10/31/10

The government has spent many millions of dollars in recent decades cleaning up sites contaminated with dioxin and, in extreme cases, relocating residents of entire neighborhoods tainted by the toxin.

But tough new pollution standards proposed by the Obama administration could require additional dioxin cleanups at scores of abandoned factories, military bases, landfills and other locations declared safe years ago, officials say.

If the guidelines receive final approval, federal and state officials will examine sites with known dioxin contamination to identify those needing work and what the work will cost. Among those expected to be reviewed are notorious places such as the former village of Times Beach, Mo., where about 2,000 people were relocated in the 1980s after dioxin-laced waste oil was sprayed on roads to control dust.

The Environmental Protection Agency plan has escalated a decades-long debate over the danger of dioxin, a family of chemical byproducts from industries such as pesticide and herbicide production, waste incineration and smelting. One form of dioxin was in Agent Orange, the defoliant used by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.

The EPA is expected to make a final decision this fall on the new standards. But congressional critics and chemical companies say the agency is acting hastily and should wait until it completes a reassessment of dioxin's health effects in the coming months.

"They're proposing these sweeping changes to regulations without giving us an idea of how many sites will be affected, how many homes will be affected, what the economic impact would be," said Rep. Dave Camp, a Republican whose Michigan district includes a 50-mile-long watershed polluted with dioxin from a Dow Chemical Co. plant. 

EPA officials say they want to move ahead because they are convinced dioxin is hazardous at lower concentrations than previously thought. If necessary, they say, the standards can be adjusted later.

"We're driven by the need to protect against excessive risk of both cancer and non-cancer health concerns," said Mathy Stanislaus, EPA assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response. "We believe (the current standards) are not sufficiently protective and more stringent numbers are needed."

Since 1998, the agency has regarded dioxin soil concentrations of less than 1,000 parts per trillion (ppt) as safe for residential areas. For commercial and industrial zones, 5,000 ppt to 20,000 ppt has been considered safe.

The proposed revisions would drop the safe levels to a fraction as much - 72 ppt for residential areas and 950 ppt for commercial and industrial sites.

Cleanups could be ordered anywhere dioxin readings exceed those thresholds, including sites where previous cleanups used less stringent standards.

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10/29/10

The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has announced that it is suspending its effort to develop a wave energy project off the coast of Humboldt County.

The utility cited “significant permitting challenges” and higher-than-expected projected costs. The proposed configuration and location of the project made it unviable, PG&E said in a statement.

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Click Here for PG&E's press release

Update from the Times Stanbdard, 10/30/10:

Wave project breaks apart; PG&E quits Humboldt coast effort, citing costs, permitting

10/21/10

Humboldt County is blessed by some of the most beautiful rivers in the country. However, users from outside and inside Humboldt County have been taking too much of our water for their own benefit, resulting in great damage to our rivers and placing them in great peril. Our rivers must be protected.

The Eel River is in grave danger. Over 90 percent of the headwaters of the Eel River are diverted to Sonoma County through the Russian River, and yet studies now show the Russian River has too much water. Native salmon and steelhead are currently unable to get past Fortuna and Ferndale. The release of additional water is being held up for more bureaucratic studies. Meanwhile, the fish are at risk of dying.

The Klamath River has suffered from reduced water flow from multiple dams upstream, and even the recent Klamath River agreements are in jeopardy. There is no assurance that the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement (KBRA) will be implemented, as it depends on the state of California issuing a $250 million bond to fund its share of the removal costs. Even removing the dams does not guarantee that there will be adequate water to support the fish, and there remains a great deal of salmon habitat restoration that needs to be done.

Humboldt County has a legal right through Congressional legislation for 50,000 acre feet of water for the Trinity River which has been diverted to the Central Valley and Southern California and sold for huge profits. Despite the efforts of local  tribes (especially the Hoopa tribe), this right has been ignored by the Bureau of Reclamation, and Humboldt County has done little to enforce its rights. It is time for the county together with the tribes to take more aggressive action to force a successful resolution to this matter.

While it is convenient to blame others for our river problems, we are partially to blame for the sad state of our rivers. The perfect example of this is the Mattole River, where years of poor logging practices and a great deal of water diversion have led to the near extinction of the salmon there. This from a river that had an estimated 20,000 salmon in the 1950s; now there may only be a few dozen left.

In Redwood Creek, the salmon population has already been hurt by changes made to the estuary when the levee for Orick was constructed. Most of the upstream land past the National Park is private timberlands which are regulated on their impact on creeks and streams. One of the county's general plan update proposals would remove the working forests and allow unfettered home building without any regard to the impact downstream on the rivers.

Our water is our future. We need to fight to protect it, and we need a plan in place to restore our rivers, our fisheries and protect our water before our rivers are destroyed beyond recovery. Our fishermen have already felt the brunt of the enormous decline in our salmon population. Soon, we may face extinction of a fish that was once so plentiful that legend claimed you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon.

I am calling upon Humboldt County to create a comprehensive river policy that will provide a framework for the county to fight for the return of our water, on the Klamath, on the Trinity and on the Eel, as well as to protect and restore health to the Mattole, the Mad and Redwood Creek.

Outside special interests will always look to use our water for their purposes. That's why a Sonoma County water lobbyist is contributing to conservative candidates in our local elections.

We must stand up for our water and keep the special interests out. We have some of the finest watershed restoration professionals in the country here. I believe that if we can pull together the community, we can begin to pull together a plan to restore our rivers.

It will take strong leadership from our Board of Supervisors and a community solution to resolve these complex issues. Otherwise, we risk being known as the land that used to have Six Rivers.

Patrick Cleary is the president of Lost Coast Communications and is running for 5th District supervisor. He lives in McKinleyville.

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10/12/10

Whale feces -- should you be forced to consider such matters -- probably conjures images of, well, whale-scale hunks of crud, heavy lumps that sink to the bottom. But most whales actually deposit waste that floats at the surface of the ocean, "very liquidy, a flocculent plume," says University of Vermont whale biologist, Joe Roman.

And this liquid fecal matter, rich in nutrients, has a huge positive influence on the productivity of ocean fisheries, Roman and his colleague, James McCarthy from Harvard University, have discovered.

Their discovery, published Oct. 11 in the journal PLoS ONE, is what Roman calls a "whale pump."

Whales, they found, carry nutrients such as nitrogen from the depths where they feed back to the surface via their feces. This functions as an upward biological pump, reversing the assumption of some scientists that whales accelerate the loss of nutrients to the bottom.

And this nitrogen input in the Gulf of Maine is "more than the input of all rivers combined," they write, some 23,000 metric tons each year.

It is well known that microbes, plankton, and fish recycle nutrients in ocean waters, but whales and other marine mammals have largely been ignored in this cycle. Yet this study shows that whales historically played a central role in the productivity of ocean ecosystems -- and continue to do so despite diminished populations.

Despite the problems of coastal eutrophication -- like the infamous "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico caused by excess nitrogen washing down the Mississippi River -- many places in the ocean of the Northern Hemisphere have a limited nitrogen supply.

Including where Roman and McCarthy completed their study: the once fish-rich Gulf of Maine in the western North Atlantic. There, phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, has a brake on its productivity when nitrogen is used up in the otherwise productive summer months. (In other parts of the ocean, other elements are limiting, like iron in some regions of the Southern oceans.)

"We think whales form a really important direct influence on the production of plants at the base of this food web," says McCarthy.

"We found that whales increase primary productivity," Roman says, allowing more phytoplankton to grow, which then "pushes up the secondary productivity," he says, of the critters that rely on the plankton. The result: "bigger fisheries and higher abundances throughout regions where whales occur in high densities," Roman says.

"In areas where whales were once more numerous than they are today, we suggest that they were more productive," say McCarthy.

The numbers of whales that swam the oceans before human harvests began is a question of some controversy. "Conservative estimates are that large whales have been cut to 25 percent," says Roman, "though the work done on whale genetics shows that we're probably closer to 10 percent," of historical levels. To cover the range of possibilities, Roman and McCarthy's study considered several scenarios, estimating current whale stocks as 10, 25, or 50 percent of historical levels.

"Anyway you look at it, whales played a much bigger role in ecosystems in the past than they do now," says Roman, a conservation biologist in the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and the author of a book on whales.

"And everything that we do to enhance recovery and restoration of the great whales to something like pre-harvest levels works against other deleterious effects that humans are causing in the oceans," says McCarthy, like the decline of overall ocean productivity as climate change drives up water temperatures, which, in turn, causes a decline in nutrients for phytoplankton.

Save the whales, save the fishermen

A further implication of the new study is that ongoing calls by some governments to relax international whaling restrictions are ill-considered. Culls and bounty programs would reduce nitrogen and "decrease overall productivity," Roman and McCarthy note.

"For a long time, and still today, Japan and other countries have policies to justify the harvest of marine mammals," says Roman. These countries argue that whales compete with their commercial fisheries.

"Our study flips that idea on its head," Roman says, "Not only is that competition small or non-existent, but actually the whales present can increase nutrients and help fisheries and the health of systems wherever they are found. By restoring populations we have a chance to glimpse how amazingly productive these ecosystems were in the past."

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