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6/29/13 





Millions of krill — a tiny shrimp­like animal at the center of the ocean food web — have been washing up on beaches from Clam Beach, Redwood National Park and Crescent Beach to Southern Oregon for the past few weeks.



Scientists are not sure why.



“We’re still looking into it. We got reports locally a couple days after the mass strandings,” said Joe Tyburczy, Humboldt County coastal specialist with California Sea Grant Extension in Eureka. Most local sightings of the event happened between June 16 and June 18, and were reported mostly by beach goers, he said.



National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer Bill Peterson says the krill may have been blown into the surf by strong winds while mating near the surface, and then been dashed on the beach.



The species is Thysanoessa spinifera. They are about an inch long, and live in shallower water along the Continental Shelf. They have been seen in swaths 5 feet wide, stretching for miles on beach­es from Eureka to Newport, Ore. Some were still alive.



“It’s pretty significant. We’re working with other agencies to gather informa­tion on this event,” Tyburczy said. Cal Sea Grant is trying to get observations from people who have observed the mass strandings. “Luckily, some people had the presence to collect samples and send them to NOAA,” he added.

“There has definitely been something going on,” Peterson said from Newport. “People have sent us specimens. In both cases, the females had just been fertil­ized. That suggests they were involved, maybe, in a mating swarm. But we’ve had a lot of onshore wind the last two weeks. If they were on the surface for some reason, and the wind blows them toward the beach, and they are trapped in the surf, that is the end of them.” Or they may have fallen victim to low levels of oxygen in the water, said Tyburczy. A recent ocean survey showed lower than normal oxygen lev­els in some locations. If the krill went to the surface to get oxygen, they could have been blown onshore, he said.



For some reason, people did not see gulls and other sea birds eating them, he added.



Peterson said low oxygen conditions, known as hypoxia, are a less likely explanation because they normally occur later in the summer.



Tyburczy added that washed up krill were seen June 21 as far south as Bodega Bay.



The mass strandings are unusual, but not unheard of, Peterson added. There is no way to tell yet whether this repre­sents a significant threat to a source of food for salmon, rockfish, ling cod and even whales.

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6-26-13

The reactor of the former nuclear power plant on Humboldt Bay is almost completely dismantled and the next phase of decommissioning will see the installation of a rubberized concrete wall around the reactor site.

A team of experts from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) was at Eureka’s Wharfinger Building on June 19 to update the community on the long-shuttered nuclear facility’s decommissioning.

Components of the reactor are being cut apart in a 26-foot-deep pool of water that also holds the last batch of the reactor’s spent fuel rods. The pool is encased by a steel liner and the spent rods are in a cask made of steel covered with concrete.

Bill Barley, a PG&E decommissioning manager, said the destinations of the radioactive materials vary and the “lesser activated materials” will be stored in liners for transfer to a burial site in Utah. The “mid-range” of the radioactive components can’t be accepted at the Utah site but can go to a site in Texas, he continued.

There is no waste disposal site that will accept the most highly activated materials – the spent fuel – so the cask that contains it will join others that are encased in an on-site storage facility.

Barley said the spent fuel casks will “stay on-site until such time as the Federal Government comes up with a place where that can go to – right now there is none.”

Once the spent fuel cask is moved and the reactor’s internal components are shipped out for disposal, the pool will be removed and enclosed around a concrete wall. Then the pool site will be filled with clean sand and soil.

Completion of work and the termination of the plant’s license are expected sometime in 2019.

The nuclear plant was built in 1963 and was shut down in 1976 after seismic faults were discovered near the reactor. The plan was to retrofit and refuel it but changes in nuclear regulatory standards made reopening financially infeasible.

PG&E got a license to store nuclear fuel onsite in 1988 and the company has been working on decommissioning the plant since.
Brittany McKannay, PG&E’s regional representative, said that much of the facility has been dismantled and now that the Humboldt Bay Generating Station is operating, “We can really put all of our efforts into taking down the structures on the remaining sections of the site.”

She added, “If you looked at the site now compared to a year ago you would see it looks much different – there’s a lot changing year to year.”

A variety of local, state and federal agencies are overseeing the work and McKannay said the goal is to bring the site to safe soil and well-water standards. A coastal trail and environmental habitat uses are being considered for the post-clean up.

The open house’s intent was to update the community on the decommissioning work and to detail effects like traffic impacts, said McKannay. “More importantly, we want to make sure community members have access to our experts,” she continued.

The two-hour event drew strong attendance that included Jen Kalt, the policy manager for Humboldt Baykeeper. She was asked how confident she is about the safety of the storage and disposal process.

“Not very confident at all but there’s a lot of good people involved trying to do the best they can,” she responded.

Kalt said she’s been on a tour of the plant and realized that “this power plant was never designed to be dismantled – these people are doing an amazing thing, trying to figure out where all the rebar and concrete is.”

She described the significantly-dismantled plant as a “bizarre” sight. “It’s like walking into the middle of Doctor Strangelove,” said Kalt, referring to film director Stanley Kubrick’s fanciful but relevant exploration of atomic age culture.

Kalt highlighted the exponential gap between the plant’s cost and the cost of getting rid of it. The nuclear facility cost about $22 million to build and PG&E Decommissioning Manager Kerry Rod said $382 million has been spent on decommissioning as of last May.

He said $950 million is expected to be spent by the time the work’s done.

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6/26/13

If you’ve been following the great East-West Train Dreaming that has been happening in these parts for the last year or so, you’ve no doubt been bewildered by the great variety of new or new-to-us public and private organizations that have sprung up to hasten the day when that glorious golden spike is pounded into place round about Hayfork or somewhere. You’ve got your Upstate California, your Upstate RailConnect Committee, your Land Bridge Alliance, your Humboldt Bay Harbor Working Group, your this, your that, etc., etc.

Which is what and what is who?

The picture was defuzzed a little this morning, when one of those groups — the Upstate RailConnect Committee — met in Humboldt County for the first time this. The RailConnect Committe, if I have this right, is a subset of Upstate California, a heretofore obscure (at least on this side of the mountains) quasi-public economic development council serving the entirety of Northern California.

Representatives from Trinity and Tehama Counties, through which the great east-west railroad will run in the extremely unlikely event that it is built, were in attendance, alongside Rex Bohn (representing Humboldt County) and Lance Madsen and Mike Newman (representing the City of Eureka). Also on the committee were former Eureka City Manager David Tyson, representing the Land Bridge Alliance, and former Humboldt Bay Harbor District CEO David Hull, representing … himself, it seems.

There was a good deal of questioning from the public about the nature of the RailConnect Committee itself. Is it a governmental agency? Is it a nonprofit group? Does it have staff? How can one contact it? What are its obligations to public transparency, or the Brown Act, or anything? Where are its agendae and minutes posted?

The answer, from Upstate California General Manager Allison O’Sullivan, amounted to the fact that Upstate California, of which the RailConnect Committee is a part, is something like a nonprofit economic development corporation that chooses to act as a governmental agency. She and Tyson said that there was much concern, at the committee’s formation, that it act as transparently as possible, even though their attorney told them they didn’t have to. So even though meetings of the committee are not noticed on Upstate California’s own website, they will be noticed on the sites of the City of Eureka and other member groups.

There is no staff. People seeking to contact the committee for information or input were directed to contact Eureka City Councilmember Lance Madsen, the committee’s chair.

So the fact that it is a non-governmental agency accounts for the presence of the two non-government actors on its board — Tyson and Hull, or, in committee parlance, “the Daves.” Hull led the most substantive portion of the day’s proceedings: A discussion of what would happen were some rich person to come along and offer money to fund an east-west feasiblity study? (Remember: Despite the amount of energy being poured into this, locally, we’re still in the pre-feasible stage. The committee is trying to find money to fund a study to determine if a new rail line is even feasible.)

Hull laid out a couple of scenarios as regards this hypothetical private party wishing to drop a bunch of cash into east-west feasibility and asked for committee input. What if this private party just wants to fund his own study, cutting Upstate RailConnect out of the loop entirely? What if he dropped a bunch of cash into Tyson’s Land Bridge Alliance, with the proviso that the money be forwarded to Upstate RailConnect to fund the study with no strings attached? What if he dropped a bunch of cash into the Land Bridge Alliance in the same way, but with a bunch of strings attached — i.e., that some, most or all of the information in the study be kept confidential?

It was the third scenario that got board members talking the most. In general, there was a great deal of disapprobation. A representative from Trinity County made the point that if this ever actually gets going, the impacts on the public would likely be enormous, and would run the gamut — environmental, economic, infrastructural. She was not comfortable with any part of the hypothetical third scenario, except that maybe she could see market research aspects of the study kept close in such an event. Her point of view seemed to carry the day among committee members. Most of them are, in fact, elected officials.

There was, perhaps, only one other major matter of note, and that was the Humboldt Bay Harbor District’s lightly simmering feud with the committee. For one, the Harbor District — through whose territory the massive goods anticipated by the eastie-westies would, after all, run — would like a seat on the committee. The committee is disinclined to give them one.

Why? That leads to the second source of contention. The Harbor District is skeptical of the possibility of east-west rail — current CEO Jack Crider has a great deal of experience with short-line railroads, and has publicly turned up his eyebrows at the possibility of a new Eureka-Red Bluff line. The district has, in fact, commissioned its own small ($20,000) pre-feasibility study that explores the restoration of rail service to the North Coast. Harbor District Chair Mike Wilson told the committee that his agency just received a draft report from its consultants yesterday, and that he hoped that the RailConnect committee would be allowed to hear its findings at a future meeting. No date was set, but Wilson and Madsen agreed to find a date sometime in the future.

Then they adjourned to go have lunch at the Samoa Cookhouse and ride the Madaket around the bay for a while. 

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6/20/13

After spending his entire career hoping to spot a rare North Pacific right whale, researcher John Ford had given up ever being able to see one of the rarest animals on earth.

The last time one of the majestic mammals was seen off the coast of B.C. was in 1951 — before the 58-year-old scientist was even born.

That was until last week, when Ford and fellow department of fisheries and oceans whale researchers James Pilkington and Graeme Ellis spent a day near Haida Gwaii monitoring a whale that’s the size of a semi-trailer and weighs more than 20 SUVs combined.

“It was a thrilling experience,” said Ford. “We would never have imagined that we would be able to see one. They are critically endangered and extremely rare.”

Ford estimates there are between 38 and 50 of the animals left on the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean and no more than a few hundred in the world.

This sighting south of Langara Island was only the seventh in the past century, he said.

The right whale — so named because it was the “right” whale to hunt for its blubber and its valuable baleen plates that hang from the roof of its mouth to filter out everything but its preferred meal of the tiny zooplankton called copepods — was harpooned almost into extinction in the mid-1800s.

In one decade back then, 30,000 of them were killed in one decade, said Ford.

“They were big, slow and easy to float once they were killed,” he said.

The right whales were coveted for their 500 baleen plates, which are three metres long and 25 cm wide, because the substance was strong and flexible and used for various products, including “whalebone” corsets popular a century ago.

The North Pacific right whale is mostly black, large and stocky, and is easily recognizable for its highly arched jaw and growths of white thickened skin on its head called callosities, according to the DFO website.

“If you do spot one, you may have just won the marine mammal lottery,” according to the DFO.

Hunting of the animals have been banned since 1935 but the Soviets continued to hunt them illegally in the 1960s, which likely delayed their recovery, said Ford.

He said it’s “very, very doubtful” that any nation would continue to hunt it because of its endangered status but the whales are at risk from collisions with ships and getting entangled in fishing line.

“It was not only exciting personally to see one of the whales but it was wonderful for us to be able to confirm that this species still exists,” said Ford.

He and his colleagues for identification purposes videotaped and photographed the whale, coming to within 25 to 50 metres of it but not close enough to disturb it.

The researchers were able to collect some of its prey and its scat, which they can analyze to genotype the animal through its DNA and learn more about it, such as its gender.

The Canadians have already compared photos with the Americans’ catalogue of 19 whales and none of them match, which means they likely have discovered a new whale.

Ford said they spent as long as they could monitoring the whale, which seemed “pretty indifferent” to their presence.

“It’s an opportunity we may never have again,” he said.

This is the first sighting in over 50,000 km of whale surveys off the B.C. coast over the past 10 years, said Ford, who is head of the cetacean research program at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo.

But he said he remains hopeful that the sighting is a sign that the population will survive. The DFO has been implementing a strategy to help it recover.

The whale was first spotted by Pilkington on June 9 and Ford and Ellis joined him on June 13 to observe the whale.

“When we realized what we were looking at, we were in a state of disbelief,” said Pilkington in a press release. “I never thought I’d see a North Pacific right whale in my lifetime, let alone have the opportunity to study it over several days. I was ecstatic!”

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