An Ecological Disaster on Pine Creek
Local farmers find hundreds of pounds of dead trout after a creek is diverted into an irrigation ditch.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Thousands of trout, ranging from a few inches in length to half-pounders, are reported dead in the bed of Pine Creek below the intake of the Burlingame ditch. Farmers in the vicinity, learning of the slaughter, hastened to the creek and scooped up the fish by the half-bushel. The stream was dammed up a few days ago to furnish water for the ditch. The lower part of the creek was left high and dry, resulting in fish being stranded in shallow pools. These pools soon evaporated, leaving the fish dead in the creek bottom. Pine Creek is a small stream heading on Basket Mountain and winding its way through the Hudson Bay country, finally emptying into the Walla Walla River. Trout once abounded in its cool waters. Parties who brought news to Walla Walla Saturday say several hundred pounds of trout were lying in the creek bottom the day after the water was diverted.
“The stream was dammed up a few days ago to furnish water for the ditch. The lower part of the creek was left high and dry.”
This 1903 account of water diversion causing mass fish mortality highlights the long-standing conflict in the Walla Walla Valley between agricultural water needs and the health of local salmonid populations. The struggle to balance irrigation rights with river ecology remains a central, unresolved argument in regional environmental policy today.
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