Oregon’s Water Temperature; the Saga Continues
NWEA has been working for protective water temperature standards in Oregon for 23 years. Now, two successful lawsuits later, the nation’s fish expert agency has completed its review of whether Oregon’s temperature standards are good enough to protect threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead—and the endangered killer whales that depend upon them. EPA had already given the big thumbs up. But, in November, the National Marine Fisheries Service found Oregon’s water quality standard for migrating salmon was inadequate and based on a hoax.
At 20º C (68º F), this migration criterion is Oregon’s hottest allowable water temperature and applies primarily to 100 miles of the Columbia River and 50 miles of the Willamette River. The Fisheries Service found that the migration standard jeopardizes the survival of nine species due to increased deaths and disease, and impairment of fish migration behavior. For example, Snake River sockeye are at an “extremely high risk” and “unlikely to tolerate persistent reduction of survival due to water temperature” particularly given predicted climate change.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) had attempted to create the fiction that its too-hot migration temperature would be okay for salmon by supposedly requiring pockets of cold water to provide relief to the fish. But the Fisheries Service skewered Oregon DEQ and the EPA by revealing the trick for what it was always intended to be. As a result, the Fisheries Service told EPA and Oregon DEQ to identify how many of these “thermal refuges” are needed, assess whether there are enough, and devise a method of protecting and restoring them.
Two ironies jump out here. First, despite NWEA’s having served on advisory committees for 23 years in which people have talked about the critical importance of thermal refuges to salmon, this is the first time that any agency has suggested that they should be actually real enough for the fish to experience them first-hand! The second irony is that the two agencies now in charge of making thermal refuges real—EPA and Oregon DEQ—are the two agencies that have been perfectly comfortable making them remain fake over the last years. We will be watching to make sure that the fish are not the victims of yet another con job.
(NWEA was represented in this case by Allison LaPlante, Dan Mensher, and Dan Rohlf of the Earthrise Law Center at Lewis & Clark Law School.)
NWEA Challenges the Thermal Refuge Irony in New Lawsuit
A third irony regarding the story above (concerning the Fisheries Service finding that thermal refuges are required to protect salmon from temperatures as hot as 20º C) is that Oregon DEQ and EPA have already agreed to allow much higher temperatures in rivers and streams across Oregon without any cold water refuges at all! With the complete support of EPA, Oregon used clean-up plans called “Total Maximum Daily Loads” (TMDLs) to replace allowable temperatures known to protect cold water salmon and steelhead—16º to18°C—with temperatures as high as 32° C, which is 90° F! That’s way up in the lethal zone.
Not only has EPA routinely approved this scam but apparently it never crossed the minds of the bureaucrats that fish suffering through these much higher temperatures might conceivably require thermal refuges to survive. It would seem logical that fish subjected to temperatures higher than 20º C would require at least the same protection as fish in 20º C temperatures. As logic proved to be unavailable to the agencies, NWEA was left with no other choice but to take EPA to federal court and challenge these unsafe temperatures.
NWEA is represented in the Oregon TMDL case by Bryan Telegin of Bricklin & Newman, and Allison LaPlante of Earthrise Law Center at Lewis & Clark Law School.
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