Adult spring-run Chinook from test releases of young are already returning to the San Joaquin River after their decades-long absence. The restoration program, which launched in October 2009, is a mix of spectacular success and drawn-out delays. The settlement guaranteed water releases of up to 4,500 cubic feet per second for fish from Friant Dam and established the San Joaquin River Restoration Program, which is charged with restoring a naturally spawning, self-sustaining population of 30,000 spring-run Chinook while minimizing adverse impacts on agriculture and other water users. Department of the Interior seeking to restore threatened spring-run Chinook and other fish in the San Joaquin River. That was shortly after a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)-led coalition prevailed in its 18-year lawsuit against the Friant Water Users and the U.S. “We all laughed-and then we sharpened our pencils and got to work.” “That broke the tension,” recalls Gerald Hatler, who manages the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Central Region Fisheries Program. Then one of the team members joked that they should just write a white paper saying it wasn’t going to work. The salmon that once thronged up-river by the hundreds of thousands had vanished, and there was no precedent for jumpstarting a population from scratch. The riverbed had been parched for so long that someone even built a house in it. The thirsty farms that crowd the river on both sides had taken almost all the water out of it most years since the mid-1900s, leaving a nearly 60-mile long stretch below Friant Dam near Fresno completely dry. When a team of fish biologists was tasked with restoring spring-run Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River in 2006, none of them quite knew where to begin.
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