Plan aims to help clean up Columbia River
Imagine a river so polluted that some of the creatures living in it must be disposed of as hazardous waste.
That's the river running past Vancouver.
Members of the four-state Northwest Power and Conservation Council, meeting Wednesday at the Vancouver Convention Center, learned about the latest effort to tackle pollution in the Columbia River.
The council, formed by the Northwest Power Act of 1980, typically weighs in on issues related to offsetting the harm hydroelectric dams cause to fish and wildlife habitat in the Columbia River basin. Council officials, however, pointed out that water quality is just as important for the fish living in it.
And, in the case of the Columbia River, water quality isn't great.
The river's long-documented water quality problems range from radioactive waste seeping toward the river at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation to a legacy of now-banned pesticides such as DDT that still linger in the languid reservoirs behind the dams.
Elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, pesticides and mercury have all been detected in the water and sediment, and in tissue of fish consumed by people.
"It's not necessarily worse than what we find in other rivers throughout the country," said Mike Gearheard, director of the Office of Water and Watersheds with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's regional office in Seattle. "But it nevertheless troubles us because we would like the Columbia to run clean."
Perhaps most notoriously, crayfish caught near an old landfill just above Bonneville Dam had so much of one kind of PCB in their tissue -- more than 15,000 times the level considered safe -- that the creatures had to be hauled away for special disposal in Arlington in northwest Washington
In September, the EPA assigned a new urgency to cleaning up the Columbia.
In a strategic plan transmitted to Congress, the agency assigned the Columbia cleanup with a level of importance on par with six other water bodies in the nation: Chesapeake Bay, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Everglades, Long Island Sound and Puget Sound.
The EPA committed itself to the following actions within the next five years:
Working with states and tribes to restore 13,000 acres of riverside wetlands and 3,000 acres of upland habitat to help filter and break down chemical pollutants.
Clean up 150 acres of highly contaminated sediments from known sites, such as the badly polluted Portland Harbor on the Willamette River and the landfill above Bonneville Dam.
Demonstrate a 10 percent reduction in the average concentration of contaminants of concern in water and fish tissue. The EPA will select five or six sites along the course of the river to establish as a baseline for environmental pollutants.
"We're saying this is important, and we're going to do work to have some demonstrated success," said Mary Lou Soscia, the EPA's Columbia River cleanup coordinator. "We're going to show some accountability on moving toward toxics reduction."
Gearheard and Soscia acknowledged they're starting with modest steps.
"Our intention, long-term, is to better understand the river," Soscia said. "It's a start -- instead of taking on the whole basin, which is daunting. Instead, let's put our toes in the water."
This article is republished courtesy of The Columbian:
Plan aims to help clean up Columbia
