LAMATH FALLS, Ore., Jan. 1 -- A security fence, video cameras and motion detectors have taken the place of the federal police guarding the head gates of the Klamath Reclamation Project irrigation system.
The $90,000 security system was completed last week around the Klamath project, a United States Bureau of Reclamation site that became the center of protests last summer over federal restrictions on irrigation for farms. The limits were put in place to conserve water for threatened and endangered fish, a bureau spokesman, Dave Jones, said on Monday.
The cutoff forced farmers with no other source of water to sell cattle, let pastures and hay fields go brown and forgo annual plantings of potatoes, grain and other crops.
The federal police were brought in after irate farmers pried open the head gates to an irrigation canal four times and siphoned off water with a pump and a pipe.
The bureau spent about $750,000 guarding the head gates from July 14 to Sept. 26, when the federal police left the site, after protesters agreed to scale back their activities in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Security guards will remain through mid-January, when a final decision will be made on relying solely on the fence, cameras and motion detectors to protect the head gates, Mr. Jones said.
Mr. Jones said water restrictions might not be necessary this year.
“We are hoping for a very peaceful new year,” he said. “The snowpack building up in the Siskiyous and the area there gives us every hope this will not be another contentious year, that we have enough water to meet both the environmental obligations we have as well as our longstanding relations with the farmers who depend on that water.”
Because of last winter’s drought, there was not enough water to supply farmers after meeting Endangered Species Act requirements for the endangered suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake, the project’s primary reservoir, and the threatened coho salmon in Klamath River, which drains the region.
More than 240,000 acres of ranches and farms rely on water from the federal irrigation project in the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon.
A report from Oregon State University said the water dispute polarized the Klamath Basin and involved an undercurrent of racism against the Klamath Tribes, which consider the suckerfish to be sacred gifts from their creator.