(The Epoch Times)—Siskiyou County, in the northernmost part of California, declared a state of emergency March 26 and requested state assistance to help residents impacted by the state’s dam removal project on the Klamath River.
Since January, residents living along the river have watched as the 100-year-old Copco Lake disappeared after the state began drawing down dams along the bi-state waterway. The state’s plan to remove four dams along the river is part of its strategy to restore salmon fisheries and habitat.
The county’s board of supervisors approved the emergency declaration resolution at a special meeting Tuesday on a 4–1 vote. Officials said they hoped state assistance could help them monitor the effects of sediment released that has sent algae and chemicals downriver into communities and affected fish.
“This is a proactive move,” Board Chair Michael Kobseff told residents at the special meeting. “The proclamation is to get attention from the state of California and hopefully somewhere from the federal agencies. … It’s just to provide assurance to the community.”
After samples tested showed high levels of arsenic and other metals, county residents were warned this month not to drink or touch Klamath River water that has already killed scores of fish and some wildlife.
Supervisor Ed Valenzuela voted against the resolution, saying the river’s problems are getting “plenty of spotlight” and questioned what the emergency declaration could add.
County leaders said they are hoping the declaration will raise alarms with the state to monitor the changing river conditions.
“This decision marks a pivotal moment in our county’s response to the evolving landscape, emphasizing the importance of preparedness and collaborative action,” county officials said in a press release this week.
The Governor’s Office of Emergency Services told The Epoch Times the county’s request for an emergency declaration “has been transmitted to the state and will be evaluated on its merits,” according to the office’s spokesman, Brian Ferguson.
Rick Dean, director of the county’s community development department, said since the start of the dam removals, the look of the river water has varied. Some days it resembles the color of chocolate milk and on others it’s black, depending on its flow and how much sediment has been dumped into it, he said.
“There will be times where it’s worse,” Mr. Dean told The Epoch Times. “All in all, it’s not good.”
After the Siskiyou County Environmental Health Department’s safety alert this month saying residents should avoid the river, due to high levels of arsenic, lead, and aluminum, one mother told county supervisors, also this month, her son was having nose bleeds. She said tests of their water showed high levels of chromium present.
Earlier this month, the Siskiyou County Department of Natural Resources released a report stating about 4.3 million tons of sediment had accumulated in the reservoirs over the past 80 years, with more than half of it in Copco Lake. The sediment is expected to eventually flush downriver after the dams are removed.
The state has proposed planting vegetation to stabilize the sediment, according to the report, but such is not yet in place, causing public health concerns, the report said.
The county’s environmental health division collected water quality samples which show there are “higher than baseline concentrations of arsenic, lead, and aluminum,” and nickel, according to the report.
The levels are above federal and state water quality standards, and may cause harmful health effects if consumed, the county reported.
“Therefore, it is not safe to consume the Klamath River surface water,” the county said in the report.
The county additionally advised residents in January not to attempt to rescue animals in the river for their own safety and well-being.
“Going into the mud can pose serious risks to your safety and well-being,” the county said in the alert.
Matt St. John, an environmental program manager with the state’s North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, which oversees the area in question, brushed off the county’s concerns at Tuesday’s meeting.
“The water board does not believe the Klamath River water quality conditions pose any public health risk associated with potential well contamination, recreational water contact, or to drinking water systems,” Mr. St. John said.
The state anticipated water quality to diminish during the dam removal project in the short term, he said. The only drinking water affected was a system that fed a state rest stop, according to Mr. St. John.
However, no one should be drinking surface water from the river without treating it, he said. The water board also told county supervisors it believes metals from sediment would not affect the area’s groundwater wells located near the river.
Some residents who spoke at the county’s meeting, however, said they remained concerned.
William Simpson, a rancher in the area, said he supported the proclamation and state of emergency.
“We need to err on the side of citizens,” Mr. Simpson said. “There’s a lot of things going wrong. There’s a lot of unintended consequences here. The people up and down the river are exposed to what’s going on in that river.”
Longtime Copco Lake resident Chrissie Reynolds held back tears as she talked about the animals trapped in mud after the lake drained in January. She said she heard gunshots Jan. 27 when the first two deer stuck were euthanized by the state. Then, eight more were killed, she said.
“I have not had proper sleep, proper rest,” she said. “Today’s [my] wedding anniversary and I haven’t had time to even think about that. Or my daughter’s 16th birthday, or Easter or anything.”
Resident Holly Hansard also said the community has suffered an extreme loss.
“It’s devastating, and it is shocking,” she told supervisors. “The full extent of the emergency hasn’t really come to surface. But we need a victory. We need a little bit of love.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.