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Representatives of federal, state and local agencies on Thursday announced the elimination of a 105-year-old barrier in a creek between Palo Alto and Menlo Park to allow endangered steelhead trout to migrate upstream from San Francisco Bay.
The project by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, California State Coastal Conservancy and San Mateo County removed the concrete wall from San Francisquito Creek that was blocking most of the migrating native trout, EPA spokesman David Yogi said.
The barrier was placed in the creek in 1908 to protect the nearby historic El Palo redwood tree from flooding but prevented many juvenile steelhead from swimming upstream to spawn, said Brian Wardman, an engineer from West Sacramento-based Northwest Hydraulic Consultants who worked on the project.
The fish make the upstream swim from the bay each November, when water levels in the free-flowing creek are high due to seasonal rainfall, Mr. Wardman said.
Jared Blumenfeld, the EPA’s Pacific Southwest regional administrator, said with the barrier gone, the steelhead, already a federally threatened species, will be free to move upstream from the bay to spawning and rearing grounds.
The unimpeded access to the creek, flowing east toward the bay from Searsville Dam in Portola Valley near Woodside, will improve prospects for the fish species, which have not been doing particularly well in the bay, Mr. Blumenfeld said.
“It is certainly going to point the indicators in the right direction,” he said. “Things have been going down. Habitat loss, pollution, all those things continue to stress an already stressed population of steelhead.”
“So this is sending the tide literally in the other direction,” he said.
The project to extract the wall, called a “Bonde Weir,” from the creek came about after the partnering government agencies together obtained $309,000, including a $75,000 grant from the EPA.
So this is what all the noise has been about in our neighborhood. What are the two counties/cities, going to do to address erosion of the creek bed walls? This is something that should be looked at, especially along the “s bend” near the Caltrain and pedestrian foot bridges.
We love Salmon, bbq in foil is the best. Great news for fishermen!
Steelhead aren’t Salmon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_trout
Looks like a typo in the article: “free to move 40 miles upstream from the bay to spawning and rearing grounds” unless the spawning grounds are the Pacific Ocean or the underground storm pipelines in downtown San Francisco.
Wikipedia’s article on San Francisquito Creek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisquito_Creek
has a nice map located here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/San_Francisquito_Creek_Watershed_Map_2002_Joint_Powers_Authority.jpg
which strongly suggests the distance to Searsville Lake would be four (4) miles and not forty (40).
Glad to see coverage of this positive story and project. There are several factual errors and quotes that are not accurate:
Bonde is not the last barrier in the watershed, in fact there are still about a dozen structures that limit or block steelhead migration, the most limiting is Stanford’s Searsville Dam which is impassable and blocks over a dozen miles of spawning and rearing habitat.
Bonde was only a partial barrier during lower flows so while it’s removal helps access during those flows, it did not block habitat during all flows and it’s removal did not open up new habitat.
It also did not improve access to 40 miles of habitat. It improved access to over two dozen miles, but the rest is still blocked by Searsville Dam and other small barriers such as the Bear Gulch Diversion dam on Bear Gulch Creek in Woodside and a couple smaller barriers on Los Trancos Creek and other tributaries. It’s great that so many agencies and people are celebrating this project, but it would be nice if they, and the media, accurately reported the story and situation. We still have a ways to go before the last barrier in the watershed is removed or modified for fish passage. Thanks Almanac for ongoing coverage of our creek.
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