Fish & Wildlife halts dam reconstruction

Thursday, Feb. 18, 1999 | 2:53 a.m.

The agency said it determined that Walker Lake's Lahontan cutthroat trout population would be harmed if the dam were rebuilt on the Walker River Paiute Reservation.

Babbitt said the project should go ahead because of concerns about the dam's safety. But Fish and Wildlife said the dam design would continue to block the fish from passing up the river to spawn. The trout are a federally threatened species.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs had concluded the new dam would not be harm the fish. The wildlife agency disagreed, telling the BIA Wednesday to consult with it on ways of making the dam more fish-friendly. The BIA agreed.

"Everybody has the interests of the fish in mind. It's just a matter of how we get there," Fish and Wildlife field supervisor Al Pfister told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Under the law, the consultation could take as long as six months, thwarting plans by the BIA to break ground on the $10 million dam in April.

It would replace a 43-foot-high earthen dam built 63 years ago to provide the reservation with irrigation water. The dam lies on an earthquake fault and leaks, posing a hazard to the town of Schurz downstream.

The old dam does not have a fish passage. Shortly after it was built, the lake's Lahontan trout population died off because the fish couldn't spawn.

The new dam will be built with money from the federal dam safety program, which can't be used to build a fish passage.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat, endorsed wildlife's intervention and said the dam probably shouldn't be rebuilt. Reid, a champion of reviving the dwindling lake, said he would work with the federal agencies to resolve the fish passage problem.