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On Thursday, State District Judge Francis Mathew dissolved a restraining order that had prevented the Interstate Stream Commission from deciding on the water diversion, which means the commission can now make a decision under the 2004 Arizona Water Settlements Act.
The law granted New Mexico $90 million in federal funding to improve the water supply for the dry, southwestern corner of the state. The act also gave New Mexico the right to develop an additional 14,000 acre feet of water from the Gila River, which would trigger an additional $46 million in federal subsidies for that purpose. With the restraining order dissolved, the commission can now make a final decision about whether it will build a diversion and take the federal bonus.
Monday morning's deliberation is coming despite growing criticism of the stream commission and its decision-making process. In addition to general anger over the potential changes to the Gila that might result from a diversion and the enormous expense of building one, critics are upset over the lack of transparency in the commission's meetings. Now, with the December deadline looming, opponents fear the commission is intent on green-lighting the diversion in a bid for federal dollars.
"It's pretty clear they have their mind made up," said Todd Schulke, a staff member at the Center for Biological Diversity, which opposes the diversion. "They may throw bones at other projects, but they're going after the water."
The restraining order had come from a lawsuit filed by a former director of the commission, Norman Gaume. He says the commission has made Water Settlement funding and other policy decisions outside the public eye, which is not legal under New Mexico's Open Meeting Act.
"The Open Meeting Act says citizens should be able to observe their deliberations," Gaume told me when we met two weeks ago to discuss his lawsuit. "But there's been no deliberations to observe."
Anthony Gutierrez, the chairman of the commission's Gila River subcommittee, denies those charges. The subcommittee makes recommendations that the commission then votes on, he said in an interview, calling those procedures "routine." Gutierrez, who was born and raised in Grant County, one of the four counties covered by the Arizona Water Act Settlement, supports a diversion. He sees securing the right to more water as a crucial preventative measure for this drought prone region. "Look at Tucson and Phoenix right now," he said. "Those cities are screwed if they don't find water somewhere."
But that line of thinking doesn't sit well with Gaume, who has worked on numerous water projects over his 40-year career as a state water engineer. He says the Gila River is not going to provide the kind of water the commission is hoping for.
"The biggest thing for me was the yield," Gaume said. "I would have thought they would have investigated this, since it's the basis for any water project. Even if you assume best case scenario, it barely works."
The legal terms of the Arizona Water Settlements Act place significant restrictions on the amount of water New Mexico could legally divert. Gaume says the commission has not publicly disclosed its method for calculating the amount of water a diversion would make available.
However, the commission inadvertently sent him part of its inspection as part of a public records request, which allowed him to make his own calculations and analysis, he said. Based on his models, which analyzed river flows between 1937 and 2013, he concluded that little or no water would be available for a diversion in almost half those years. In addition, the commission is not considering the geology of the canyons it hopes to use as water storage, he said.
The structure recommended for a diversion by the commission's engineering consultants is a low-profile concrete weir, a barrier fitted with a screen, which would draw water into pipes leading to massive storage sites in the Gila's side canyons. But those side canyons are a problem, Gaume said.
"It's seepage-prone volcanic conglomerate," Gaume said, noting that a report by the commission's own consultants had similar concerns. The expected seepage losses, when combined with the evaporation losses at the storage sites, could "equal or exceed the planned minimum annual diversion yield of 10,000 acre feet, which would result in no available usable water from the project," the commission report states. In other words, the canyons won't hold that much water, and Gaume fears the commission is making decisions based on false assumptions.
Bohannan Huston, the engineering consultants hired by the commission, admitted this at their presentation during the commission's Nov. 10 meeting. Their solution is to drape the canyons in a plastic liner, a plan Gaume called "magical thinking, not engineering."
For Gutierrez at the Gila subcommittee, however, these questions miss the point. "The important thing is for New Mexico to secure the water because it's valuable," he said. "We can figure out how to get it later on."
Sarah Tory is an editorial intern at High Country News.]]>
Three years into a severe drought, hundreds of residential wells in an unincorporated area of Porterville, California, have gone dry, leaving many families without running water. The wait list to drill deeper wells in the area is at least six months. In September, photographer and multimedia storyteller Zoë Meyers visited Porterville, which sits in the San Joaquin Valley within the Central Valley. In this film, two women reflect on how their families and their community have been affected.
Follow @zoekmeyers]]>
When it comes to water use, the United States,
A. Withdraws billions of gallons more water from rivers, lakes and aquifers than it did in 1970.
B. Withdraws the same amount of water
C. Withdraws less water.
2. The state whose residents use the most domestic water (indoor and outdoor) on a per capita basis is:
A. Nevada
B. Arizona
C. Utah
D. Idaho
3. The biggest water gulping category in the United States is:
A. Golf courses
B. Thermoelectric power
C. Irrigation
3. The biggest water using category in the West is:
A. Las Vegas Fountains
B. Fracking
C. Irrigation
You'll have to read on to find the answers.
According to a US Geological Survey report on water use released last week, the U.S. in 2010 not only withdrew* less water than it did when the agency conducted its previous survey five years earlier, but it also withdrew less than it had since 1970. As the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick, a well-known water guru, put it: We appear to have reached Peak Water, decades ago.The implications are huge. The U.S. has added 105 million people since 1970, and the economy has grown tremendously. Yet we somehow have managed to shrink our overall water footprint. It's not only counter-intuitive; it's baffling. Surely, some of our water guzzling was sent overseas when we outsourced manufacturing and food production. Yet most of the savings can be attributed to simple thrift, and huge gains in efficiency in just about every sector.
It's proof that conservation is not an impediment to economic growth, and that we can limit our collective environmental impact even as the population grows, without sacrificing quality of life. And the western U.S. is leading the way.
The biggest water user in the country is thermoelectric power — most coal, natural gas and solar thermal power plants need water to produce steam to turn turbines and for cooling purposes. Over a five-year period, U.S. plants were able to cut their water withdrawals by 20 percent by installing dry-cooling technology or simply by becoming more efficient. The West has shown even more progress, cutting use by about 50 percent since 2000.
Irrigation is second in water use nationwide, but in the West, it tops the list, guzzling water at almost ten times the rate of Western power plants. Nationwide, irrigators cut water use by about 9 percent since 2005, about the same as in the West, by increasing efficiency and switching from flood irrigation to micro-irrigation, or drip, systems.
Domestic use dropped by 5 percent. Some Western cities hit hard by drought have cut water use by incentivizing homeowners to tear out their lawns, or by limiting turf at new homes. Increasing water rates on big guzzlers has also helped, as have more efficient plumbing fixtures. Las Vegas reduced a tremendous amount of waste simply by plugging the leaks in its pipes.
The mining industry, on the other hand, which includes oil and gas extraction, pulled 39 percent more water from the earth than it did in 2005, thanks to the sharp uptick in drilling. The mining industry still only accounts for about 1 percent of all withdrawals, about half of which consist of the otherwise unusable saline byproduct of oil and gas production, which is then re-injected into the well to stimulate production. But drillers use mostly fresh water for the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water used to hydraulic fracture a single well. This use shows up in North Dakota, for example, where mining's water withdrawals shot up from 5.6 million gallons per day in 2005 to 27 million in 2010. Still, that's only one-sixth of the state's withdrawals for agriculture. In Wyoming, which saw a natural gas drilling bust between 2005 and 2010, mining's water use plummeted.
All of this, and there's still plenty of waste. Las Vegas has taken great strides in conserving water over the last decade, but it still has entire neighborhoods that look like Connecticut, thanks to gluttonous lawn-watering. Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and California farmers still rely mostly on flood irrigation for their crops. And folks in some of the driest places pay the least for their water, contrary to economic principles. This is all good news, because it means that despite gains, many low-hanging fruit remain. We must pluck them before we even think of building the next dam, pipeline or groundwater pumping scheme.
*The USGS report tracks total withdrawals, or the amount pulled from the source, whether it's returned to the source or not, rather than consumptive use, which is arguably a more critical measure. Consumptive use is when the water is precluded from subsequent use (at least for a while) because it's consumed by humans or livestock or is incorporated into a product or plant. A good deal of the water sucked up by a power plant, for example, goes right back into the source, as does a portion of the water used to flood irrigate a field.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. Follow @jonnypeace
"Exempt well" laws in most Western states allow domestic wells to be drilled without water rights, or even a permit in some cases ("Death by a thousand wells," HCN, 10/19/09). These wells aren't subject to cutbacks during drought, something that angers surface-water rights holders, who do have to cut back. Developers started exploiting exempt wells in fast-growing, water-short areas like the Gallatin Valley in Montana, which exempts wells that pump less than 35 gallons a minute and 10 acre-feet per year. Rather than drill one well that would serve a subdivision but exceed those limits, they drilled multiple exempt wells. Originally intended to support rural homesteads, the wells were assumed to be too small to impact streamflows — something that is now disputed.
In mid-October, a Montana judge effectively closed that state's loophole, ruling that grouping wells for single developments violates the law's intent. He reinstated an older interpretation that will exempt future subdivisions only if all the wells collectively meet pumping limits. That rule will stand until a state agency or the Legislature comes up with a new one.]]>
Despite its heavy reliance on aquifers, California is the last Western state to enact groundwater monitoring. In years of average precipitation, groundwater makes up about 40 percent of all water used; roughly 21 million Californians depend on it for at least part of their drinking water.
But with most of California suffering extreme or exceptional drought, the strain on aquifers has been tremendous this year. In the southern Central Valley, a surge in well drilling helped offset water normally delivered through reservoirs, aqueducts and canals. By some estimates, groundwater has accounted for as much as 65 percent of the water supply this year, and aquifers have been badly depleted.
The new regulations offer little in the way of immediate relief. Nor do they give the state the power to ban pumping outright. But many believe they're a critical first step toward managing aquifers more sustainably, as California moves deeper into an era defined by water shortages and conflicts. The question is whether the new rules will help remedy a century or more of overuse and extensive damage, all of it carried it out with virtually no oversight.
The rules, which go into effect at the beginning of 2015, require the state's Department of Water Resources to identify "high" and "medium" priority basins, which then must establish local groundwater sustainability agencies and develop monitoring plans. (Though the basins have not yet been identified, it's likely that many will be located in the southern reaches of the Central Valley, where overdraft has been most severe.) These plans, which require each basin to achieve "groundwater sustainability" by 2040, must be completed within five or seven years, depending on the priority. If deadlines aren't met, the state water board can intervene and establish an interim plan.
In addition to its new monitoring requirements, the law also requires local agencies to look for ways to apply "conjunctive" management of ground and surface water — treating rivers, streams and lakes, along with aquifers, as a connected hydrological system. It's the first time the connection between ground and surface water has been explicitly acknowledged under California law. "If there has been an upside to the drought," says Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine, "it's that it has brought sustained focus on groundwater to get this legislation passed."
The package of bills, authored by state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, and Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, comes after emergency water-saving restrictions in July banned wasteful activities, such as hosing down sidewalks and washing cars without water-saving nozzles. Brown has also used the drought to build support for a $7.1 billion water bond on the November ballot. (At press time, the vote had yet to take place.) This includes funding for drought relief, dam building, groundwater cleanup and devising regional water-management plans.
California's population has more than doubled over the past 50 years, to 38 million, and competition between farms, industry and municipalities for water has grown increasingly fraught. In most parts of the state, landowners were allowed to pump without limits. Where regulation was happening, it was often piecemeal and the result of lawsuits between water-rights holders, or it was implemented through local ordinances and agreements between counties, cities, water agencies and other stakeholders.
California's powerful agricultural lobby, however, strongly objects to state oversight. Paul Wenger, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, says that the new regulations will inevitably cause confusion and bring lawsuits from farmers, who doubt that the state has enough storage to compensate for restricted pumping. Property values could suffer as a result, critics say. "With the stroke of his pen, the governor changed over 100 years of water laws — without the people's input. This is not the democracy Californians deserve," says Jim Nielsen, a rancher and Republican state assemblyman who represents a large agricultural district.
But it's hard to argue that sweeping change isn't needed. Overall, the valley's aquifers have lost 60 million acre-feet since 1960, according to a 2009 U.S. Geological Survey report. In vast swaths of the Central Valley, the water table has fallen by as much as 60 feet in the last year alone. A new study from UC Davis estimates that water shortages have led to the fallowing of over 400,000 acres in the Central Valley this year, resulting in the loss of more than 17,000 seasonal farming jobs. Several small towns in Tulare County, near Fresno, have run out of water entirely.
Given such serious challenges, some say the new law's deadlines are too lax, noting that the state could face disaster if 2015 is as dry as 2014. Others cite vagueness in the language; "groundwater sustainability," for example, is not defined precisely.
That allows local authorities to decide, says Famiglietti, and is an important reason the law passed the state Legislature without much resistance. One definition, he says, could impose a limit beyond which pumping is not allowed. Another could accept that long-term depletion will occur, but within specified limits. "The opportunity for local (control) assuages the fear that the state is going to come in and say you can't pump this much groundwater," he says.
Compounding the California law's slippery definitions of sustainability and its deference to local agencies, says University of Arizona law professor and author Robert Glennon, is an inadequate understanding of groundwater resources. One major obstacle is the lack of public access to the detailed technical reports compiled by well drillers.
California is the only Western state where well logs are not publicly available, the result of a 1950s tweak to the state water code that has largely benefitted private drillers who don't want data shared with competitors. Though there are exceptions for government agencies, most researchers trying to create a comprehensive picture of California's groundwater basins have been denied a critical source of information. "For hydrologists who want to know what's going on underground," says Glennon, "the data is very important — and it's just not available."
While the new law is an important step, says Glennon, it may not prove effective in restoring California's aquifers. That's because the water districts and rights holders that benefitted from unchecked pumping will, in all likelihood, retain a role in managing local groundwater supplies through the new groundwater sustainability agencies. He points to similar laws in Texas and Nebraska that have done little to curb overdraft.
A more promising model, Glennon says, can be found in his home state: "There aren't many instances where Arizona is more progressive than California, but this is one of them." Arizona's 1980 Groundwater Act allowed the state to prohibit new wells in severely overdrafted basins. And while Arizona's law didn't prevent pumping, it limited groundwater-rights holders to specific quantities based on historical use, says Glennon. It also required rights holders to reduce their water use in accordance with statewide targets.
"I can't say Arizona's plan has been flawless," says Glennon. "But a blueprint for a successful plan in California would include these basic elements."
Correction: An earlier version of this story cited a 2013 USGS report, when in fact it was a 2013 USGS press release that was referencing a 2009 report. HCN regrets the error.]]>
Outside, the October day was gray, the sun having slid off to a better place. The winds, swept aloft by the nearby Pacific Ocean, swirled above the stands of fir trees that rise above the small, clean one-story house. Wright's uncle, Jack Cox, who lives with him, had a ferocious nosebleed. At the same time, 33 other people, scattered up rabbit-hole roads throughout the valley, suffered in different ways: Strange rashes bloomed on their arms and foreheads, and some victims crouched over the toilet for hours, crippled by sudden diarrhea. Others were struck by nausea, headaches and asthma attacks. Wright, struggling with his own symptoms, was unaware of his neighbors' troubles. All he knew is that up until the yellow-and-white helicopter flew overhead, he'd felt just fine, working on the carburetor of his '79 Dodge truck in his front yard.
Over the next several weeks, local doctors and nurses were mystified by the ailments that plagued members of this coastal town, a picturesque spot nestled at the mouth of the Rogue River, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. Many people stayed sick, or got even sicker. A horse went blind. One dog died.
An investigation completed this summer by the Oregon Department of Agriculture reveals that, on the same day last year that Wright tinkered with his truck, Steven Owen, a pilot hired by two timber-stand outfits, Crook Timberlands and Joseph Kaufman, crisscrossed the valley north of Gold Beach where Wright lives. Nozzles on the helicopter doused four recent clear-cuts, and then illegally sprayed surrounding properties with a cocktail of herbicides containing substances such as triclopyr, imazapyr and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, better know as 2,4-D, an ingredient in Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant. Wright knew about Agent Orange; he was a gunner during the Vietnam War, when it was heavily used.
"I never bled through my lungs before in my life," says Wright, 60, chief of the local fire department. A former logger and commercial fisherman, he once survived for six and a half hours in 43-degree water after his crab boat capsized in the Pacific Ocean. Wright tends to joke about his own suffering, rarely mentioning the 42 pieces of shrapnel in his body or the bullet wounds he got in Vietnam. But as he recounts the spraying incident, he shakes his head.
"The whole thing, it feels like you're being violated, you know? They (the state and the timber companies) obviously don't care about us."
Timber companies hire licensed helicopter pilots to spray hundreds of thousands of pounds of herbicides each year on forests throughout Oregon. Their goal is to kill the weeds, shrubs and trees that compete with the Douglas-fir and other trees harvested by the state's $20 billion timber industry. These herbicides, which can cause a host of long- and short-term health problems, sometimes drift away from the timber stands and onto nearby communities and into their drinking water sources. Oregon isn't the only state with this problem. However, its relatively lax regulations, limited oversight, and the proximity of forests to homes throughout the coastal range put Oregonians at the greatest risk.
"People in Oregon are being exposed against their will, and these exposures are routine," says Richard R. Kauffman, the recently retired Northwest regional director of the Centers for Disease Control's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. "Enough of these instances are happening, there should be some changes to state laws.
"But I also see a basic flaw in the (pesticide) regulations we have in this country. Our system is at fault here."
On a summer morning, fog sinks low in the shallows between forested hills in Oregon's coastal mountains. Douglas-fir stands stretch for miles, interrupted frequently by brown patches that look as if they've been scraped clean by a giant spatula — logging clear-cuts. This is some of the most productive timberland in North America. But people live here, too, in homes and schools, farms and marinas squeezed between the ocean and the tree-covered hills.
Though a clear-cut may look barren, it's actually home to a vibrant competition for life. Long-dormant seeds buried underground take flight when exposed to the sun. Within months, these opportunistic species, including blackberry, salmonberry, alder and Scotch broom, can cover the ground with a fresh thicket of green, robbing fast-growing Douglas-fir seedlings, the industry's big moneymaker, of sunlight. Timber companies combatting these weeds require a war-like sensibility and weapons, namely herbicides.
In the 1940s, when Wright's mother's family owned a logging company and mill north of Gold Beach, they burned out unwanted species after logging, before replanting trees, but such fires could be risky and didn't accomplish much. As long as the root systems of brush species survived, plants like salmonberry continued to grow back. So starting in the late '60s, chemists developed an array of substances designed to destroy specific forest shrubs.
By the time Wright was working logging crews in the late 1980s, he hiked through the woods armed with a hatchet and cans of what he says was a diluted solution of 2,4-D and tobacco. "We didn't spray all over the ground and into the water. You'd cut into the bark of a tree and douse a little bit of (the herbicide) where you made your cut," says Wright, staring up at a wax maple that turned bleached as bone after the helicopter flew over it. "A five-man crew could take out a lot of undesirables in a day."
But the work was slow and dangerous, putting people who trudged across steep slopes at risk of injury from chainsaws and hatchets. Aerial spraying became an attractive alternative.
Today's timber industry is particularly dependent on spraying by helicopter. About 37 percent of Oregon's timberland –– 9 million acres –– is privately owned, most of it divided into corporate-owned parcels of at least 5,000 acres apiece. Using ground crews on anything over 100 acres doesn't make economic sense, says Mike Kroon of the Oregon Department of Forestry. It takes 10 workers an entire day to treat the same acreage that a helicopter can spray in a half hour, while an industrial-grade clear-cut could take months to treat on the ground, without aerial spraying. That's simply too long and too costly, so the timberland equivalent of crop-dusting is deployed. In 2008, the last year that Oregon tracked spraying, more than 800,000 pounds of herbicide were dropped on the state's private timberlands. Aerial herbicide spraying is banned on Oregon's federal lands.
At high concentrations, these herbicides can cause a host of human health problems, from eye and skin irritation to vomiting and diarrhea. A person who drinks 2,4-D is likely to incur kidney failure and skeletal muscle damage, according to the National Pesticide Information Center. But regulatory agencies and timber companies, citing decades of science, insist that at the low concentrations likely to result from aerial spraying drift, most of the herbicides in widespread use are fairly harmless.
"Research can never prove that there's zero risk, but the EPA requires that these chemicals have an 'acceptable risk' when applied correctly," says Paul Adams, chair of the Oregon Society of American Foresters policy committee. "Some people feel that, until we can prove they won't ever cause any harm, we shouldn't use them. At this point, you're dealing with philosophy, not science."
Mike Newton, an emeritus Oregon State University professor of forestry who has published nearly 100 scientific articles about the ecology of Douglas-fir and the environmental effects of herbicides, agrees. Forests are sprayed much less frequently than farms are, he says, and so there is much less chance of exposure. "There has been a great deal of effort to do good science; the lay citizen doesn't have any grasp of what's gone on here, and they don't realize that there's millions and millions of dollars dealing with the safety of these products before they go on the market," says Newton, 81, patting a Douglas-fir he planted 40 years ago in the 30-acre parcel behind his home in western Oregon.
Over the last decade, however, new findings have called this thinking into question. Atrazine and 2,4-D, two of the most commonly used chemicals in forestry, affect the endocrine system, the hormones and glands that regulate vital functions such as sexual development and behavior, pregnancy and many aspects of childhood development. Prenatal exposures have been linked to low birth weights, according to a 2013 article in Environmental Research. In 2011, an Environmental Protection Agency scientific advisory panel found evidence of a link between atrazine exposure and diseases including ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and thyroid cancer. And when chemicals are applied in a mix, they can interact, which may lead to more harmful effects than when they're applied individually, according to a 2009 article in Environmental Health Perspectives.
Such research exacerbates the fears of the residents of Oregon's Triangle Lake region near Eugene, Oregon, who have worried for decades that their proximity to industrial timberlands and aerial sprays is responsible for their rashes, cancers and other health problems. In 2011, the EPA tested the urine of locals and found atrazine and 2,4-D in every sample. This makes Nancy Webster and her neighbors in Rockaway Beach, Oregon, 150 miles north of Triangle Lake, increasingly nervous about drinking the water that comes out of their taps.
Two summers ago, Nancy Webster sat on her front porch, morning coffee in hand, watching a helicopter spray a fine mist over a private forest about a half-mile away in the Jetty Creek watershed, the source of her town's water supply. The high school, middle school and a local preschool sit at the base of the forest slope.
"I was horrified. I could smell the chemicals," says Webster, a soft-spoken baby boomer who retired and moved to the coast six years ago. As was the case at Gold Beach, the timber company did not notify the community prior to spraying, so Webster didn't set aside any water or shut the windows. The water treatment plant doesn't filter for herbicides and, with just one day's worth of storage, it can't shut down for the several weeks necessary to let the chemicals pass through, as do several treatment plants elsewhere along the coast. "My neighbors and I trade tips about what filters to put on our water. We all look up at the hills and pray we're not poisoning ourselves."
On a day when the sky spits rain, Webster and her friend, Judy Coleman, hike into the forest to take a look at the clear-cut above Jetty Creek. The heart-shaped bowl, once home to a creek, is now full of logs and branches strewn like toothpicks in a mud fondue. "That creek feeds the main stem. But because there's no salmon in the creek, they can log right through it," says Coleman, a former water-quality specialist with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. "It makes no sense at all. Even if there's no fish in there, that stream flows into the creek below that does have fish in it, that is the source of our drinking water. When it rains like this, everything becomes connected." The gravel roads that crisscross this forest and most other timberland act as vectors, delivering any herbicides deposited by helicopter into ditches along the roads, which ultimately empty into the streams.
In 2013, the state Department of Environmental Quality sampled water from the creeks and estuaries of six public watersheds along Oregon's northern coast. The herbicides atrazine, glyphosate and sulfometuron-methyl were identified in multiple locations, and since municipal water districts don't filter out herbicides or pesticides, they likely ended up in tap water. The amounts found were far below the levels that would trigger action under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. But Josh Seeds, a water-quality expert at the DEQ, says that those low levels could result from inadequate testing: Since timber companies aren't required to tell any agency exactly when they'll spray, the DEQ wasn't able to sample for days afterward. During such a delay, chemicals dissipate.
"Most of the herbicides used in forestry move through water quickly. To find anything, you have to be set up for it," says Seeds. "You have to know when they're going to spray, and then sample immediately after spraying. And we haven't been able to do that."
Testing by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2011 found imazapyr in the well water at a public school in the Triangle Lake area, west of Eugene. Between 2002 and 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey took samples from Oregon's McKenzie River Basin, an area dominated by timberland, and found that nearly half of all samples included the herbicides hexazinone, 2,4-D, atrazine and glyphosate, which rank among the most frequently used herbicides in forestry. Here, as along the North Coast, the herbicide concentrations were considered a negligible threat to human health. Yet the majority of the chemicals found are potential endocrine disruptors that the EPA has yet to regulate.
"It doesn't take very much exposure to these chemicals in our water or air to mess with our hormones," says Laura Vandenberg, a University of Massachusetts toxicologist who sits on the boards of the scientific journals Reproductive Toxicology and Environmental Health and is an editor of Endocrine Disruptors. "The functional concentrations of hormones in your body are in the parts per billion or parts per trillion. We're talking about a drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool."
It's illegal for even a drop of herbicide to drift away from the target areas, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Stuart Turner — a one-man "CSI-crops shop" who investigates cases of pesticide misapplication — has seen herbicides drift over six miles from where they were sprayed.
The EPA sets standards for how specific herbicides are applied, determining the likelihood of drift based on industry-produced data using fixed-wing aircraft targeting crops from about 10 feet above flat land in Texas. (Helicopter application is not factored in.) The agency's own model for drift calculation allows users to input no more than a 20 percent slope, even though coast range slopes are frequently twice that.
And drift is much harder to predict in most Western forests than it is above flat land in Texas or laser-leveled Iowa cornfields. The timber-dusting helicopters along Oregon's coast fly as high as 80 feet above 40-degree slopes, and torrential rain and unpredictable ocean winds can pull chemicals downslope during application, making it nearly impossible to prevent herbicides from drifting away from their targets. "The pilots are the best in the business, but they're not 10 feet off the ground like you are in a crop-duster," says Turner, who chaired the Helicopter Associations' International Aerial Applications Committee for 13 years. "There's no doubt you're getting people being exposed to pesticides against their will." But neither the EPA nor any state agencies have established a protocol for taking air samples, making it impossible to document the accusations of landowners who report breathing chemicals after seeing a helicopter drop herbicides.
Though herbicide application is in part federally regulated, enforcement and investigation remain primarily up to the states. State pesticide regulatory agencies get most of their funding from chemical manufacturers or distributors that pay to register their products, and from licensing fees paid for by pest-control applicators and dealers. This, combined with the Oregon Department of Agriculture's dual mandate to both bolster and police the industry, makes for a poor record of investigating cases, critics say.
With only nine field investigators to cover all of Oregon, the agency monitors applications only if asked. "As an investigator, I'm typically following up on complaints," says Sunny Jones, an Oregon Department of Agriculture pesticide investigator. "We're not Big Brother. A lot of use goes on that we don't know about."
In October, an investigation by the Portland Oregonian found that for six years, state agencies had ignored residents' reports of herbicide drift in the Rogue River Valley before finally launching the Gold Beach investigation.
That investigation, however, was far from complete, critics say: The investigator didn't arrive to collect samples and interview affected parties until seven days after the spraying. The agency took vegetation and soil samples, but no water, urine or blood was collected, and the investigator gathered testimony from only four of the approximately 20 households that reported being directly impacted. Initially, the helicopter pilot, Stephen Owen, said he sprayed only glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup. Less than two weeks after he sprayed, however, the agency discovered other chemicals, including 2,4-D, triclopyr and other herbicides, in vegetation samples. But community members weren't given this information for another six months, delaying proper medical treatment for those who had gotten sick.
In August this year, 10 months after the incident, the department fined Owen and the company he owns, Pacific Air Research Inc., $10,000 each, for providing false and misleading information to agency inspectors. Owen may lose his operating license as well; the punishment, however, will ultimately be decided at an administrative hearing before a state judge, during which "anything is open to negotiation," says Dale Mitchell, program manager of the Oregon Department of Agriculture's enforcement division. In September, the EPA fined Pacific Air Research an additional $1,500 for illegally spraying two herbicides in a way that caused them to come into contact with people.
The $10,000 fines, if they hold, are significantly higher than those typically levied by the state agency. (The most recent available data, from 2012, shows that the agency issued fines ranging from $204 to $962 each for various misapplications of pesticides.) The people of Gold Beach, however, remain unimpressed.
"At this point, I've put out $30,000 in health care and vet bills, so (the fine) is pretty much a drop in the bucket," says Kathryn Rickard, a daughter and granddaughter of loggers, a former hairdresser and mother of five, who developed rashes on her arms, flu-like symptoms and an instant headache after standing on her porch a few hours after the helicopter flew over her house. Her dog became sick with a wasting disease that she blames on the spraying; it later died. "I'm pro-logging — I know chemicals have their place, if used appropriately — but I'm angry. I was sprayed against my will."
Rickard's ability to sue in response is limited. In Oregon, as in Washington and Colorado, the law insulates herbicide and pesticide applicators from liability for damages incurred by neighbors. If a neighboring landowner sues and then loses, she's on the hook for the opposition's attorney fees, which can run upwards of $100,000. But the Gold Beach incident might lead to change. In early August, Chris Winter of the Crag Law Center, a Portland-based public interest law firm, filed suit on behalf of Rickard and 16 other Gold Beach residents, asking a state judge to declare portions of the Oregon Right to Farm and Forest law unconstitutional. If the judge finds in their favor, citizens such as Rickard could sue the timber companies for property damages without being on the hook for defendant's legal fees.
Beyond the courts, a coalition of regional environmental nonprofits, private timber owners and public health advocates is working to lobby the Oregon Legislature for reform. The coalition has several demands: It wants Oregon to adopt a formal application process for all use of herbicide sprays on private and state lands, and it asks that pesticide applicators file publicly available records of where and what they sprayed within 24 hours of application. In addition, it wants the names of the sprayed chemicals turned over to the Poison Control Center so that doctors can treat patients in a timely fashion. The group also wants Oregon to follow Washington's example and establish buffer zones to prevent spraying within 200 feet of surface water, homes and schools.
"How many more people have to get sick before we do something about this?" says Lisa Arkin, executive director of Beyond Toxics, an Oregon-based nonprofit. People from 11 Oregon counties have reported getting sick from aerial spraying, says Arkin. "The fact that earnest and truthful complaints from communities in Oregon and other states have fallen on deaf ears is unacceptable and outrageous."
In late May, the Oregon Senate Committee on Energy and the Environment, following a hearing on the Gold Beach case, asked the state agencies involved to develop protocols to better respond to future spray emergencies. The committee met again in September, and lawmakers say they may push for stricter policies in the upcoming legislative session.
But getting them passed could be an uphill battle. The timber industry in Oregon contributed $4.4 million to state campaigns over the last four elections — two and a half times more than the oil and gas industry, and 25 times more than the dairy industry. And rural legislators are worried about the impact of policy changes on forestry jobs, says Sen. Michael Dembrow, D, head of the state Senate Energy and Environment Committee. "The question is how can we affect the practice (of herbicide spraying) in a way that harms the industry the least while protecting people's health the most," says Dembrow.
In the interim, Ecotrust, a regional economic development organization, is looking for ways to help communities protect their watersheds from potential sources of contamination, including aerial spraying. It's helping the community of Carbonado, Washington, near Mount Rainier, work out a voluntary agreement to halt spraying in the most sensitive areas of its municipal water source, which lie on forest land not owned by the city. In the future, the town hopes to pay the timber company to minimize exposure to additional areas by using backpack sprayers instead of helicopters.
The spraying issue has caused some division in the small town of Gold Beach; some of those who have spoken out against the timber industry have complained about feeling threatened, and ugly quotes have appeared in local news stories. Keith Wright has helped form a telephone tree so that in the event of an emergency, neighbors can quickly come to each other's aid. In June, Wright received a form letter from the state Department of Agriculture stating that it planned to investigate his lung damage; he says that an ear, nose and throat specialist in Coos Bay has ascribed his bleeding and cough to his exposure to the aerial spray. At the time, he felt optimistic. "I hope somehow I play some little part in getting them to stop spraying everywhere," he said.
But by this fall, having heard nothing from the department since the letter, his hope was subdued.
Last spring, the state Department of Agriculture erroneously reported that Wright had died following the spray incident; he only found out when a mortuary called his house to make funeral arrangements. Almost a year after the spraying, a wicked cough continues to trouble him, but he still tries to have a good laugh when he can. Today, someone calls to ask how he is. "I'm alive," he replies. "Are you?"
Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren, a former HCN editor, writes about public health and the environment from Portland, Oregon.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.]]>
So what about it makes many environmental groups so mad? The Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and San Francisco Baykeeper have all taken an explicit stand against Proposition 1, as has virtually every fisherman's advocacy group in the state. The Sierra Club, though it officially opposed the legislative bill that produced the ballot measure, remains neutral in theory, but the group's position statement announcing neutrality also uses the word hate.Chelsea Tu, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, says the problem comes down to this: While the bond measure does indeed give a nod to higher environmental concerns, "those beneficial provisions are far outweighed by the $2.7 billion in the bill set aside for surface and groundwater storage provisions." In other words, the "public benefits" it funds could mean new dams: One would flood 14,000 acres in Colusa County north of Sacramento for the proposed Sites Reservoir; another would augment current San Joaquin River water storage at Temperance Flat. Prop. 1 funds could also go toward adding 18.5 feet to Shasta Dam — a $1.1 billion project touted as a "bargain" by Westlands Water District General Manager Tom Birmingham, but opposed by the Winnemem Wintu tribe, which was flooded out of sacred lands once when the dam was first built in 1945.
Proposition 1 never explicitly states that any of the $2.7 billion will fund dam projects, however, and not every environmental group worries quite so much. "The era of big dams is over," pronounced Doug Obegi, staff attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, on the organization's blog. "The water bond does not earmark funding for Temperance Flat or any other surface storage project." Dams cost too much money to make sense anymore; even with taxpayer subsidies they "can't compete economically with these regional and local water supply projects."
Emphasizing that NRDC "strongly opposes" both Temperance Flat and a Shasta Dam raising, Obegi says the organization endorses Prop. 1.
Tu thinks that's not only "optimistic," but at odds with Gov. Jerry Brown's oft-stated agenda. "Every time the Governor talks about the water crisis, he talks about building out water infrastructure projects that go back to the 1950s," she says. "Those are projects that both state and federal legislatures have been pushing for many, many years." They're also projects that the state's agricultural interests, which consume more than three-quarters of the state's water, have lobbied hard for, along with a multibillion-dollar tunnel project that would suck water from the Sacramento River before it ever gets to the ailing California Delta. (Prop. 1 was written to be "tunnel neutral.")
Adam Scow, California campaign director for Food and Water Watch, calls Prop. 1"a bunch of mystery meat," ominously geared toward finding more ways to deliver water to industrial agriculture. Even more alarming, he says, is that according to the provisions of the bill, the nine members of the California Water Commission have been tasked with allocating the meat. Those nine members have been appointed by "Big Agriculture's closest ally," Scow says. "A man named Jerry Brown."
Scow thinks Proposition 1's other benefits recede in light of that fact. Aquifer cleanup, water for fish, habitat restoration and drinking water for disadvantaged communities are all good, he says, and even necessary. They just don't have to be yoked to what he calls "a bloated bond deal," written with industrial agriculture in mind.
"We do need to address the inequities in water rights we have in this state," Scow says. "We just don't need a bond deal to do it."
Judith Lewis Mernit is a High Country News contributing editor. She tweets @judlew.
Few people understand the river's state today, let alone can imagine its future — longer droughts, larger floods, shrinking snowpack that melts sooner. So in June, I set out to follow the Rio Grande from its source to the Gulf of Mexico, alongside photographer Erich Schlegel. By foot, kayak and canoe, we are exploring the river, seeking to comprehend the recent changes. We expect to reach the sea in January. On every reach, we meet people who love the river and are working to shape its future. Meanwhile, the Rio Grande stays busy, carving mountain ranges and deserts, nourishing wildlife and human beings. In 150 years, it will fill its reservoirs with sediment. Everything on the river is temporary.
We arrived at the end of the Upper Rio Grande in late August, after hauling our canoes across a delta of pudding-like mud at the head of the Elephant Butte Reservoir, outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The reservoir was 7 percent full. The only water leaving it runs from a pipe collecting condensation inside the dam's inspection tunnels. The river will not flow again until it merges with the Rio Conchos, flowing out of Mexico, some 400 miles downstream.
This story appears in High Country News with support from the McCune Charitable Foundation.
Feature Image: Colin McDonald carries his pack raft below Caballo Lake near Arrey, New Mexico. After paddling the last section of the lake, he walked the rest of the way in southern New Mexico.
Now, several coastal communities are looking at all that seawater as a possible source of drinking water.
Desalination has been on California's radar since the 1960s but came to the fore in the mid 1970s, as severe drought aligned with a leap forward in technology. Industrial-scale treatment of brackish and salty water was made possible by improvements in reverse osmosis technology, a technique in which water is passed through a semi-permeable membrane to remove dissolved salts and other solids.
By the mid-2000s, according to a report from California State University's Center for Collaborative Policy, there were 16 small desalination plants – capable of treating between 2,000 and 600,000 gallons per day – supplying drinking water to communities across the state. But economics and environmental concerns have proven to be stumbling blocks to large-scale desalination, as numerous plants have been proposed and never built or shuttered outright.
Today, however, with growing populations and rapidly dwindling surface and groundwater supplies, desalination is getting a serious second look. More than a dozen desalination plants are in the planning phases along the California coast – from Santa Cruz in the north to Carlsbad in the south.
The wealthy seaside enclave of Santa Barbara, for example, is in the midst of a plan authorizing $32 million to reactivate its Charles E. Meyer desalination facility after nearly 20 years offline. The facility, which can treat 5,000 acre-feet of water per year – about 20 percent of the city's total supply – was built after a prolonged dry period in the late 1980s. But the plant was taken offline in the mid 1990s after precipitation increased and less expensive water sources again became available.
Just outside San Diego, the finishing touches are being put on the $1 billion Carlsbad desalination plant, which, when brought online in 2016, will be capable of delivering 56,000 acre-feet annually – or 50 million gallons of water per day – to residents in the San Diego region.
Last week, the Metropolitan Water District, which serves 19 million people across the Los Angeles and San Diego metro areas, approved a plan to increase subsidies for various types of water projects, including desalination plants. "Ongoing and new efforts to locally produce these resources and lower water demands plays a fundamental role in our long-term water plan," said Metropolitan board chairman Randy Record in a press release. "However, the costs to develop and maintain these supplies are a significant hurdle to initiating new projects."
While desalting plants have become more efficient, costs are still high when compared with other methods of delivering water. According to data from the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, costs for desalination can run between $500 and $2,500 per acre-foot compared with, say, $300 to $1,300 per acre-foot for the treatment and reuse of municipal effluent. Most of this energy would come from the combustion of fossil fuels, which, critics note, would release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere – further contributing to the state's warming temperatures, dwindling snowpack and vanishing water supplies.
However, Heather Cooley, director of the Pacific Institute's Water Program, determined that the amount of energy it takes to desalinate an acre-foot of seawater is comparable to the amount of energy required to pump an acre-foot of freshwater through the aqueducts of the State Water Project – from the Delta, east of San Francisco to southern California.
Desalination also generates large volumes of ultra-saline brine, which must somehow be disposed of. In Saudi Arabia – where desalination provides as much as half of the country's water supply – outfalls from de-salting plants dump brine directly into the ocean and have been blamed for increased salinity of the Arabian Gulf and degradation of coastal ecosystems. (To minimize impacts, the Carlsbad plant's permit requires the facility blend its brine in a five to one ratio with seawater before discharging it back to the ocean.)
Beyond the immediate environmental and economic concerns around desalination are serious issues of scale. In spite of calls for desalination to replace water imported from elsewhere, it's clear that a large-scale transition to desalination would have profound impacts on the coastline of southern and central California. "To replace half of the water Metropolitan Water District gets each year from the Delta," wrote Nancy Vogel, a spokeswoman for the Department of Water Resources, "would require construction of approximately a dozen plants the size of the Carlsbad facility in the MWD territory – about one every 13 miles along the coast from Malibu to San Diego."
As California's coastal communities push into what seems to be an increasingly water scarce future, will they be forced to don this albatross to meet their water needs? Or can California's push for efficiency and more careful monitoring of its surface and groundwater boost supplies, and make large-scale desalination unnecessary?
Jeremy Miller is a contributing editor for HCN.]]>
By noon, though, an unusually strong storm was blooming 40 miles north of Big Water, at the top of a 50-mile-long sandy canyon called Wahweap. The local weather website's radar noted that nearly 3 inches of rain had fallen in less than two hours, and it was still raining hard. By 1 p.m., Rankin was back in his Jeep, "the Desert Rat," hurtling down the road. Today, he could chase his dearest obsession: flash floods. He'd sit and wait and watch the changing weather. "And then it's time," he thought, "for battle."
Tracking a roiling wall of mud and debris down a desert wash might seem an odd obsession for a kid from suburban Salt Lake City, but it came naturally to Rankin. When he was 8, his family moved to Big Water — once a camp for the workers who built Glen Canyon Dam in the '50s and now home to 475 people. It has an average July high of 106 degrees and just 6 inches of precipitation a year. Rankin was enraptured, hiking alone for hours over sagebrush-lined trails and through red-rock hoodoos and deep slot canyons. He found oyster fossils and sharks' teeth, souvenirs of the days when southern Utah soaked underwater 93 million years ago. As a kid, he hung out with paleontologists, and even found full skulls of ancient marine reptiles. A species of long-necked, ocean-dwelling reptile is named after him — Eopolycotylus rankini. "He had a brilliant mind — a good mind for bone," helped along by hours poring over anatomy books, says Merle Graffam, now a Bureau of Land Management ranger.
When Rankin was 12, the old-timers' stories about a different monster captured his imagination: Dry nearby washes that transformed into roaring rivers in seconds. "I just couldn't wrap my mind around it," says Rankin, who has a round face, sturdy build and hazel eyes. So he started hanging out at Wahweap during big rainstorms — perching high up in a stone cubbyhole and getting soaked to the skin.
It was several summers before he saw the leading wall of a flood for the first time — a small, frothy affair in 2003. His real breakthrough came when Google released its Earth application. For $40, a computer science student that Rankin found in a Yahoo chat room agreed to create a custom program that overlaid real-time weather data with Google's navigable, incredibly detailed satellite images of the local landscape. Using it, Rankin could easily estimate which local washes were likely to go big.
Now, Rankin says, "I have it down to a science." And sometimes that science can be, well, dull. "It's difficult to describe the utter boredom of waiting for these things," he says. That's because the best way to catch a flood isn't to sit in the storm, as he had been doing, but to stake out a spot well before it arrives, when the rain is still dozens of miles upstream. Sometimes, after waiting four hours in 95 degree heat with nothing for company but a CamelBak and his own thoughts, Rankin begins to wonder: "Am I just hoping for the impossible?" A trail sign rattles in the wind; nothing moves. And then, finally, he hears a soft rumbling in the distance. The banks of the dry wash tremble underfoot. Just as he catches a wafting scent of fresh, wet, gritty earth, the flood rolls around the corner, gnashing and crunching at an unmistakable pitch. It's laden with debris carved from miles of canyon and riverbed, black as solidified lava and thick as wet cement. But instead of fleeing from the deadly flow, Rankin leans in closer to film it, sometimes hopping to high ground just as the water lips over his shoes.Some might suspect that Rankin's behavior borders on the pathological, but what he's doing has relevance to the real world. Flash floods can be extremely deadly — a 1997 one in Antelope Canyon, Arizona, killed 11 European hikers — but because they take so long to arrive, there's usually ample time to check for signs of danger. If, that is, you know when and where to look.
Getting the word out falls to the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Salt Lake. But the current radar system, the closest portion of which is based in Cedar City, can't always see what Rankin sees. Projecting from a mountain 10,000 feet above sea level, its beam is at about 25,000 feet by the time it reaches Big Water, thanks to the plunging topography, the radar's upward angle and the planet's slight curvature. And many storms happen below 25,000 feet.
To fill in the gaps, the National Weather Service has a network of about 400 weather spotters across Utah. Most report how much rain has fallen in their area. But Rankin drives to where he thinks there will be a flood and reports back when it arrives. He and Brian McInerney, a senior hydrologist at Salt Lake's National Weather Service Office, text about what they're seeing — McInerney on a computer screen and Rankin in the sky. As a result, the agency catches floods it would have otherwise missed in an area frequented by millions of tourists every year. "If he indicates it's going to happen," McInerney says, "we issue warnings. He's that good."
The agency now uses Rankin's videos to illustrate the dangers of flash floods. Over 5,000 students have watched them. Media outlets lease them for $40 per second, and over the past few years, Rankin's had about 20 such contracts. He considers these arrangements "back-up plans" alongside website development, sculpture and digital animation, all of which he's enjoyed moderate success with. He's also a landscape and space photographer, and has spent days on end with little rest, taking time-lapse pictures of the night sky. "Sometimes," he says, "I wish I didn't have to sleep."
Despite Rankin's recurring nightmare of being run down by a flash flood in a slot canyon, he seems unlikely to ever divert too much of his energy from his deepest obsession. And that ordinary July day in 2013 turned out to be one of the best yet: Massive floods ripped through southern Utah. He drove swiftly from one bend in Wahweap to the next, chasing the flood's roiling front wall until it had passed Big Water and was careening toward Lake Powell. The water receded within hours, as it usually does, and by the following morning, the landscape was still again. Rankin was already impatient for the next flood. And why not? "They've got tornado chasers in Kansas and Oklahoma," says McInerney. "Well, we've got David."
Tay Wiles is the online editor of High Country News. Follow @taywiles]]>
In response, the city water bureau decided to flush all 38 million gallons from the reservoir. "Our customers don't anticipate drinking water that's been contaminated by some yahoo," a spokesman told the Associated Press. It was a question more of optics than science. A few ounces of urine in so much water posed little threat to anyone's health.
To Alejandro Queral, though, it was also a question of politics. One of the most liberal cities in the country was showing that selectively drawing on science to support a conclusion that contradicts what the scientific community accepts is not the exclusive province of extreme conservatives. "Portlanders can get pretty crazy about their water," he says. And he would know.
In September 2012, the Portland City Council voted 5-0 to add fluoride to the city's drinking water starting the following March. Many thought the move was long overdue: Portland is the largest U.S. city that doesn't fluoridate its water, and while voters had rejected fluoridation three times since 1956, the council was confident this time would be different. But they were wrong. A local group calling itself Clean Water Portland filed paperwork almost immediately to put the decision to a referendum in a special election that May.
At the time, Queral was a program officer for the Northwest Health Foundation, a nonprofit that works on health issues in Oregon and southwest Washington. A native of Mexico, he has advanced degrees in law and ecology. "I studied water snakes," he tells me in a Portland coffee shop, grinning through his black beard. He sits on both the Public Health Advisory Board and the Oregon Environmental Council, and when the referendum went forward, he was asked to co-chair the group Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland, which supported fluoridation.
Set against him was Clean Water Portland's Kim Kaminski. She is pleasant and soft-spoken but with a steely edge. Like Queral, she has a law degree. She grew up in Illinois with fluoridated water and had no problem with it, other than that she still seemed to get a lot of cavities. But by 2012, her feelings had evolved. She and her allies launched an attack dazzling in its variety. They pointed out that the proposed additive, hydrosilicofluoride, was a byproduct of pesticide production, and that a factsheet from the National Sanitation Foundation showed detectable levels of arsenic (43 percent of samples) and lead (2 percent) in hydrosilicofluoride-treated water. A 500-plus-page brick of a report from the National Academy of Sciences raised questions about whether high levels of fluoride led to a dental condition called fluorosis, caused brittle bones or even certain types of cancer, and perhaps lowered intelligence in children.
It was, in a way, a battle for the Rose City's uniquely liberal-libertarian soul. Portlanders take pride in the cleanliness of their Bull Run watershed, and here, Kaminski thought, were the city fathers making backroom deals to fill it with chemicals. She and her allies framed fluoridation as a matter of personal choice, or its lack; to embrace it was akin to allowing the government to forcibly medicate you. "We live in a creative city. We could do better than just pouring chemicals into our water," she says, in what would become the battle hymn of the fluoride foes.
Assertion for assertion, Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland challenged Clean Water Portland, listing all the big medical organizations that endorsed fluoridation, including every surgeon general and U.S. president since Kennedy. The group noted Oregon's spotty dental health statistics: It is 48th in the nation in residents having access to fluoridated water. Nearly two-thirds of Portland's third-graders show signs of tooth decay, and many of them come from the city's less-affluent minority communities.
It wasn't enough. Queral was unprepared for the campaign's heat. "It was never explicitly personal, but there was a lot of underlying nastiness. Typical Portland," he says, as two coffee-shop patrons shoot him dirty looks. He watched in dismay as the numbers in support of fluoridation declined from over half, to half, to under half, and on down. When the election arrived, fluoridation was pummeled, 61-39 percent.
Water fluoridation began in the 1940s. Back in the early 1900s, Colorado Springs dentist Floyd McKay noticed that many of his patients' teeth were mottled, a condition called "Colorado Brown Teeth." But their teeth were also unusually strong. McKay linked their lack of cavities to naturally high levels of fluoride in local drinking water.
In 1945, the U.S. Public Health Service began its own ambitious experiment. In four metropolitan areas, one community's water was supplemented with fluoride, and another's was not. The study was supposed to last 10 years, but produced dramatic results after just five: The incidence of cavities had declined more than 50 percent in those communities with fluoridated water.
Supplementation programs sprang up across the country. As of 2010, close to 75 percent of U.S. citizens drank fluoridated water (and, as Queral has pointed out, "no one's head has exploded or anything"). Very little is needed to have a significant effect; the current standard is 0.7 milligrams per liter. The number of cavities has dropped, and in 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed water fluoridation as one of the 20th century's top 10 advances in public health, along with vaccination, seat belts and the recognition of tobacco's harmful effects.
As fluoride use spread, resistance against it hardened. Objections ranged from its efficacy to its role as a form of socialized medicine and government intrusion. (The John Birch Society called it a communist plot.) Nearly three-quarters of Americans may drink fluoridated water, and it might seem strange to have to adjudicate something that has been around nearly unchanged for more than 60 years, but ever since 1950, when fluoridation comes on the ballot, it loses nearly 60 percent of the time.
The idea of political conservatives dismissing Science (in its capitalized, deified form) when it suits ideology, particularly when it comes to climate change and evolution, is a familiar media trope. The left, however, has hardly covered itself in glory with some liberals' attitudes toward vaccinations, homeopathy and other issues. In Portland, in fact, fluoridation opponents employed many of the methods more commonly associated with the right.
"Their goal was to destabilize the science," says Philip Wu, a pediatrician who participated in several forums as a pro-fluoride expert. It hardly mattered, he says, that almost every objection could be contextualized. (The authors of the National Academy of Sciences report explicitly said their work had nothing to do with water fluoridation; the arsenic and lead detected in water samples occurred at levels far below what the Environmental Protection Agency considered unsafe.)
But Kaminski and her supporters, though they prided themselves on their skepticism, didn't see themselves as anti-science. Rather, they considered themselves diligent if amateur students of science, who saw their lack of expertise as an advantage. "My one credential," Kaminski says, "was that I know how to read." When she first encountered fluoridation as an issue in 2005, she dove into the literature and saw a lot of things that scared her not only as a citizen, but also as a mother. "The new science raises questions," she says. "That's why it's best to be cautious. You err on the side of uncertainty."
For Wu, that attitude shows how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A single study suggests that something might be rotten in the state of fluoride. Fair enough. But one study is only one study. It can and should spur further investigation but, as a study, its reach should be limited. "It can't lead to grand conclusions," he says. "That's the way science works."
However, he notes ruefully, that is not how politics work. "Once the other side had introduced doubt, that opened the door to talk about other sets of values," he says. "Not values that say science is bad, but values that perhaps supersede science." Fluoridation ran into a city that loved the idea of a pristine watershed remaining pristine, that resented being condescended to by a bunch of medical and dental organizations, and was confident in its ability to think for itself. More broadly, the assurances of science can seem abstract if a person wants to protect himself or his family, no matter how miniscule the risk actually is. The difficulties your own child may face are a tragedy; the benefits to thousands of other kids, a statistic. "When the council just rammed it through, a lot of people were like, 'Let's take a step back and think about it,' " Kaminski says. "Even people who might have supported it under other circumstances."
In hindsight, Queral feels, fluoride advocates should have spent more time doing groundwork. "I would have spent a lot longer educating people, like two years," he says. "You explain the nature of the problem, explain who is most at risk, and then talk about what fluoridation does to solve that problem." He shrugs, pained. "Who knows? Maybe we'll do better next time."
Soon after the election, Queral left the Northwest Health Foundation. He now directs the local chapter of the United Way, working on childhood poverty issues. The job has other attractions as well: "It's nice to be behind the scenes."
Kaminski, meanwhile, is still in the thick of things. On the day I meet her in northeast Portland, she is carrying three petitions: one for a women's equal rights amendment, one for a measure on the labeling of GMOs, and the last for the formation of a people's water trust. She is excited to support the water trust, which will ensure that no one gets blindsided by the city council and its social engineering experiments ever again. (It will eventually fail to get enough signatures, showing that Portlanders' love for enlightened contrarianism has its limits.)
Today, though, her focus is on the GMO labeling measure. For her it's a no-brainer, but she says she knows she's facing an opponent skilled in the art of deception and obfuscation. Similar measures have been defeated in both California and Washington — places she would have thought they had a good shot. That just shows the power of the GMO interests, she says, and is a reminder that everyone needs to stay on their toes. "Those guys go in and create a seed of doubt that they can exploit," she says. "And they're very good at it."]]>
The demonstrators aimed to draw attention to the river's plight and to a seemingly minor but actually monumental legal fact: Sept. 16 marked the first time the U.S. or Canada could terminate, with a 10-year notice, the 1964 Columbia River Treaty — the bedrock law that coordinates operation of 14 dams on the river, plus many more on its tributaries. That possibility has triggered a flurry of action as both countries position to renegotiate the treaty, proposing changes that could dramatically re-shape the river's future.
Paul Lumley, a citizen of the Yakama Nation and director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a tribal agency representing four tribes in river-management issues, is one of many who see a new treaty as a tool for reversing decades of environmental abuse. "It's probably the best opportunity in our lifetimes to affect how the Columbia River is managed," he says, especially when it comes to salmon.
The treaty originated in the aftermath of major flooding in 1948, when heavy rain on a thick winter snowpack churned the Columbia into a monster that wiped out Vanport, Oregon, leaving 18,000 homeless. In response, the U.S. and Canada stepped up efforts to tame the transboundary river. The treaty authorized construction of three major dams in British Columbia — which the U.S. helped pay for — as well as the Libby Dam in Montana on the Kootenai River, a major tributary. The agreement also established a framework for sharing the flood-control and hydropower benefits from those dams and others.
And by those measures, the treaty has succeeded: The Columbia Basin dams, operated in careful coordination by the two countries, have prevented flooding and given the region reliable and cheap electricity. But 15 Columbia Basin tribes have another view, stating with rare consensus in 2010 that the treaty has "degraded rivers … natural resources, and tribal customs and identities." Dozens of the Columbia's salmon and steelhead stocks have gone extinct, and 13 remain listed as threatened or endangered. Much of that collapse occurred before the treaty, the result of over-fishing and the construction of dams like Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph, which lack fish ladders and block salmon from reaching the Upper Columbia Basin. But the treaty added additional dams without fish passage, and the 1960s negotiations, adding insult to injury, completely excluded the tribes.
So in 2010, the tribes demanded to be included in any treaty talks brought on by the 2014 trigger. The Army Corps of Engineers and the region's federal electric distributor, the Bonneville Power Administration — which together represent the U.S. in the treaty — received input from the tribes, as well as from states and federal agencies, and crafted a proposal for treaty changes. Last year, they submitted the proposal to the U.S. State Department, which is responsible for advising the president on treaty matters.
The proposal's most striking feature — largely bearing the fingerprint of the tribes — is "ecosystem function" as a third major treaty tenet alongside flood control and hydropower. That could provide legal justification for changing dam operations, including timing reservoir releases to enhance fish health and creating an adaptive plan to deal with climate change. "The leadership by the tribes has really been extraordinary," says Rachael Osborn, director of the Washington-based Center for Environmental Law and Policy, which helped to organize the August riverside gatherings. "They have put a vision out there."
The focus of that vision involves restoring salmon to their native Canadian spawning grounds. For decades, that has seemed a daunting, even insurmountable task. Now, a growing coalition of tribes, religious leaders and conservation groups see "ecosystem function" as the needed lever. In a declaration sent Sept. 23 to President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, many religious leaders — including the Catholic archdioceses of Portland and Seattle — plus representatives of nearly all the Columbia Basin tribes and First Nations, called for modernizing the treaty to restore salmon and other fish "to all historical locations throughout the Columbia River basin."
The actual proposal, however, is more cautious. It would only direct the U.S. and Canada to "investigate" and possibly implement an incremental plan for restoring salmon to the upper basin. That's earned support from over 80 of the region's utilities, which chafe at the prospect of increasing the cost of hydropower. (The region's utility ratepayers, along with American taxpayers, already spend nearly $1 billion annually on fish recovery.) But that compromise hints at cracks between the stakeholders that could widen into bigger rifts.
The utilities' money concerns could indeed prove a major sticking point, potentially overshadowing the enthusiasm for "ecosystem function." In addition to funding salmon recovery, U.S. utilities give British Columbia nearly $300 million in hydropower each year in return for reliable flows from the Canadian dams. The U.S. utilities think this so-called "Canadian Entitlement" is worth significantly less, while British Columbia, which holds treaty authority on the Canadian side, wants to preserve or increase the amount.
And British Columbia has considerable weight behind it: Under the existing treaty, the province's obligation to provide guaranteed flood control to the U.S. expires in 2024. If that were to happen, the U.S. would have to steeply draw down its reservoirs ahead of spring runoff, further stressing salmon as well as hydropower, irrigation and other river uses. Climate change would increase stress with earlier runoff and drier summers, potentially throwing river management into disarray.
British Columbia has indicated its willingness to extend the flood control agreement. But despite First Nations and other Canadian locals' demand for something like "ecosystem function," the province opposes sweeping changes, such as leveraging the treaty for upper-basin fish passage. That's led to a general sense among stakeholders that the U.S. — which is calling for sweeping changes — will be the one to open talks.
Hence the fragile consensus in the U.S. among the tribes, utilities, federal agencies, state governments and others who support the 2013 proposal — a display of broad support intended to prod the Obama administration into action. All 26 congressional delegates from the Northwest states have urged the State Department to act on the proposal no later than 2015, calling the treaty "an issue of paramount importance for the entire Pacific Northwest." The State Department, considering its options behind closed doors, has given no indication of when it might open treaty talks.
If, and almost certainly, when, those talks occur, it will become apparent how durable the U.S. consensus is — and whether a new Columbia River Treaty can truly reshape the mighty river's future. Until then, "we have to support each other," says Lumley, referring to the diverse set of stakeholders behind the proposal. "If we don't, then the whole thing could unravel."
Marshall Swearingen is a contributor to High Country News. He writes from Bozeman, Montana.]]>
When Governor Hickenlooper issued his executive order last year to create a state Water Plan, he charged the Colorado Water Conservation Board with the task and they, in turn, looked to the Basin Roundtables for their ideas about what the overall plan should include. The goal said, James Eklund, the Board's Director, was to tackle Colorado's water problems "as one unit."
That's the theory at least. But with the Roundtables dominated by municipal and agricultural interests, other groups are struggling to make their voices heard.
On September 10, a group of Colorado business leaders made their case for the "river-based economy" at the Colorado Water Conservation Board meeting in Glenwood Springs, where members of the public could comment on draft sections of the plan.
The setting was fitting: nearby, the rugged Glenwood Canyon runs alongside the busy I-70 corridor. A good portion of the town's economy revolves around people coming to fish and raft on the Colorado River which carves through the canyon walls, but that river, like so many on the West Slope – where the majority of Colorado's water lies – is shrinking. Every year, 180 billion gallons of water are sucked from rivers flowing west of the Continental Divide through a vast system of tunnels and pipes to thirsty farms and cities along the dry Front Range.
Now, faced with a growing gap between water supply and demand, they need more. In their draft plans, released in July, East Slope Basins like the South Platte emphasize the need "to consider new Colorado River supply options to meet future water demands" - which means keeping open the possibility of pulling more water from west to east through new transmountain diversions. But those plans, say members of Colorado's outdoor recreation, real estate, and tourism industries, jeopardize a $9 billion dollar economy that hinges on healthy rivers – and supports more than 80,000 jobs in the state.
A report commissioned by Protect The Flows found that if the Colorado River was a company, it would rank 155th on the 2011 Fortune 500 list (those numbers are based just off of the revenue and jobs provided by the outdoor recreation industry), ahead of General Mills and US airways. It would also be the 19th biggest employer on the list.
"It's really pure economics for us," says Dennis Saffell, a realtor from Grand County. Factoring in all the indirect beneficiaries of Colorado's rivers means the true economic value is likely much greater, he added, citing a recent report that found declining river flows across the Southwest could significantly hurt home prices.
Decades of overuse, plus a 15 year drought, have taken their toll on Colorado's waterways. Reservoir levels have dropped 35 percent in the last 12 years and average flows on the Colorado River are half what they were two centuries ago.
"For 150 years we've done a good job of taking water out of the river," says Craig Mackey, the co-director of Protect The Flows, a coalition of business owners that rely on rivers.
Protect Our Flows wants the statewide plan to place more emphasis on smart water management and remove the option of building new transmountain diversions. The group is pressing the Colorado Water Conservation Board to set concrete statewide conservation goals in the Water Plan, especially for towns and cities – something most other Western states have, but Colorado is lacking.
Both Mackey and Saffell noted that although most of the Basin Roundtables recognize the economic value of healthy rivers, far fewer have actually quantified those benefits - or included specific language to protect stream flows. Since each Basin's recommendations lay the foundation for the statewide plan, it's essential that all of them include concrete standards.
But the river advocates are up against some strong, well-entrenched political forces. They pointed to the big agriculture and municipal interests that drive a large chunk of Colorado's economy – and hold much of the power at the Basin Roundtables.
In comparison, the recreation economy is "the new kid on the block,", says Mackey, who grew up skiing on wood skis and cable bindings. "I'm a sixty year old man and Patagonia, The North Face, the Vail Ski Resort – these companies grew up in my lifetime," he added. "So we really need to push our way into the conversation."
And there's another challenge: Colorado's water laws. Most were written in the late 1800's and though a few modifications have occurred over the years, the laws still reinforce a "use it or lose it" mentality, which makes it difficult to implement conservation strategies. Thanks to those laws, says Saffell, farmers and cities have a legal right to keep using more water.
Think of it this way, he added: if we had the same traffic laws as we did 150 years ago when the water laws were written, it would be utter chaos. Most laws change to accommodate new realities, says Saffell, "but for some reason our water laws are untouchable."
Instead, "we need to get away from this concept that any water left in the river is wasted water because it's not being put to beneficial use," he said.
Sarah Tory is an editorial intern at High Country News. Follow @tory_sarah]]>
Still, the USGS study is the country's most comprehensive assessment of water quality to date, and it does offer some good news — or at least, what passes for good news on the environmental beat. For one thing, farmers are doing a better job at reducing runoff: The number of agricultural rivers with pollutants exceeding aquatic life benchmarks decreased from 69 percent to 61 percent, while pollution in mixed-use streams stayed about the same.
The study also demonstrates how effective federal regulators can be at reducing pollutants — and how slow they are to catch up with real-world conditions. Diazinon, for example, a commonly used pesticide in the '90s that's toxic to bees and birds, was phased out of residential use by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2004. Levels in waterways have since dropped dramatically. Yet for each toxin removed, dozens more are added: Even as the EPA was phasing out diazinon, a new pesticide called fipronil — classified as a "possible human carcinogen" — began showing up in high concentrations in urban streams, apparently in runoff from gardeners.
Altogether, some 15,000 new chemical compounds identified in patents and academic literature are added to the federal database of the American Chemical Society every day, and the "EPA simply cannot keep pace," writes Jerald L. Schnoor, editor-in-chief of the society's Environmental Science and Technology journal. "Their budget is in decline and the list grows exponentially."
The EPA isn't the only federal agency that can't keep pace. Due to "resource constraints," the USGS study was only able to monitor about half of the 400 herbicides and pesticides widely used in U.S. agriculture, meaning that serious pesticides like neonicotinoids — linked to widespread bee decline and banned in Europe — weren't included in water quality assessments. Nor were unregulated chemicals used by oil and gas companies.
Plus, even as the public health organization NSF International recently found that 87 percent of Americans are concerned about trace pesticides in their water and the USGS report credited the reduction of pesticide pollution to EPA regulations, the U.S. House of Representatives is quietly working to reduce the EPA's ability to regulate stream pollution. On July 31, the House passed Ohio Republican Bob Gibbs' "Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act," which would allow regulated pesticides to be dumped into navigable waterways without a permit. On Sept. 11, it followed suit with Florida Republican Steve Southerland's "Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Protection Act," which would exempt seasonal streams and some tributaries from Clean Water Act protections. Both bills stalled in the Senate.
Krista Langlois is an editorial fellow at High Country News. She tweets @KristaLanglois2.]]>
The deliberation comes under the 2004 Arizona Water Settlements Act, which gave New Mexico the right to develop up to 14,000 acre feet of additional water on the Gila — enough to supply a city the size of Santa Fe for a year.
On Aug. 26, the commission delayed voting on options for the river until the results of further feasibility studies come out later this fall. It will hold two more meetings — one scheduled for Sept. 22 and the other in October — before making a final decision in November.
For 10 years, the commission has weighed in on various proposals for the Gila. All of them are designed to improve the water supply for the dry southwestern corner of the state. But debate over how to do that has created one of American West's most contentious water battles, pitting proponents of a diversion against those advocating for less costly conservation alternatives.
Craig Roepke, deputy director of the commission, says it is evaluating all 15 proposals, and not just those for a diversion and is "applying the best science" before making a decision. But environmental groups like the Nature Conservancy and the Gila Conservation Coalition say the commission is silently pushing for a diversion — and selling flawed science to the public in an effort to win support for that agenda. These critics say the commission is unlikely to choose options that forgo grabbing more water for the state, no matter the cost. At stake are a $46 million federal subsidy reserved for a diversion project, and the rare chance to bolster shrinking water supplies for drought-prone New Mexico, before thirsty Arizona takes it.
"There's been a successful campaign of misinformation about which flows will be diverted," says Martha Cooper, the Southwest New Mexico Field Representative for the Nature Conservancy.
The Gila is a capricious river, ranging from a roaring deluge during early spring snowmelt and late summer monsoon to barely a trickle during drier times of the year. The floods range in size, with the largest coming in like a tsunami and the smallest barely noticeable, but they all play a critical role in the ecology of the Gila by spreading nutrients around the floodplain and re-charging the groundwater reserves that keep the riparian forests flush with life.
"It's like a sponge," says Cooper, who's lived and worked at the Conservancy's research station in the Cliff-Gila Valley for nine years. "I'm always stumbling into small wetlands I didn't know existed."
Under the complicated terms of the Arizona Water Settlement Act, New Mexico can only divert up to 350 cubic feet per second of water at any given time. That's the equivalent of 350 basketballs whizzing by each second, which isn't a lot on the mighty Colorado, but on the Gila — which can look more like a creek at certain times of year — it's significant. For that reason, the commission said a diversion would only be allowed to draw water when the Gila is flowing at a minimum 150 cubic feet per second to keep from "de-watering" the river. The idea, says Roepke is to just shave the peaks off major flooding events.
The Nature Conservancy disagrees. Its own report, called "The Gila River Flow Needs Assessment," looks at how the river's fluctuating flows shape its ecosystem and how that relationship would be affected by a diversion. The study shows that contrary to the commission's message, a diversion would have the greatest effect on the small- and medium-sized floods by reducing their frequency and magnitude. This would lead to rapid groundwater declines and set off a chain of harmful ecosystem changes.
An earlier report written by S.S. Papadopulos & Associates, environmental consultants hired by the Interstream Commission, also found that the small- and medium-sized flooding events will be altered most by a diversion, but opponents of the diversion say those findings have not been well publicized. In public presentations, the commission maintains that a diversion will have minimal impact on the Gila's flows and will actually improve the ecology of the river.
But that doesn't jive with the science, says Cooper. The really big floods only occur every five to ten years, so if those were the only times a diversion were drawing from the river, it wouldn't capture much water. Not only that, she says, "if a 30,000 cubic foot per second flood becomes a 29,650 cfs flood, that obviously doesn't really matter, but if you take 350 cfs from a 600 cfs flood, you've just taken more than half of its flow."
When that happens, the river won't move out of the main channel and into the secondary streams snaking through the floodplain. That would hurt the cottonwoods, since their seeds need a bed of wet mud in which to germinate, and numerous species that depend on the trees, including the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo.
"One thing I've learned from all this is that general averages don't tell the whole story," says Cooper. "They're [the ISC] saying groundwater levels would decline a foot but then bounce back but the trouble with averages is they mask the actual effects in any particular year."
Roepke, however, claims that first diverting and then storing water will help prevent the river from drying out during the peak irrigation season before the late summer monsoons hit. "If you can store some of the flood water and keep the river flowing, you'll do some really nice things for the species in the river and the riparian habitat," he says.
That may help some fish and aquatic macro-invertebrates, says Mike Fugagli, a local ornithologist, "but it's a classic example of robbing Peter to pay Paul." In other words the diversion would potentially improve the river's base flow, slightly, but could destroy the crucial small- to medium-sized flooding events.
"The ISC has made no effort, as far as I can tell, to acknowledge this tradeoff," Fugagli says.
As the debate over the Gila enters its final stretch, no side is backing down. The commission has until the end of the year to decide whether New Mexico will build a diversion — and receive the federal subsidy reserved for that purpose. Meanwhile, everyone is wondering: how much is the Gila's water worth?
Sarah Tory is an editorial intern at High Country News. She tweets @tory_sarah.]]>


text:
Today, Pivotal announces eight new Gold level members who have stated their intention to join the Cloud Foundry Foundation when it launches this Fall. They include Accenture, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, Ericsson, GE, Intel, NTT and Verizon, bringing the total level of Platinum and Gold members to 17.
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