Environment

Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission Endangering Fishing Waterways For… Cash?

July 13, 2011, by 7 comments

Ãœber-environmental writer Elizabeth Royte recently fired up an article about the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission conducting some remarkably questionable sales to energy companies. To whit:

Gas companies in southwestern Pennsylvania are leasing portions of streams from Pennsylvania’s Fish and Boat Commission to build a 16.5-mile pipeline to move locally drilled gas to larger markets. Why is an agency that promotes sport fishing making it easier for gas companies to operate in and around waterways used for fishing? Because it’s $36 million short on cash to repair dams in danger of collapse (the dams are classified as high risk because they’re incapable of holding 50 percent of the maximum precipitation that a region could receive). The Fish Commission also plans to sell water to the gas companies for use in drilling operations. (Wait: aren’t surface waters in the public trust—owned by the people? Maybe they’re selling groundwater – the story is unclear.) So far, about one-third of the commission’s waterways—some 14,000 acres–are potential drilling sites.

It gets worse; not only will the pipeline cross a few bazillion streams and wetlands, but they’re going to let the industry police itself?

The pipeline will cross wetlands 71 times and streams 41 times. Kelly Swan, a spokesperson for Williams Production Appalachia, which is pursing a permit to drill under Donegal Lake, a popular trout-fishing spot in Donegal Township, among other sites, minimizes the potential for environmental damage: “Company inspectors will be stationed along the pipeline daily to ensure that construction adheres to state DEP requirements.” Very reassuring: the company guards itself, under requirements set by a notoriously drill-friendly agency. (We’ve seen how well this worked with BP in the Gulf, ExxonMobil in Yellowstone, and so on.)

Royte is not a fisheries person, but she is a meticulous writer and researcher, and I wonder if any of the Undergrounders in Pennsylvania can offer any information or perspective?

See you at the pipeline, Tom Chandler.

More on The Yellowstone River Oil Spill

July 7, 2011, by 2 comments

The latest from the Button Valley Bugle about the Exxon spill in the Yellowstone River:

In what seems to have become SOP for the oil giant, they told federal regulators today that their pipeline was buried 12 feet below the streambed of the Yellowstone. On Tuesday ExxonMobil Pipeline Co. President Gary Pruessing said, before talking to the Exxon PR department, “Soundings to determine the pipeline’s depth were taken in December, and at the time, the line appeared to be 5 to 8 feet below the riverbed,”. On Tuesday, a company executive told the Governor that they had shut the line down within 30 minutes of the spill. The new documents show that the pipe leaked for nearly an hour before being shut down. Initially, company spokesmen said that they saw “very little soiling” of the river banks beyond the 10-mile mark. Currently the company has workers sopping up oil along a 25-mile stretch of the river and there were reports of a 25-mile long slick near Hysham, nearly 100 miles downstream.

The rest of his article here.

Update On The Yellowstone Oil Spill

July 4, 2011, by 1 comment

Update on the Yellowstone River oil spill response from the Button Valley Bugle (the news isn’t that wildly good).

Exxon Pipeline Ruptures, Spills Oil Into Yellowstone River

July 2, 2011, by 10 comments

The same wacky gang who brought you the Exxon Valdeez adventure apparently spilled an “undetermined” amount of oil into the Yellowstone River; a 12″ Exxon pipeline running beneath the Yellowstone River ruptured early July 2.

The spill began near Laurel, MT (not far from Billings MT):


View Larger Map

Emergency evacuations were conduced near the spill, though interestingly, counties farther down the river never received notification of the spill from either the state or Exxon.

More as it happens…

Our Tuesday A.M. “Save a Steelhead” Post

June 28, 2011, by No comments yet

Moldy Chum posted an impressive list of actions you can take to rid our little rock of another damaging steelhead hatchery, this one the Snider Creek version on the Olympic Peninsula’s Sol Duc River.

You can read Moldy’s post (it lays out the whole argument, including links to other sources), or simply invest a few seconds sending an automated comment (not as much impact as a personal email, but fast) at this link.

From Moldy:

We need you and your friends that are interested in saving wild steelhead in this river to write the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) quickly and tell them it is time to establish wild steelhead gene banks and management areas where wild fish can reproduce without the impacts of hatchery fish.

This action will allow the early run of wild stocks to recover genetically and productively to a level similar to those of the 1950s—prior to hatcheries—and create an early fishery as valuable as the late winter run.

Over the last 25 years the Snider Creek Hatchery on the Sol Duc River has negatively altered the genetics of the population, reduced its productivity and encouraged increased fishing effort for hatchery fish, which has been detrimental to the wild run.

Click here, and in about 20 seconds, your voice can be heard.

The Underground’s Crazy of the Day: Battle Creek Restoration

June 22, 2011, by 3 comments

Your mother probably taught you it wasn’t smart to put on clean clothes before you played in mud puddles, but the state of California is doing exactly that on the Battle Creek restoration project (from the Sacramento Bee’s uber-enviro writer Matt Weiser):

Here at Battle Creek, an icy stream that tumbles off Mount Lassen, state and federal agencies are spending $128 million to bring endangered salmon back to 48 miles of water blocked by dams for nearly a century.

At the same time, another arm of state government is allowing clear-cut logging on thousands of acres just upstream, which some scientists say could jeopardize the costly restoration project.

It gets worse once you read that Sierra Pacific isn’t just logging, they’re clear-cutting:

Sierra Pacific uses a technique called “even-age management,” the California regulatory term for clear-cutting. The goal is to convert a large percentage of its acreage, essentially, to pine plantations.

Sierra Pacific has submitted 16 logging plans over the past 12 years for almost 20,000 acres in the Battle Creek watershed.

In a typical even-age logging plan, all vegetation is removed from multiple 20-acre parcels, leaving a checkerboard pattern of bare ground that may span 1,000 acres or more. One or two oaks and standing dead trees are usually left as “habitat diversity.”

Then each parcel is replanted with pine seedlings. Herbicides are sprayed to eliminate competing vegetation before planting.

The forest service land just up my road contains several “plantations” which — if you ski it in the winter and look at the animal tracks — supports a lot fewer animals than the wild stuff.

Because Sierra Pacific is just so damned concerned with the well-being of salmon in Battle Creek, they strong-armed a local conservancy nonprofit (they sit on the board) to not include a 2004 report which said that upwards of half the streams in the watershed were already compromised by excessive sediment.

Of course, Sierra Pacific has also said they’re cutting as much as they can as fast as they can now because the regulatory climate will only get tighter.

Lovely.

They’re helping to create the disasters that will eventually force the regulations they’ll then attack as being unfair.

See you on Battle Creek, Tom Chandler.

The California Water Wars: Ag Posts Record Revenues in 2008, 2009 – Even As They Predicted Ruin

June 17, 2011, by 1 comment

Remember the stories about the rampant unemployment in the agricultural sector when a judge temporarily stopped the Delta pumps from removing record amounts of water from California’s Sacramento Delta?

How the drought in California was decimating agriculture, and that if you didn’t support essentially open-ended pumping of water from the Delta, you were a smelt-hugging terrorist who favored fish over people?

Remember the appearance of famous blowhard Sean Hannity, who may have set a record by not getting a single fact right in his televised report about the water crisis?

Turns out the truth was rather different than we were told. From the NY Times comes an article about a new Pacific Institute study:

Farmers and most other residents in the state’s breadbasket blame environmentalism run amok for forcing them to leave fields unplanted when the water they hoped for was diverted to benefit the endangered ecosystem of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. But the institute’s report, based on an extensive analysis of federal and state data as well as the records of water districts, argues that environmental constraints played at best a minor role in water shortages and rural unemployment.

If any single factor is to blame for rural unemployment, the analysis concludes, it is the collapse of the construction industry, which was crucial to the state’s booming growth in the early 2000s. The report noted that “strong demand for California farm products on national and global markets also kept both crop prices and revenue high throughout the drought.” The industries that suffered disproportionate harm from the drought, the report said, were hydropower and salmon fishing, not agriculture.

That’s not the explanation that the Fox News commentator Sean Hannity offered for the Central Valley’s troubles two years ago, when the photograph above was taken. In 2009, fallow fields sprouted signs reading “Congress-Created Dust Bowl” — an apparent reference to congressional support for the Endangered Species Act, one of the laws involved in curtailing water supplies from the federal Central Valley Project.

But the report notes that in two of the drought years, 2008 and 2009, California’s crops brought record high revenues. And while some Central Valley counties, particularly in the southern portions of the valley, suffered significant declines in crops like citrus fruits, overall unemployment in the agricultural sector rose in lockstep with — or even a bit more slowly than — unemployment in other sectors.

Record revenues and unemployment on a par with other sectors aren’t exactly what was promised.

Not by a long shot.

It’s always easy to blame environmental restrictions when people don’t get all the water they want, though it’s pretty clear that farmers–on the whole–did a hell of a lot better than salmon fishermen (commercial and sport), both of whom essentially took a couple years off.

Rather than face the reality that California’s water is badly overpromised–and then get on with solving the issue in a way that doesn’t decimate the Delta, salmon and their related industries–some agricultural concerns feel free to point fingers, misinform, and then file lawsuits in an attempt to remove even more water from the Delta.

In fact, Underground Fave Whipping Boys Westlands Water District–the wholly untrustworthy-but-politically-connected district that wanted to annex the McCloud River into their water district (located hundreds of miles south), were recently caught in yet another bald-faced lie about the amount of water used by agriculture in the state.

The drought wasn’t kind to California agriculture–droughts are generally hard on everyone–but it’s also clear it was a hell of a lot harder on salmon and the Delta Smelt than it was on farmers, and that some reasonable compromises better be found before the wet years play out, and we’re facing another drought–and the flood of emotionally driven misinformation that accompanies them.

See you reading the papers, Tom Chandler

Elwha River Dam Removal Process Begins as Generators Powered Down

June 2, 2011, by 11 comments

One day, I hope to see similar words written about the four Klamath Dams. From the News-Tribute, a story about the removal of the Elwha Dams:

On Wednesday, nearly two decades after Congress called for full restoration of the river and its fish runs, federal workers will turn off the generators at the 1913 dam powerhouse and set in motion the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.

Contractors will begin dismantling the dams this fall, a $324.7 million project that will take about three years and eventually will allow the 45-mile Elwha River to run free as it courses from the Olympic Mountains through old-growth forests into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

See you holding a sledgehammer, Tom Chandler.

Suction Dredge Mining Essentially Dead Due to State Budget Cuts

May 14, 2011, by 1 comment

A moratorium on the suction dredge mining was enacted in California while Fish & Game developed new regulations for the practice, but all that seems to have been thrown out the window by California’s legislature, which seems to continued the moratorium indefinitely because the program costs far more to administer than it raises.

From a Karuk Tribal press release:

“California is in the midst of an historic financial crisis. Taxpayers can no longer afford to subsidize this environmentally destructive hobby,” said Leaf Hillman, Director of the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources.

The move by the budget committees still has to be approved as part of the overall state budget, but reversing the proposal would require lawmakers to fight for budget increases to fund a dredge mining permit and enforcement program while they are at the same time faced with deep cuts to education, healthcare for the elderly, and law enforcement.

According to the Department of Fish and Game’s own Environmental Impact Report, the dredging program raises $373,000 a year in permit fees, but under the newly proposed regulations would spend over $1.8 million in administration and enforcement. This fails to include the cost of defending the program from lawsuits filed by Tribes, taxpayers, and fishermen.

Although the Department’s draft Environmental Impact Report found that dredging has “significant and unavoidable” impacts to water quality due to the reintroduction of mercury to the food chain, the Department claimed it had no authority to regulate the practice on those grounds. The Karuk Tribe along with a host of fishing, environmental, and Tribal groups argue that the Department’s proposed regulations would fail to protect struggling runs of salmon, steelhead, and numerous other fish species while violating clean water laws.

Yow. Going to be some unhappy miners in California.

It’s a heated issue, at least in my experience; a suction mining thread was one of only two ever shut down on the Underground after I received a slew of angry/threatening/incoherent emails.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

As We Near 20th Anniversary of Cantara Loop Spill, What’s Happening on the Upper Sacramento River?

May 12, 2011, by 6 comments

It’s been nearly twenty years since a train derailed on the Upper Sacramento River’s Cantara Loop, dropping a tanker of metam sodium into the river.

On June 4, 1991, fishermen and residents of the area saw nearly 40 miles of the Upper Sacramento River essentially sterilized, and oddly enough, we were probably lucky it was metam sodium and not something more persistent.

Luck, I guess, is relative.

An ABC TV news team did a story about the anniversary (which I’d forgotten), and if you look hard, you’ll notice Wayne Eng’s backside (probably his better side) several times in the footage.

Also, CalTrout’s Curtis Knight makes an appearance.

Since the spill, Union Pacific has replaced the wooden ties in the canyon with concrete, built that monstrous super trestle, and now uses “pusher” engines to reduce the strains on the cars in the middle of trains (which are the most likely to derail).

Still, a 2003 derailment in the Upper Sacramento River Canyon saw a tanker of hydrochloric acid come off the tracks within spitting distance (literally) of the river, suggesting that the safety of the river is largely an illusion.

So while UP has taken steps, it still could improve the way it builds the trains headed up and down the canyon (the spill was caused — in part — by empty cars in the middle of the train, which can be more easily pulled off the tracks when loaded cars are attached to the front and back of the train).

More derailments are inevitable. What they mean to the river so many of us have come to love as our own? That one’s largely up to lady luck.

See you holding my breath every time a train passes through the canyon, Tom Chandler.