The city of Bakersfield announced Tuesday it was cutting back Kern River flows for a maintenance project. But the hundreds of dead and dying fish found Friday near the Stockdale Highway bridge suggest water had already been ratcheted back days earlier.
It’s unknown when flows through Bakersfield might return.
The rapidity of the river’s dewatering and breadth of the ensuing carnage elicited gasps from Cal State University Bakersfield biology Professor Rae McNeish and two students early Friday morning as they clambered over sand bars that had been under water just two days prior.
“Look, you can still see our footprints,” McNeish noted as herons and egrets lumbered into the sky, reluctantly moving away from the smorgasbord of fish, some still flapping, in a shallow pool. One fish continued gasping even after its head had been pecked open by a hungry bird.
As devastating as the scene was, McNeish and her students, Isaac Owens and Andrew Alba, quickly got to work counting and photographing the fish, testing what was left of the water and retrieving a temperature sensor tangled in weeds now high above a drying puddle.
McNeish reeled off an impressive array of species, including carp, catfish, blue gill, bass and crappie, as she scribbled in her notebook early Friday morning. The three continued up river taking readings at five more weirs.
Then Saturday, McNeish led six other students on a slow slog through the still flowing river from Calloway Drive east to Coffee Road. The group fanned out across the water counting, photographing and categorizing just about every life form they came across, even peeking under water with face masks and snorkels.
For some, like student Dana Garcia, it was the first time they’d ever been in a river.
McNeish was glad they had that opportunity.
MASS DEATH, ROTTING FISH
Because by this coming Saturday, when she leads another team in the river, it will likely be dry.
“I expect we’ll see mass death and fish rotting. That will attract insects and any stagnant pools will be a breeding ground for mosquito larvae,” McNeish said after reading the city’s notice about cutting off flows.
Her team will continue its surveys, she said, “But obviously we won’t be able to monitor water flows because there won’t be any.”
The city had been moving enough water down the riverbed for 10 cubic feet per second to reach the Bellevue Weir across from the Park at River Walk on Stockdale Highway. As of Tuesday morning, no water was being routed down the riverbed west of Calloway Weir, according to a Kern River Operations sheet that lists how water is divided among the hydra of canals that move water from the riverbed onto farmland miles away.
Bakersfield announced it is cutting river flows so that repairs can be made to the Bellevue Weir, according to a press release. The city will also be removing sediment behind that weir.
It did not elaborate on the scope of either project.
The last time the city cleared the river channel in that area was 2020. It scraped the riverbed and banks clean, leveling islands and taking out entire stands of what many observers said were native willows.
The actions caused a severe public backlash.
“The hope is, this time, they stick to the primary flood channel, but they never do,” said Bill Cooper, with the Kern River Parkway Foundation. “We completely understand the need to maintain the channel for flood control but there are ways to do that without wholesale destruction of the riparian area.”
The city’s press release also noted it was seeking bids to replace the weir at Coffee Road, which was damaged in 2019 and again during the 2023 floods. Depending on this winter’s storms, that project is expected to begin March 1 and take six months. That structure will also be used to connect the Kern River Parkway path to a pathway being built along the Friant-Kern Canal toward Shafter.
It’s unclear if river flows will be stopped for the duration of that project.
LEARNING THE KERN
If so, that could put a crimp in McNeish’s river studies.
She and her students spent most of the summer monitoring the river to get baseline data about water quality, temperature, flow levels and aquatic life. The project was initiated partly as a basic function of her McNeish Laboratory and partly at the behest of several groups embroiled in a lawsuit against Bakersfield.
That lawsuit, filed in 2022 by Water Audit California, Bring Back the Kern, the Kern River Parkway Foundation and several other public interest groups, seeks to have the city study the impact of river operations on the environment and public use under the state’s Public Trust Doctrine.
Water Audit is paying for some tests involved in the current studies, but McNeish said she is seeking ongoing funding so she and local students can continue gathering data and learning about the river. All of their findings, including photos and videos, are publicly available on her lab’s website.
McNeish characterized the work as creating a background for understanding the river. She would have preferred to start building this data earlier but there wasn’t much water in the river when she came to CSUB in 2018. She started doing research on trash in the river bed in 2019. Then COVID-19 put a pause on everything, including not being able to work with large groups of students.
“It worked out because now that there’s been water in the river for almost two years, we can actually study it and begin to ask questions,” she said.
Water Audit Attorney Bill McKinnon said the information gathered so far by McNeish and her students has been invaluable.
“They’ve been gathering data every week for six weeks below each weir so now we have a better understanding than we ever had of each of those reaches,” he said. “They’ve found enormous pockets of life.”
As for the city’s plans to cut flows and remove sediment, he said, it’s impossible for him to have an opinion.
“The city doesn’t share what its plans for the river are,” he said, “so how are we supposed to know if what they’re doing is environmentally good, or environmentally bad?”
