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U.S. Sen. John Boozman visited the Norfork National Fish Hatchery on Tuesday, touring the facility and meeting privately with federal and state officials about a crisis that has killed millions of trout over the past two years and threatens the economic backbone of the Twin Lakes region.
Boozman, chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, called the visit productive and said the stakeholders involved have shown a willingness to find solutions.
“We had a really good meeting today and got the people together that are responsible for the hatchery in all different ways,” Boozman told reporters after the tour. “I do believe the people who are directly involved in the hatchery, the lake and downstream have a real willingness to solve the problem.”
Recovery from the ground up
Boozman’s visit came as the hatchery works to rebuild from near-total loss. Stack columns and diffusers installed on the facility’s raceways are designed to add oxygen to the water and help vent hydrogen sulfide gas before it reaches the fish, said Steve Blumreich, president of the Friends of the North Fork and White Rivers and a board member of the Friends of the Hatchery. The equipment is a step forward, but advocates say it is not enough to prevent another catastrophic kill on its own.
“They had to literally start over,” Blumreich said.
John Casey, who oversees operations at the hatchery, walked Boozman and other visitors through the indoor egg room, where trays of rainbow trout eggs shipped from the federal hatchery in Erwin, Tennessee, sat in various stages of development. Brown trout eggs have come from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and Saratoga, Wyoming.
“This is where everything starts for us,” Casey said.
The hatchery had to start over after losing the bulk of its inventory, Casey said. Some of the eggs were already beginning to hatch, with tiny black dots visible through the shells. Casey described the early stages of fry development, from hatching to the first feeding.
“They’re kind of a pinkish orangish color, and they develop and swim,” Casey said. “They’ll turn black, and once they’re all swimming pretty good, we start feeding a little bit.”
The new eggs represent the beginning of a recovery that will take at least 18 months for rainbow trout and up to 22 months for browns to reach stockable size, Casey said. The hatchery coordinates with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, which sets the stocking schedule.
Stephen Jackson, assistant regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, joined Boozman for the tour and the closed-door meeting that preceded it.
The iron staining visible on the outdoor raceways told the story of what happened last fall. In October 2025, a late-season turnover event in Norfork Lake sent water with dangerously low dissolved oxygen, high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide and manganese and elevated temperatures into the hatchery’s intake pipes. Fish deaths escalated from about 1,000 per day to tens of thousands. By the time conditions stabilized, as few as 350,000 small trout remained at a facility designed to hold more than 3 million.
It was the second straight year of major losses. In late 2024, the hatchery lost roughly 750,000 fish under similar conditions. Combined, the back-to-back kills wiped out years of breeding stock and forced the facility to import eggs and fish from out-of-state hatcheries to begin rebuilding.
Blumreich said the 18 to 22-month growing cycle means the hatchery needs two consecutive clean years to fully recover. Another bad fall resets the clock.
“They’ve got to get lucky two years in a row,” Blumreich said. “If they get unlucky that third year, it kicks them back down.”
A 25-year trend
Blumreich said the problem is not a one-time event but a pattern that has been building for a quarter century. He pointed to a FEMA study of the upper White River basin that tracked rainfall and flooding data in the Norfork Lake watershed back to 1950. The data shows a marked increase in significant events over the past 20 to 25 years, driving more organic debris into the lake and worsening the oxygen-depleted conditions that poison the hatchery’s water supply.
“The lake is different than it was 25 years ago,” Blumreich said during Tuesday’s visit.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission takes dissolved oxygen and temperature readings from the lake’s surface to 135 feet twice a month through the summer. That data gives officials a preview of what kind of water quality the hatchery can expect when the lake begins to turn over in the fall. But knowing the danger is coming and being able to stop it are two different things.
The hatchery draws 100 percent of its water from Norfork Lake, roughly a million gallons per hour, through underground pipes from the dam. When the entire water column degrades during a turnover event, there is no clean water to draw from.
The bigger ask
The on-site equipment will help, but Blumreich and other advocates say the long-term solution is a forebay oxygenation system on the lake side of the dam, similar to one installed at Wolf Creek Dam on the Cumberland River in Kentucky. That project, managed by the Corps of Engineers’ Nashville District, used liquid oxygen tanks and vaporizer banks to inject oxygen into the reservoir upstream of the dam. It cost approximately $20 million and took about seven years to complete.
Whether a similar system is feasible at Norfork Dam would require federal funding and coordination among multiple agencies. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers controls lake levels and flood management. The Southwestern Power Administration manages hydroelectric generation. The Fish and Wildlife Service operates the hatchery. Getting all three to align on a project of that scale is the central challenge, and it is the reason Boozman’s involvement matters.
Boozman acknowledged the balancing act between power generation and conservation.
“Electricity is really important, not only traditionally but to continue to produce in such a way that we can all afford it,” Boozman said. “But it’s also making sure that we can continually enjoy this, with fish.”
He called Norfork the largest federal hatchery in the country and framed the stakes in generational terms.
“This is the biggest hatchery in the country and we can be very, very proud,” Boozman said. “We’ll get a good outcome and make it such that we can protect the hatchery and continue from this.”
The goal, he said, is to ensure “our children and grandchildren have the ability to do what we do.”
Economic pressure
Blumreich said the damage extends well beyond the hatchery grounds.
“When the hatchery issues come up and there’s no fish to stock, that really puts a hit on local businesses, guides, resorts, restaurants, other retail businesses,” Blumreich said. “It could have a ripple effect eventually, if it’s not resolved, to real estate values, especially real estate values on the rivers.”
The hatchery crisis has landed on an already stressed tourism economy. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has estimated that Arkansas trout fishing generates more than $100 million annually for the state. Visitors to Baxter County spent approximately $218 million in 2024, according to the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism, supporting around 2,200 local jobs.
Trout fishing is what pulls anglers from as far as Chicago, Nashville, Dallas and Houston. Without fish in the river, the guides do not book, the resorts do not fill and the restaurants lose covers. Emergency fishing restrictions imposed by the AGFC after the 2025 kill, followed by reduced permanent limits adopted in January, have already tightened what anglers can take home.
Blumreich said the coalition of stakeholder groups, including the Friends of the North Fork and White Rivers and the Friends of the Hatchery, has organized around a simple mission: “Gather the facts, inform the public and encourage the decision makers.” The groups have printed 5,000 fact sheets to educate the public and counter misinformation that spread on social media after the fish kill.
The hatchery has stocked Arkansas’s White and North Fork rivers since 1955. Whether it can continue to do so at historic levels depends on what happens between now and the next fall turnover, and on whether the federal investment matches the scale of the problem.
