The California Department of Fish and Game poisoned
Lake Davis despite a last-minute barrage of legal assaults and
pre-dawn civil disobedience hours before the Oct. 15 treatment
occurred.
A week after pumping Nusyn-Noxfish and
powdered rotenone into the lake north of Lake Tahoe, state
officials had collected 15 tons of dead fish, including an 18-pound
northern pike with a nearly 3-pound trout in its
belly.
The goal of the $2 million project was to
eradicate the voracious non-native pike to prevent their spread
downstream into California’s lucrative salmon fishery, said Banky
E. Curtis, a regional Fish and Game Department manager. Workers
collected 10 dead pike for every trout killed by the 33,000 gallons
of chemicals, he said.
Local residents, who
depend on Lake Davis as a drinking-water source, were outraged by
the use of Nusyn-Noxfish, a compound containing cancer-causing
trichloroethylene (TCE). Although they forced the Fish and Game
Department to decrease the amount of Nusyn-Noxfish, their efforts
to halt the project failed.
Hours before the
poisoning began, Portola City Councilman Bill Powers and three
others chained themselves to a buoy in the icy lake to make what
Powers called “a simple statement about a significant evil.” They
were cited for trespassing.
Curtis called the
poisoning a success. “I can understand the concerns of the local
residents, but our job is to make fishing better,” he
said.
The department plans to stock Lake Davis
with 700,000 rainbow trout once the chemicals have disappeared. It
will provide water from alternate sources to Portola residents
until state health officials determine the lake water is
safe.
* Jane Braxton Little
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Plumas lake poisoned despite civil disobedience.
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