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WEITCHPEC — Four decades after the remote Trinity River was dammed and diverted to pour water into California’s farm belt, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt tightened the spigot Tuesday, doubling the water kept in the north and outraging growers hundreds of miles away. 

In emotional ceremonies on the ancestral lands of the 4,000-member Hoopa tribe, Babbitt said his decision fulfilled a pledge he made to the Hoopa and Yurok tribes in 1993 during his first trip to the West as interior secretary. The promise: that he would act on the Trinity before leaving office. 

“We didn’t make it by much,” Babbitt said, noting his tenure ends in a month. 

Babbitt was escorted to the signing ceremonies by Hoopa Chairman Duane Sherman in a dugout canoe hand-hewn from a redwood that, by tribal tradition, was cut seven days after the full moon. 

“This wasn’t just a project. It was a cause invested with a moral imperative,” Babbitt said. 

The Trinity, which joins the Klamath 25 miles from the coast, is at the heart of the culture and economy of the Indian tribes that have inhabited the region for thousands of years. The area is about 300 miles north of San Francisco. 

“For 500 generations, the Hoopa tribe has known a different river than what they see today. Gone are those deep spawning pools, those alluvial gravels, those different salmon at different times of the year, those spring, fall and summer runs. It’s changed,” Sherman said. 

Legislation backed by growers and crafted in the 1950s led to federal projects, completed by the early 1960s, that dammed the river and diverted about 90 percent of the water at Lewiston through huge tunnels to the Sacramento River. 

The goal was to get more water into the Central Valley to produce power and irrigate crops to support California’s swelling population. Indians, whose approval was necessary to consummate the original legislation, said they agreed to the plan after being assured that “not one bucketful of water” would be diverted that would affect fish and wildlife habitat. 

But the runs of salmon, which provide commerce and food, diminished as large amounts of water were taken from the river. 

The 90 percent diversion was later reduced to about 75 percent, but the environmental impacts continued as the salmon populations slowly began to mend. For years, the Indians and their political allies have sought to retain more water in the north. 

Babbitt’s decision meets their demands, at least in part. 

It splits the diversion roughly in half – 52 percent to the Central Valley and 48 percent to be retained in the north. That means the amount of water shipped out to the valley will be reduced by some 300,000 acre-feet. An acre-foot of water, about 330,000 gallons, is roughly the amount used by a family of five in a year. 

Farmers, irrigation districts and utilities say the river is a crucial part of California’s water-delivery and power-generating system, and that reducing the flows southward violates federal promises. 

“Today’s decision was irresponsible,” said John Fistolera of the Northern California Power Agency, a consortium of nearly two dozen cities and farm-belt irrigation districts. He said the decision was based on flawed science and came at a time when California seeks new sources of energy to cope with an electricity crisis. 

“This is the perfect example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing,” Fistolera said. 

The Westlands Water District near Fresno, the nation’s largest agricultural irrigation district, challenged Babbitt’s decision in U.S. District Court. The district’s request for a temporary court order halting the diversion was rejected, but a hearing on the issue is scheduled there in February. 

“Westlands is in a fight for survival,” Thomas Birmingham, Westlands’ general manager and legal counsel, said last week. “We’re going to do whatever we can to protect our water supply.” 

Another issue looms before the diversion actually begins. Several small bridges cross the Trinity and must be removed for environmental and safety reasons before the river flow can be boosted. Money to do that is not yet available – until it is, the bridges will stay in place. 

But Chairman Sherman said the money would be obtained. “We will find it internally,” he said. 

Although little known outside northern California, the Trinity supplies perhaps a seventh of all federal Central Valley Project water in the state and a fourth of the CVP’s electrical power.