(excerpted from Mercury News)
by Julia Scott
"Locals have spent every winter for the past 15 years watching silvery steelhead trout die in Pescadero Marsh. Now they are tired of waiting for state officials to step in and are preparing for a major fight -- in court.
'… When the system is in utter collapse, you don't study that. You take action,‘ said Ronda Azevado Lucas, an attorney representing a group of Pescadero anglers and concerned citizens who are about to file a lawsuit…
An unknown number of juvenile steelhead suffocate each year in the brackish waters of the marsh when rains force open the sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon and the ocean flows in like a fire hose, mixing layers of freshwater and saltwater. Scientists believe this mixing stirs up toxic hydrogen sulfide and robs the water of oxygen the fish require to breathe.
Time is of the essence for one of the last steelhead runs in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. The marsh also hosts the largest population of threatened California red-legged frogs in the state, and the Pescadero group asserts that increasing salinity levels have substantially hurt the frog population as well as the endangered San Francisco garter snake and the tidewater goby.
The endangered Central Coast Coho Salmon disappeared from Pescadero and Butano creeks a few years ago, which feed into the marsh. "The frogs, the snakes and gobies -- they'll come back. But once the fish are gone, they won't come back. They're extinct," said Steve Simms, a local fisher and a driving force behind the lawsuit…
This lawsuit will attempt to tie the actions 15 years ago to the California Endangered Species Act. It focuses on the Coho salmon and the San Francisco garter snake, since they are state-protected species. Simms hinted that a follow-up lawsuit could target the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which protects the red-legged frog under federal law…"