News

Permit could help pulp mill restart; Freshwater Tissue says water board decision will aid funding drive

7/17/10 The water board unanimously adopted the permit, which enforces federal guidelines applied to other similar American mills for millions of gallons of wastewater the mill discharges into the ocean every day. Under the new permit, the mill will have to build a secondary treatment facility at a cost of about $26 million to remove pollutants before the wastewater is released. The permit and a cease and desist order from the board impose a timeline on progress toward tightening pollution controls.

The mill must reduce the amount of total suspended solids -- solid material present in the wastewater -- and biological oxygen demand, a measure of how much oxygen is stripped from the water around the outfall pipe that runs 11/4- miles into the ocean. The mill released about 14 million gallons of effluent a day in the last three years of the mill's operation.

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Mercury found in fish from S.F. water supply

7/7/10 When researchers wanted to test largemouth bass at Lower Crystal Springs Reservoir for mercury levels, the reservoir's managers in San Francisco figured the scientists were simply looking for a clean sample to compare with toxic results at other spots.

Instead, the study showed that the fish in the San Mateo County lake - which collects rainwater as well as water piped in from Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy reservoir - had some of the highest mercury levels in the state.

Now, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which oversees Crystal Springs and the rest of the sprawling network that supplies drinking water to 2.5 million people in San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties, is trying to find the source of the heavy metal, a neurotoxin that can cause developmental damage in children and brain, lung and kidney problems in adults.

"It was a big surprise," said Tim Ramirez, manager for natural resources and land management at the commission's water enterprise division. "We're going to jump on it and try to find out what's going on."

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Countdown on the Klamath: Feds, state beginning environmental examination of dam removal project

7/13/10

Some of the most difficult questions surrounding what would be the largest dam removal project in the world have yet to be answered.

Tearing out four dams on the Klamath River would be an incredibly complicated endeavor, requiring a host of engineering studies, economic analyses and biological investigations before it could start. After a broad array of tribes, agencies, fishing groups, environmental and farming interests -- though not without opposition -- signed two agreements to embark on the project in February, the federal government and the state of California are coming to the public in what they say is an effort to turn over every stone.

Public meetings on the development of an environmental impact statement and environmental impact report have been held in inland areas, and they are now beginning on the coast. A meeting will be held today in Brookings, Ore., Wednesday in Arcata and in Orleans on Thursday.

The sessions, called scoping meetings, are meant to inform the agencies working on the environmental analyses, which will be molded together with a set of technical studies. All together, the information will be used by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to determine if tearing out the dams is in the public's best interest.

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The story behind the salmon's decline

7/12/10

Though I share the frustration about salmon declines in the Mattole expressed in Glen Councilman's July 9th letter, “Sea Lions Need the Management,” his argument doesn't add up. It goes -- “Sea lions have been killing many of the remaining Mattole River salmon. The people in the Mattole who have been working to save the salmon have failed to kill sea lions or let them be killed. They are thus responsible for the loss of the salmon.”

Sorry, Glen. That's not the way it is. Here's just one bit of history that suggests the existence of alternative factors in salmon decline. I knew an old tree faller who, in the first year of the mid-70s drought (1974) when the big chinook were trapped in pools all over the North Coast waiting for rain to let them move upriver, bragged about killing 88 Mattole salmon over 20 pounds (he left the little ones alone). And he was just one guy. Salmon stocks, already in decline, took another nosedive after three consecutive years of this scenario -- heavy poaching on drought-stranded fish.

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Mattole coho on the brink: Groups, agencies to meet on what can be done to spare salmon

6/21/10 Coho salmon in Southern Humboldt County's Mattole River are at a breaking point.

The Mattole Salmon Group counted just three adult coho in the river this winter, and only one redd, the rocky nest in which salmon lay their eggs. It's the lowest number of coho counted since the group began surveys in 2004, and far below the historical estimates of thousands of the fish.

”They're just really on the brink of extinction,” said Mattole Salmon Group Executive Director Keytra Meyer.

Meyer said that the surveys don't span the entire watershed, but she believes it's unlikely teams missed even 50 adult fish. Compounding that, Meyer said surveyors' expanded efforts to locate juvenile coho found them only in Thompson and Ancestor creeks.

The Mattole is at the southern end of the coho salmon's range. The population of fish is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, as are its salmonid cousins chinook salmon and steelhead. The health of the Mattole's coho is considered important to the survival of the evolutionarily significant unit -- a subset of the larger species.

In many California watersheds this year, coho are struggling. In the Shasta River, only nine adult coho were counted this winter, all of them males.

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