April showers bring sad rainbows at the Jim Hinkle Spring River Fish Hatchery at Mammoth Spring.

In April, a flood devastated the hatchery for the second time in eight years. A catastrophic flood also wrecked hatchery in April 2017.

Unlike the federal trout hatcheries at Greers Ferry Lake, Lake Norfork and at Mammoth Spring, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission owns the Spring River hatchery. It supplies catchable-size rainbow trout to the Spring River and also to the Commission's Community Fishing Program.

Built on an island, the Jim Hinkle Spring River Hatchery is defenseless against flooding. All of the fencing was ripped away. Roads and foundations were undercut and destabilized. Commission staff had to restore the bridge to the facility to a sufficient condition to allow large trucks onto the property to haul away debris.

Workers encountered many dead fish and tons of silt. Jason Miller, the commission's assistant chief of fisheries, said 26 dump truck loads of silt have been removed from the property so far. The screens that catch and remove vegetation from the hatchery's inlets must be removed and inspected. If another flood occurs before the screens are restored, further damage will be inevitable.

The commission is trying to assess the extent of damage to the dam. The dam's foundation might have been undermined. Divers will have to make that evaluation. That's dangerous and expensive.

Ironically, this would be the first year since the 2017 flood that Spring River Hatchery trout production would have been at 100% capacity. The loss wasn't total. About 150,000 rainbow trout at the state hatchery survived the deluge and remain confined to tanks. All of the trout being raised at the federal hatchery at Mammoth Spring were lost.

Ultimately, flood losses and loss of production while the hatchery is renovated will reduce the number of trout that are available to be stocked in state waters. Miller said the commission obtained 24,000 trout from Wyoming, but that's well short of the 750,000 trout that would have been available from the hatchery. The commission must do some hard math to allocate the few trout that are available.

Christy Graham, the commission's trout program coordinator, said significantly fewer trout will be stocked into all of the state's major trout fisheries. The Little Red River's trout fishery is very important to resident and non-resident anglers. Anglers won't notice, but this would have been the year that stockings would have increased in nearly a decade.

The Beaver Tailwater below Beaver Lake is very important to Northwest Arkansas, and anglers come from all over the world to fish the tailwater trout fisheries below Bull Shoals and Norfork lakes.

"The Little Red isn't getting cut from last year because they've already been operating at a lower stocking level during the last seven or eight years, but they won't see the increase we were starting to move toward," Graham said in a press release. "The Beaver and Bull Shoals tailwaters will see a 15% reduction in stocking, and the Norfork will see a 30% reduction. As a biologist, I don't want to make stocking cuts anywhere, but we have to balance the needs of every fishery while the recovery is taking place."

Spring River Hatchery fish are not stocked at the Beaver, Norfork or Greers Ferry tailwaters. Trout from the Greers Ferry and Norfork hatcheries cannot be stocked on non-mitigation waters whose ecosystems were reconfigured by the big hydroelectric projects. However, the Spring River trout fishery will probably be the least affected because an entire year's production got washed into the river from the state and federal hatcheries, even if prematurely.

"We recently completed an electrofishing sample of the Spring River, and catch rates were nearly four times higher than we typically see," Graham said. "We likely won't resume stocking there for at least a few months to ensure what trout we have can go to some of the other trout waters that will see some lean stocking in the short term."

Graham said she will not recommend changing trout fishing limits or regulations, but she urged anglers to handle fish carefully to reduce stress-related mortality.