Ted Frink recalls watching Jacques Cousteau’s television specials when he was growing up in coastal Orange County. “I envisioned myself as Cousteau,” says Frink, a fisheries biologist with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) now approaching retirement. “My folks encouraged my interest in science. I knew I could be a biologist.” That early inspiration sparked a long and varied career, culminating in his work as chief of DWR’s Special Restoration Initiatives Branch and his role in mitigating obstacles to salmon and steelhead passage in streams all over the state.
Frink focused on salmonids and other anadromous fish early on, graduating from Humboldt State in 1984 with a degree in fisheries ecology and a minor in hydrology. His first professional assignment was in Imperial County with what was then the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG), testing ways to control the exotic waterweed Hydrilla in local canals. “This convinced me I could find a job,” he remembers. Then came salmon stream restoration work with the US Forest Service in the Klamath region, collaborating with the Yurok and Hupa tribes. One restoration gig took him to Red Cap Creek, locale of some much-debated 1967 sasquatch footage (the so-called Patterson-Gilman film). Frink didn’t encounter any large hairy primates, although there were “funny smells and strange noises in the night.”
With federal career pathways less than promising, Frink hired on with the East Coast-based consulting firm Ebasco Environmental. That took him to Superfund sites from Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the discharge ponds smelled like chocolate, to a Denver, Colorado locale full of “chemicals no one in their right mind would put together.” He also conducted fisheries and hydrologic studies in support of the Mono Lake Committee’s suit against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which led to a landmark court decision requiring restoration of historic lake levels and tributary stream flows. “This is where the Public Trust Doctrine became a mantra in my career as an ecologist,” says Frink.
One consulting project proved more adventurous than he had bargained for. In the late 1980s, San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts were planning hydropower dams in the Tuolumne River watershed west of Yosemite National Park, although the river was a candidate for wild and scenic status. During that project Frink originated a technique, still in use, for measuring flows in high-velocity streams using climbing gear to hold the surveyors’ boat in position (see diagram). To get to remote creeks, Frink and his crew flew in a Huey 500. Piloting the Huey, the fastest helicopter available at the time, were Vietnam veterans who had survived being shot down in combat. The pilots had to avoid wire cables that had been strung across the Tuolumne canyon in the mining era, made more visible by colored flags and hanging cable cars. On one trip down-canyon, doing a hundred miles an hour, the copter began to shake violently. Landing safely on a sandbar, the pilot found that one of the main rotor blades had “a giant kink in the middle” from impact with an unseen cable. Frink and his co-workers had to hike five miles to get out of the canyon. Investigators later found that the warning flags and cable car had been moved off to the sides. The responsible parties were never identified, and the dams were never built.
Friends suggested that Frink look for a state job as a fisheries biologist; he applied with both DWR and DFG, and was hired by DWR in 1991. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he says. “I knew [how to] work in fisheries but now I had to understand engineers to get things done.” He spent five years in the Division of Environmental Services, initially working on protecting fish from entrainment at water diversions but then on fish passage improvement.
Legislation introduced by State Senator Byron Sher had funded DWR to investigate potential new storage reservoir locations while also identifying inoperable, outdated, or dangerous dams that should be removed, or could improve fish passage to and from habitat up and downstream. “We realized it would be a non-starter if we had to call it the Dam Removal Program — too controversial — so it became the Fish Passage Improvement Program,” Frink says. A five-year study generated a roster of potential sites.
It’s been a long haul, but some dams have come down, or are on their way out like a dam on York Creek in Napa County: “We’re getting close to making that project happen, a dam removal that we initiated for a little creek with a steelhead run that flows through St. Helena. Another I’m proud of was the San Clemente Dam on the Carmel River, where the Coastal Conservancy took the lead — a big milestone for me and a great example of collaborative work.”
He hopes to see dam removals on the Klamath River in the not-too-distant future as well. Frink also worked on the Fremont Weir in the Yolo Bypass, a bottleneck where migrating salmon, steelhead, and sturgeon were repeatedly stranded. “We finally got a design in the works to build a bigger and better fish passage notch in that flood system weir,” he says.
Frink has had a hand in a long list of projects and initiatives: partnering with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and NOAA Fisheries to study options for fish passage over Shasta Dam; helping develop an acoustic sound barrier to guide migrating salmonids at Georgiana Slough on the Sacramento River; restoring tidal wetlands at Dutch Slough; and administering the Urban Streams Restoration Grant Program. Frink recently took on a project at the Salton Sea, creating 4,000 acres of saline pond habitat at the mouth of the New River for fish (including desert pupfish) and migratory waterbirds. The project will replace habitat lost due to Colorado River water transfers and address air quality problems from seabed dust.
Inevitably there have been frustrations. Searsville Dam, owned by Stanford University, has been in limbo for 15 years. But overall, Frink says his years of experience working collaboratively with multiple entities have paid off, whether it’s water districts, tribes, landowners, farmers, or the owners and operators of water facilities. “The biology is straightforward,” he says. “The engineering is unique but straightforward. It’s always working with others that creates the challenge. It’s frustrating at times but rewarding when we actually improve a passage problem.”
After retirement, Frink will have more time for the foot and bicycle races he takes on to raise funds for Breathe California and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and for the sustainable community he’s helping develop in Costa Rica. “I expect I’ll stay involved with fish passage,” he adds. “I have a desire to keep moving it forward.”
Joe Eaton writes about endangered and invasive species, climate and ecosystem science, environmental history, and water issues for ESTUARY. He is also "a semi-obsessive birder" whose pursuit of rarities has taken him to many of California's shores, wetlands, and sewage plants.
Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...
Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems. Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...
Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.