights, Harris said.
“They’re using this emergency declaration to trample on those water rights. This is the only way that they can continue to keep their foot on the throat of the rancher,” he said.
It is ironic, he said, that the state removed three dams in Siskiyou County, the only county that is still under a drought emergency declaration during a flood.
Klamath River Dams Removed
The demolition of the hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River last year—the reservoirs of which were not used for irrigation—were supposed to increase flow and reduce water temperatures to save the fish, Harris said.When asked if the dams’ demolition has helped to increase water levels, especially with the recent deluge from the winter storms, Ailene Voison, a spokeswoman for the state water board, told The Epoch Times in an email that the dam removal restored about 400 miles of vital habitat for salmon and other species that are essential to the river’s ecosystem and the communities that depend on them.
But because the dams blocked the natural flow for more than a century, Voison said, it’s “going to take some time for the species to recover,” and “removing the dams did not address the issues impacting its tributary streams.”
Voison also said in the email that the water board has “no comment” about whether the ranchers and farmers have a legitimate case for eliminating the drought emergency regulations.
Ranchers Resist Restrictions
Theodora Johnson a spokeswoman for the Scott Valley Agriculture Water Alliance, and her husband, Dave, told The Epoch Times that ranchers in Scott and Shasta valleys are calling for an end to the emergency drought proclamation.“It’s a third good water winter in a row,” she said. “So if we’re having winters like these and they can’t lift emergency restrictions, then I can’t see there ever being a year when they would lift them.”
Water is running at about 10 cubic feet per second in a “dry gulch” on some leased land near the ranch, Dave Johnson said.
“Everybody that lives here says they never see it run,” he said.
The Scott River and creeks surrounding their ranch are overflowing and many of the hay and alfalfa fields are saturated and submerged, the Johnsons said.
Debbie Bacigalupi, who runs a cattle ranch with her parents in Siskiyou County near Yreka, Calif., told the Epoch Times the flood has wreaked havoc on the land.
“We have waterfalls in places we’ve never had waterfalls before,” Bacigalupi said.
One pond that has been used for decades will be empty for the first time this summer because a levee broke from all the floodwater, Bacigalupi said.
“There’s so much water, it’s absolutely ridiculous that we are in an emergency drought order still,” she said. “We have so much flooding and erosion. Our ditches—not all but many—are overflowing and breaking. We’ve got dams that are breaking. It’s so bad. It’s thousands of cubic feet going downstream every second.”
“The farmers and ranchers are tired of the state water board’s opinions and want to see facts that their curtailment of water is actually helping anything,” he said. “In a year with so much water, it’s hard to fathom being curtailed another year.”
They are “frustrated” at the irony of the situation of being asked by the state water board to cut back on water usage during a flood, he said.
The LCS plans are the state’s way of “forcing the farmers and ranchers into doing what they want,” he said.
Signing an LCS can mean ranchers have to put meters on their wells “and jump through a bunch of hoops” to be allotted a certain amount of water up to a certain point or face a possible 95 percent reduction by September, Harris said.
“The state water board has got this down to a science,” he said.
Bacigalupi said her family hasn’t signed an LCS agreement with the state and doesn’t intend to.
“Where’s the evidence so far that any of this stuff has worked?” she said. “These people who aren’t boots on the ground and [don’t] live in the area are coming up with these solutions, and yet they don’t have to live with the consequences of these plans.”
The LCS plans aren’t truly “local cooperative solutions” because the restrictions are dictated by the state, she said.
He said Newsom wanted to create “more of a shared approach to managing water” to protect fish and water quality and avoid litigation.
“So we came up with these voluntary agreements,” Crowfoot said. “And they’re enforceable but they’re called voluntary because they’re bringing everyone together.”
Surveying the Flood
Lisa Mott, a Montague resident who grew up on a ranch in the Shasta Valley region and has photographed the swollen Shasta River, told The Epoch Times she hasn’t seen this much flooding since 1997.“The Shasta River is well beyond the flood stage in these two storms that we had,” she said.
The first storm hit in late December more than a week before the governor renewed the drought emergency order, and the most recent one was the first week in February, Mott said.
“Even the Klamath River was flooding,” she said. “The last storm definitely raised the river quite a bit because we were already saturated from that December storm.”
The Shasta and Scott rivers have been targeted because the state is going to need more water flow for the Klamath River now that the dams and the reservoirs are gone, Mott said.
Mel Fechter, a photographer in Scott Valley, said “it was storming like crazy” the day before the meeting in Etna.
“I feel so sorry for these farmers and ranchers,” said Fechter, who has talked to many of them about the state water restrictions.
“I just don’t understand where these people are coming from,” he said of the state agencies.
“I’ve lived here almost 50 years now, and this is the most standing water I can remember seeing all throughout the valley—not just the flood, but the standing water,” he said.
