Over the past three weeks, ecologist Ray McNeish and his students have watched as a flowing river suddenly dropped to a dry riverbed.
While conducting biological surveys along the Kern River in Bakersfield, they watched as the water receded into stagnant puddles, then disappeared, leaving expanses of bare sand and cracked mud.
They found fish thrashing about helplessly on the banks and hundreds of dead fish strewn across the riverbed.
“We’re all very surprised at how quickly things have changed,” said McNeish, an associate professor of biology at California State University, Bakersfield. “It’s really sad.”
The river’s sudden disappearance came as a shock to Bakersfield, where residents had grown accustomed to seeing water flowing through parks and under bridges after two wet winters, with some likening the rapid drying to the effect of turning off a giant faucet.
The breach came after an appeals court ruling that cleared the way for city and water managers to reduce water flow upstream, storing some water in dams and sending other water to farms. The water cuts frustrated and angered environmental activists, who have argued in court that chronic overallocation and a rigid water rights framework have severely harmed the river and the wildlife that lives there.
McNeish and a group of graduate students have been recording observations of the disappearing river and have counted more than 3,000 dead fish.
California wildlife officials are now investigating whether drying up the river violates state law.
“The water evaporates so quickly,” McNeish said one morning last week, as he walked across the riverbed to two stagnant ponds.
The smell of decay hung in the air. Dead fish lay strewn on the sand, drying in the sun amid buzzing flies.
McNeish has been examining the fish carcasses since late August and has identified invasive species, including perch, sunfish, mosquitofish and mosquitofish. She and her students also found a native species, the Sacramento saccharine.
“These are some of the biggest I’ve ever seen,” graduate student Alexandra Brown said as she approached several dead fish.
She stopped to photograph a two-foot-long carp gleaming at the edge of a stagnant pond, the murky water filled with the dark shapes of other fish swimming slowly, with nowhere to go.
Brown, who grew up in Bakersfield, said it’s disheartening and frustrating to see so many fish stranded and suffering because of low water levels.
“When I first saw the fish start to struggle, I was in tears,” she said. “There was nothing we could do.”
As a child, Brown loved to walk along the river at Hart Memorial Park on Bakersfield’s northeast side, where water had always flowed, but for most of her life, so much water had been drained that the city’s riverbed generally remained dry.
But that all changed in early 2023, when runoff from a historic winter storm caused the river to flood and once again flow through the city.
“It’s really, really beautiful to see the river flowing and how much it supports,” Brown said.
“Now it seems like there’s very little alive left,” she said. “It was once full of life and it’s such a shame that so many have died.”
McNeish said when he began his ecosystem monitoring survey with his students in July, he had no idea the river’s flows would be reduced so dramatically.
In late August, they began noticing that the water had subsided, exposing sandbars. Since then, McNeish estimates that more than five miles of the river have stopped flowing or dried up completely.
Mr McNeish said he hoped the report would provide more detailed information about how reduced water flows had affected fish and other aquatic life, and help local authorities consider how to avoid such damage to the ecosystem in the future.
As we wade through the sandy riverbed, McNeish uses a ruler to estimate how much the water in an isolated pond has receded since her last visit. She calls it the “snorkel pool” because she used to snorkel in the crystal clear water here and take videos of the fish. Now the pond is murky, and cormorants hunt around the edge.
“There’s a lot of fish being caught here and it’s a good feeding area for the birds at the moment,” Mr McNeish said.
Elsewhere, McNeish stopped in a dry depression and dug a tape measure into tangles of aquatic vegetation to find a dead tadpole, and where a pond had been just a few days earlier, dozens of dead fish lay in the shell-strewn sand.
“There was water here on Saturday,” she said.
They drove upriver to another site, crossed a bike path and dropped into the river channel where they found shallow water, which McNeish said was also receding.
As McNeish and Brown stood chatting, a woman emerged from the bushes and introduced herself.
Bonnie Compton has lived on the river for more than 10 years and lives in a tent with her husband, but she is concerned about the rapid drop in water levels and the deaths of fish.
“You used to be able to sit and watch the fish and enjoy the view,” Compton said.
“This place was actually starting to become beautiful again and now it’s turning into a desert. It’s terrible,” she said. “The fish are being killed. The wildlife is being killed. Everything is dying.”
Compton blamed local authorities and said he suspects the water shutoffs are connected to efforts by city officials to remove encampments and evict homeless people.
“This is public land. They’re taking water away from the public,” Compton said. “We want our water back.”
Her request echoes similar calls by environmental activists. Six environmental groups argued in 2022 that allowing diversion to dry up the river would violate California’s public trust doctrine, which says certain natural resources must be preserved for the public.
The city controls several weirs through which the water is diverted. Some of the water is used by Bakersfield, but most of it is used by the Agricultural Water District to supply water to farms that produce crops such as almonds, pistachios, grapes and oranges.
An appeals court ruling earlier this year froze a judge’s months-old order to keep the river flowing and fish supplies intact. The ruling effectively allowed the river to dry up while the case was pending in Kern County Superior Court, said William McKinnon, an attorney for Water Audit California, one of the plaintiffs in the case. Environmental groups petitioned the California Supreme Court to challenge the ruling, but the petition was denied.
“Until recently, the city of Bakersfield kept the water in the river, but now they’re choosing not to,” McKinnon said. “They turned the water off and all the fish died, but we’re going to see a court case at some point.”
The lack of water in the river and mass fish deaths has caused concern in the local community.
California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials received the complaint and are reviewing the fish kill information for possible violations of state law, said Julie Vance, a regional manager for the department. One relevant provision of the state’s Fish and Wildlife Code says dam owners “must always allow sufficient water to flow” to keep fish populations downstream of the dam in good condition.
Vance said the investigation is somewhat complicated because the city’s water system is controlled by multiple entities.
“Obviously, this is a really unfortunate situation,” Vance said. “I think everybody was excited to have water flowing in the river again, so it’s unfortunate that it has ended up like this this summer.”
At a Bakersfield City Council meeting last week, several residents condemned the fish kills and called on council members to return water to the river.
Kelly Damien, a spokeswoman for the group Bring Back the Khan, called on city officials to “work together to create a healthy, flowing river.”
“We want our river back,” Damien says, “and it’s not an easy task. We face many challenges: climate change, a vast network of canals, and highly invested industries. But the hardest problem we face is an old way of thinking.”
City Councilman Eric Elias told residents he has heard their concerns and sees a need for better communication. He suggested starting regular meetings on the issue.
“The death of 3,000 fish in the river is a failure on our part and I think we can do better,” Arias said.
The city said in a Sept. 3 news release that the water department is “reducing flows” in the river so it can carry out infrastructure work such as maintaining dams and removing sediment from the waterway.
City Councilman Bob Smith highlighted recent court decisions that led to the draining of the river.
“We’ve been using the water that we own, the water that we have a right to, to the best of our ability,” Smith said.
Officials say the city stores some of its water resources in the Lake Isabella reservoir upstream in preparation for anticipated dry years, and much of the river’s water is currently diverted to agricultural water districts.
Smith said he and other officials “want to put more water in the river” and “will continue to work with you in that direction.”
Bakersfield City Attorney Virginia Gennaro suggested residents should take their message to agricultural irrigation districts that use large amounts of water, such as the Kern Delta Water Reservoir District and the North Kern Water Reservoir District.
“Tell them why you need water in the river,” Gennaro said, “and be as open with them as you have been with us.”
Mr Damien said after the meeting he was disappointed with the council’s response.
“Not one mayor has said he’s really going to champion this issue,” she said. “This was performative leadership. It wasn’t real leadership.”
