Willamette River

The Willamette River is a major tributary to the Columbia River and the nation’s 13th largest river in terms of flow. Its river basin contains the majority of Oregon’s citizens and is heavily used for agriculture. Not surprisingly, the Willamette is very polluted.

To this day, Oregonians continue to bask in the glow of Governor Tom McCall, who as a reporter first told about the polluted state of the Willamette in a 1962 KGW television documentary, Pollution in Paradise. As Governor, he became the chair of the Oregon State Sanitary Authority and ordered the temporary closure of four pulp and paper mills on the Willamette because their wastes were lowering dissolved oxygen levels in the river to such an extent that fish were dying.

Without a doubt, McCall’s bringing some truth to Oregonians was a great thing. But after that, all progress halted. The types of water pollution that could not be seen—from farming and logging to cities and toxic waste dumping—continued to be ignored. Political power was and has remained king. The successor agency to the Authority, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), simply ignored polluters with political power, such as the City of Portland at the lower end of the river and the farmers upstream.

NWEA Challenges Raw Sewage Discharges from Portland

Only when NWEA filed a lawsuit against the City of Portland over its regular discharges of raw sewage—called combined sewer overflows (CSO)—to the Willamette River and Columbia Slough did the Oregon DEQ get involved, but then only to help the city defend itself in court. DEQ thought that it could stop the lawsuit by ordering the city to fix the problem. Portland did agree to a 20-year fix that was very strict but later it went back to DEQ to arrange a less expensive and less protective solution.

The lawsuit continued and in addition to causing Portland to significantly reduce its raw sewage discharges to the Willamette River, it established a national legal precedent that citizens can enforce narrative conditions in water pollution discharge permits.

Willamette River Mercury-Contaminated Fish

In 2008, the Oregon DEQ developed clean-up plans for pollution in the Willamette River basin including for mercury, a toxic pollutant that is at high enough levels that the Oregon Health Authority has issued consumption advisories. The Oregon DEQ submitted this clean-up plan for mercury across the entire basin —called a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL)—to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for approval. Despite the fact that the Willamette Mercury TMDL failed to meet the most basic aspects of a TMDL, including the fact that it contained no limits on any mercury pollution sources, EPA approved it as a TMDL.

In 2012, NWEA challenged the mercury and temperature TMDLs for the Willamette basin. In 2017, a federal court gave EPA and DEQ two years in which to prepare a new mercury TMDL for the Willamette River basin.

Temperature Pollution, Habitat Losses, and Thermal Refuges

NWEA has worked since 1992 to improve Oregon’s water quality standards for temperature, a pollutant that is key to the survival of cold-water salmon, steelhead, and bull trout. The Oregon DEQ had adopted and EPA had approved numeric criteria for the protection of these species, such as 18º C (64º F) for salmon rearing. DEQ established a 20º C (68º F) criterion in the mainstem Willamette River, but because that temperature is not safe for salmon, it also required thermal refuges be identified anywhere the 20º C criterion applied. When DEQ issued the Willamette temperature TMDL clean-up plans in 2008, it failed to address the question of whether there were sufficient thermal refuges and whether they were protected.

In addition, DEQ had also adopted a provision in its standards that allowed it to use these federally-required clean-up plans to make the numeric criteria hotter, in fact as high as they wanted and without any federal agency review. (One TMDL established a temperature that is lethal to salmon within seconds!) NWEA challenged EPA’s approval of this provision, called the Natural Conditions Criterion (NCC), and won. In that case, NWEA also forced the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)—the federal salmon experts—to review Oregon’s remaining standards. One consequence of that review was that NMFS said attention was required to the thermal refuges. That would be the thermal refuges that Oregon DEQ has been talking about since 1992.

It is noteworthy that despite Oregon DEQ’s keen interest in making water quality standards hotter, beyond what is safe for salmon, they ignore the massive changes that have taken place in the Willamette. Those changes are illustrated by these maps, which show the loss of the braided system that once supported healthy populations of cold-water fish.