FSO-MS Flotilla 78 Vancouver, WA

MAY 2019

Quick Summary:

 

 

 

Earth Day will be 50 years old in 2020

Earth Day is recognized each year on April 22 – chosen because it falls between spring break and final exams on college campuses, according to earthday.org. It marks the anniversary of what is considered the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970, according to earthday.org.

 

What the Northwest Can Learn from Indonesia's Deadly 2018 Quake

Last September, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake followed by a tsunami devastated a region of Indonesia, killing more than 4,300 people. Two Oregon State and University of Washington professors who surveyed the aftermath say the far-away disaster should elevate attention to quake-induced landslide risks here at home in the Pacific Northwest.

 

Salmon Fisheries Set as Managers Start Process to Protect Endangered Orcas

The organization that sets limits for commercial, recreational and tribal salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest wrapped up their work Tuesday at a meeting in Northern California.

 

Increased Protections Sought for Coho Salmon in Oregon Coastal Rivers

Portland, Ore. - Twenty environmental groups are calling on Oregon to protect imperiled coho salmon with more restrictions on logging and roadbuilding in coastal forests.

 

Salmon Conference Calls for Innovative Solutions to Protect Fish

April 23, 2019 8:47 p.m. Boise - What to do with the four Lower Snake River dams and how to best protect imperiled salmon have been a tough question for decades. They were the focus at a conference on salmon Tuesday at Boise State University’s Andrus Center for Public Policy.

 

Oregon's Air Is Getting Worse, According to American Lung Association

Portland, Ore. - Oregon’s air is getting worse — according to a new report from the American Lung Association.

Every year the association looks at data from federal air monitors in 900 counties. Those monitors track things like ozone and particle pollution, from factories and wildfires.

 

Environmental Groups Oppose New Gas Project At Oregon Mega-Dairy

Environmental groups are asking Oregon regulators to deny the air pollution permit for a project that would turn cow manure into renewable natural gas. 

The Willamette River's Struggling Fish Are Raising Environmentalists' Concerns

With reservoirs full behind the basin’s dams, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the literal floodgates. As the water rushed downstream, fish that usually migrated upstream — spring chinook salmon and endangered winter steelhead — vanished. It wasn’t clear if they were unwilling or unable to navigate the high waters, if the floods had harmed the fish, or if the run had simply ended sooner than expected.

 

 

Washington Budget Funds Group to Study Snake River Dam Removal

Tucked into Washington’s $52.4 billion operating budget passed Sunday night by the Legislature is controversial funding for a “stakeholder group” tasked with looking into what would happen should the four Lower Snake River dams be removed or altered.

 

US House Passes Bill to Improve Tribal Fishing Sites

On Monday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would provide $11 million to improve unsafe and unsanitary living conditions at tribal fishing sites on the Columbia River.

 

Trump Administration to Relax Offshore Safety Rules Sparked by 2010 Gulf Oil Spill

The Trump administration will unveil on Thursday its final plan to roll back offshore drilling safety measures put in place by the Obama administration after the fatal 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the worst in U.S. history, raising concerns by some groups over potential risks to workers and the environment.

 

It's 'All Hands-on Deck' To Protect Columbia River Salmon From Invasive Northern Pike

Northern pike are some of the most troubling aquatic invasive species in the Northwest. So far, they haven’t made it past Washington’s Lake Roosevelt. Two dams stand in their way. And lots of people trying to stop them.

If the fish make it past Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River, they could greatly harm imperiled salmon downstream.

 

Portland, State of Oregon Team Up to Pay For Willamette River Superfund Cleaning

Portland, Ore. - The city of Portland and the state of Oregon say they’re partnering to tackle the Portland Harbor cleanup efforts. Last December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the entire Portland Harbor site must meet certain goals toward figuring out a cleanup plan by the end of 2019.

 

Oregon's Oldest Large Wind Farm Could Get Tech Upgrade

One of Oregon’s oldest wind farms could soon be getting an upgrade. New technology could help the wind farm in Eastern Oregon work more efficiently. Officials are voting Friday on the updates to the wind farm. Wind turbines are expected to last about 20 years. Oregon’s Stateline Wind Farm is getting up there – construction started way back in 2001. That’s why the farm’s owners are asking to update part of the facility.

 

 

 

Details about each can be found on the following pages.

Earth Day will be 50 years old in 2020

Oregonian

Deb Kiner

22 April 2019 7:24 AM; 

 

Earth Day is recognized each year on April 22 – chosen because it falls between spring break and final exams on college campuses, according to earthday.org.

It marks the anniversary of what is considered to be the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970, according to earthday.org.

 “The height of counterculture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water.’ War raged in Vietnam and students nationwide overwhelmingly opposed it.

At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. ‘Environment’ was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.

Although mainstream America largely remained oblivious to environmental concerns, the stage had been set for change by the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller “Silent Spring” in 1962. The book represented a watershed moment, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries, and beginning to raise public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment and links between pollution and public health.

Earth Day 1970 gave voice to that emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns on the front page.

The idea for a national day to focus on the environment came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a ‘national teach-in on the environment’ to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes from Harvard as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land. April 22, falling between spring break and final exams, was selected as the date.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. By the end of that year, the first Earth Day had led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts.”

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

What the Northwest Can Learn from Indonesia's Deadly 2018 Quake

Tom Banse 

Northwest News Network

April 22, 2019 7 a.m.

 

Last September, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake followed by a tsunami devastated a region of Indonesia, killing more than 4,300 people. Two Oregon State and University of Washington professors who surveyed the aftermath say the far-away disaster should elevate attention to quake-induced landslide risks here at home in the Pacific Northwest.

The severe earthquake rocked Central Sulawesi at nightfall on Sept. 28, 2018. A tsunami struck the regional hub city of Palu minutes later. The tsunami waves caused some deaths, but the majority of victims perished inland from landslides that crashed into, swept away or buried outlying neighborhoods.

Associate Professor Ben Mason of Oregon State University’s College of Engineering co-led a team of experts to the disaster scene six weeks later. His team just published a detailed analysis of the geologic processes and damage they investigated. The massive landslides and mudflows triggered by the Indonesian quake left a deep impression on Mason.

“Our coastal hills here in Oregon and Washington are actually steeper than what we had seen in Indonesia,” Mason said by phone from Corvallis, Oregon. “So, we realized that we are at risk for very similar types of events.”

State agencies in Oregon and Washington are using an airborne instrument outfitted with a technology called LIDAR to identify landslide-prone slopes. LIDAR uses pulses of laser light to pierce the foliage of trees and bushes and map the ground underneath. Overflights have produced a trove of data, much of which still needs to be interpreted by a human though. And then local officials have to decide whether to act, such as by restricting development in risky areas.

“It really comes down to zoning,” Mason said. “Perhaps we need to think about moving a road or we need to think about, for instance, adding drainage into the sides of the hills to try to keep as much water as possible off of these slopes.”

The Oregon Coast Range is of particular interest to researchers because of the vulnerability to landslides of the highways that connect the Pacific Coast with cities in the Interstate 5 corridor. Those highways through the Coast Range would be lifelines to deliver relief to the stricken coast after The Big One, a magnitude 9.0 rupture of the offshore Cascadia fault zone. Alternatively, shallow faults underneath nearly all of the Northwest’s major cities could trigger landslides.

A research team led by assistant professor Alison Duvall at the University of Washington has mapped almost 10,000 active and historic landslides in the Coast Range, which the team is now trying to categorize and date to see if peaks in the landslide record correlate with past Cascadia megaquakes.

Another University of Washington professor, geotechnical engineer Joe Wartman, was part of the five-member American team that traveled to Indonesia. The Americans were joined on the scene by Indonesian geologists, engineers and researchers.

Wartman said the debris fields reminded him of the rain-triggered 2014 Oso landslide in Snohomish County, Washington, which he also investigated. But he said the Indonesian slides were magnitudes greater in scale.

“Much of our focus has been towards precipitation-induced landslides and clearly that is a threat,” Wartman said in an interview Thursday. “But we need to think very seriously about earthquake-induced landslides as well.”

It has become standard practice for international teams of geologists and engineers to journey to major earthquake scenes as soon as practical to mine for lessons that could reduce future loss of life. The National Science Foundation supports these post-disaster missions through a volunteer organization called Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance. The organization’s mission is to gather perishable information for case studies that can be used in future research and to improve building engineering and disaster resilience.

Wartman recently completed a map of landslide hazard zones for Seattle in the event of a temblor on a nearby crustal fault or if the feared Cascadia fault unleashes. Many of the identified risky locations are built up.

“There are people who have their livelihoods there and it’s not so easy to pick up and move from those locations,” Wartman said. “It’s an important question to wonder what you do when you’re working with a high consequence-low probability event. Those are really difficult questions that policymakers face and we in the geohazards community face.”

Salmon Fisheries Set as Managers Start Process to Protect Endangered Orcas

Jes Burns

OPB

April 18, 2019 10:24 a.m.

 

The organization that sets limits for commercial, recreational and tribal salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest wrapped up their work Tuesday at a meeting in Northern California.

The Pacific Fisheries Management Council bases the limits on salmon run projections up and down the coast. While the 2019 chinook salmon catch will be slightly lower than last year, the coho fishery in Washington and northern Oregon will be much improved. Recreational anglers would benefit most from this.

In addition, the council is starting work on plans to rebuild five Northwest fish runs considered to be “overfished,” a technical designation for when the three-year average of salmon returning to a river to spawn falls below a threshold set by fishery managers.

“The overfishing doesn’t necessarily mean we caught too many fish. It could be because of a drought. It could be a result of many, many environmental things that’s going on in the streams,” said Butch Smith, a charter fisherman who chairs the Salmon Advisory Sub-panel for the council.

The overfished runs include fall Chinook from the Klamath and Sacramento rivers and coho from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Snohomish and Queets rivers. Over the next few months, the council will determine if fishing limits should be adjusted next year to help increase the number of salmon.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council also kicked off a process that could lead to more salmon being available for orcas in the Pacific Northwest. The council learned last month that the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency responsible for administering Endangered Species Act protection for marine species, are planning to step in to assess how fishing affects southern resident orcas.

The endangered southern residents spend most of their time in Puget Sound but feed off Oregon and California certain parts of the year. There are fewer than 80 left and they depend on chinook salmon for food.

Ten years ago, a similar assessment determined commercial, recreational and tribal fisheries did not have a significant effect on the orcas’ food supply. But in a lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity argued new information about where the whales get their food warrants another look.

“We definitely intend for this consultation to not just result in a new document with a new date stamp on it, but it will actually inform how they manage these fisheries. And they could take measures that are going to help the orcas recover,” said center lawyer Julie Teel Simmonds.

New science shows that the southern resident orcas depend on several of the same salmon runs regulated by the fisheries council — runs on rivers as far south as the Rogue, Klamath and Sacramento.

While federal officials say the likelihood that this process will result in fishery closures, the notice to council members said, “any activities that affect the abundance of Chinook salmon available to Southern Resident Killer Whales have the potential to impact the survival and population growth of the whales.”

There has been concern that Northwest fishermen will disproportionately be penalized in order to protect the orcas.

“It’s just not a one-stop shopping fix. I think a country [Canada] and Alaska have to also be engaged in the recovery of these whales,” Smith said.

The consultation won’t affect this year’s fishery, but officials aim to have the process complete in time to set salmon limits in 2020.

Increased Protections Sought for Coho Salmon In Oregon Coastal Rivers

David Steves

OPB

April 24, 2019 11:30 a.m.

 

Portland, Ore. - Twenty environmental groups are calling on Oregon to protect imperiled coho salmon with more restrictions on logging and roadbuilding in coastal forests.

 

The groups delivered a rule-making petition Wednesday to the Oregon Board of Forestry. It calls for designated “resource sites” for coho salmon on state and private forestlands.

 

Nick Cady, legal counsel with one of the petitioners, Cascadia Wildlands, said the Oregon Board of Forestry needs to address the impacts of logging on habitat for a species at risk of extinction.

“There are major ongoing conflicts between logging practices and coho salmon habitat that need to be resolved,” he said.

Oregon Coastal Coho Salmon Could Be Stable Again In 10 Years: Feds

Oregon coho are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Their numbers are thought to have ranged between 1 million and 2 million in Oregon before white settlement. But periods of poor ocean conditions, logging, agriculture, dams and road culverts are blamed for reducing their numbers to about 30,000 in Oregon coastal rivers by the 1990s.

 

In their petition, environmental and fishing groups say these activities have degraded water quality, blocked fish passage and led to the loss of favorable habitat, such as rivers with large wood debris, deep pools, and connections to off-channel waters that rearing salmon need, such as beaver ponds, lakes and wetlands.

 

Advocates argue for the protection of cold water and more salmon habitat by designating resource sites for coho. Forests would be left in place within 150 feet of coho-accessible waters and 100 feet of non-coho-bearing headwaters.

 

The proposal is expected to draw opposition from the timber industry, since it would restrict logging and road-building in these protected resource sites.

 

Salmon Conference Calls for Innovative Solutions To Protect Fish

Courtney Flatt 

Northwest Public Broadcasting

April 23, 2019 8:47 p.m.  Boise - What to do with the four Lower Snake River dams and how to best protect imperiled salmon have been a tough questions for decades. They were the focus at a conference on salmon Tuesday at Boise State University’s Andrus Center for Public Policy.

Bonneville Power Administration’s top official said removing the dams would be a difficult task.

Elliot Mainzer, the head of BPA, said he’s doing “significant due diligence” to understand the best path forward to protect salmon, while still keeping energy costs low. He said the administration must adapt and change.

“We’ve got to try to lean in a bit more for the fish,” Mainzer said.

BPA is one of the agencies in the midst of developing a plan for the Columbia and Snake rivers. One piece of that plan could be to remove or alter the four Lower Snake River dams.

Mainzer said the four dams are integral parts of the power system’s flexibility and capacity. Without the dams, Mainzer said, “You would have a smaller system, and — absent other changes — you would be looking at having to put flexibility, capacity and energy focus on other parts of the grid.”

Several growers worried that removing or altering the Snake River dams could mean they would no longer have access to irrigation water, like Pasco, Washington-based wine grape grower Jeff Gordon.

“We’re just above Ice Harbor Dam. That’s a pretty big body of water — it’s at least over a quarter of a mile wide and 90 feet deep. My sense is that water would be too far away for us to get to,” Gordon said.

A solution will come down to working together, said Merrill Beyeler, an Idaho rancher and former legislator. Beyeler has also worked on salmon restoration in the Lemhi River Valley.

“What I think has to happen is we have to find some way to advocate for each other. That means we do not leave anybody behind. We do not leave folks that depend on the Columbia River system to move the grain to the coast. We just don’t leave anybody behind,” Beyeler said.

Tribal representatives said it’s important to have legislative support in Washington, D.C., before giving serious consideration to removing or altering the dams.

Jaime Pinkham, the director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, breaching the dams will be a “tough political lift to get through the halls of Congress.”

He said a lack of congressional support for removing Snake River dams could lead to trouble for salmon.

“It would not surprise me to see legislation introduced to either change the Endangered Species Act or do something as drastic, like we did with wolves, when we legislated their recovery,” Pinkham said.

Right now, Pinkham said, flexible spill and salmon predator policies should be the main focus of restoration efforts.

Other tribe members and fish advocates at the conference called for dam removal sooner, rather than later, both to save salmon and the Puget Sound orcas that depend on them for food.

Chris Wood, the president of Trout Unlimited, said to solve the problem, people have to start thinking on a bigger scale than they do now.

“We’re not succeeding. We’ve spent $16 billion in one of the least successful recovery programs in the history of the world. That’s where we are right now with the status quo,” Wood said.

He said carrying the conversations on from this conference could lead to a “far better place in five or 10 years than we are in today.”

Looking decades into the future, U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, challenged the room to look for innovative solutions, like small modular reactors. He said people need to stop protecting their own interests and find ways to make keep energy rates low and protect salmon.

“Make no doubt about it, I want salmon back in Idaho. Can this be done? I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if the willpower is there to do it. I don’t know if the willpower is in Congress to do it, but I will tell you that I’m hardheaded enough to try,” Simpson said.

 

 

Oregon's Air Is Getting Worse, According to American Lung Association

Kristian Foden-Vencil  

OPB

April 25, 2019 7:37 a.m.

 

Portland, Ore. - Oregon’s air is getting worse — according to a new report from the American Lung Association.

Every year the association looks at data from federal air monitors in 900 counties. Those monitors track things like ozone and particle pollution, from factories and wildfires.

Carrie Nyssen with the American Lung Association said the country has seen a lot of progress over the years, but climate change is now proving a problem.

“The bad news is this year’s report really highlights the impact that warming temperatures and climate change is having on the air quality. Specifically, in the Pacific Northwest with the increase of wildfires and wildfire smoke exposure that we’re having,” said Nyssen.

Nyssen’s report found the Portland-Vancouver-Salem area is now the 23rd most polluted area in the U.S. for the kind of particles created by wildfire.

Medford, Grants Pass, Eugene-Springfield and Bend-Prineville all ranked worse.

 

 

Environmental Groups Oppose New Gas Project At Oregon Mega-Dairy

Cassandra Profita

OPB

April 26, 2019 5:30 p.m.

 

Environmental groups are asking Oregon regulators to deny the air pollution permit for a project that would turn cow manure into renewable natural gas. 

Oregon’s largest dairy operation is already collecting the manure from more than 30,000 cows and turning it into biogas in a digester.

Right now, Threemile Canyon Farms in Boardman is using that gas to generate electricity. The company has applied for a permit to produce renewable natural gas instead. That way, it can go into a natural gas pipeline while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from normal dairy operations.

Tarah Heinzen with Food & Water Watch said she doesn’t see that gas being clean or renewable.

“This is a production method that is reliant on producing vast amounts of manure and housing huge numbers of animals in intensive confinement,” she said. “It’s an inherently dirty energy source.”

Her group and others are asking the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to include the air pollution from the rest of the mega-dairy operations in the permit for the new facility – or deny the permit altogether.

Threemile Canyon Farms spokeswoman Anne Struthers said her company would invest $30 million in the conversion, which would remain under the state limits for air pollution.

She said current laws would give the state no basis for regulating dairy operations outside the company’s renewable natural gas and electrical power plant operations.

DEQ spokeswoman Laura Gleim said the state hasn’t required air pollution permits for dairy farm operations in the past but has not made a decision yet on the permit for the proposed facility.

Heinzen said the project will generate revenue for the dairy farm that will incentivize expansion of the operation in the future, and that could increase unregulated air pollution over time.

“The vast majority of the emissions from this operation are not captured or addressed in any way by this digester, and they’re not regulated and will not be regulated by the permit as proposed,” she said.

Struthers said her company has no plans to expand its herd size and estimates the conversion to a renewable natural gas facility will reduce an additional 20,000 tons of carbon emissions from its dairy operations.

“It is a clean, renewable energy source which contributes to our closed-loop system and sustainable farming strategy,” she said in a written response.

The existing biogas digester and the proposed renewable natural gas facility are both eligible for carbon offset credits under programs such as California’s cap and trade system because they reduce methane emissions from dairy operations.

 

 

The Willamette River's Struggling Fish Are Raising Environmentalists' Concerns

Erin Ross 

OPB

April 26, 2019 4:27 p.m.

 

April’s record rains and snowmelt sent torrents of water down the Willamette River’s tributaries and into its main stem.

With reservoirs full behind the basin’s dams, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the literal floodgates. As the water rushed downstream, fish that usually migrated upstream — spring chinook salmon and endangered winter steelhead — vanished. It wasn’t clear if they were unwilling or unable to navigate the high waters, if the floods had harmed the fish, or if the run had simply ended sooner than expected.

Wildlife officials held their breath as waters receded. Slowly, the fish came back. On Thursday morning, the Corps’ supervisory fisheries biologist, Greg Taylor, moved a truckload of wild winter steelhead over Fall Creek dam, a barrier the fish can’t pass without human help. He was happy to see the runs return.

These runs are closely monitored in the Willamette River basin and its tributaries. Fisheries scientists worry that precarious populations of winter steelhead could face local extinction in the coming years if things don’t change. Spring chinook populations are doing better but they’re still declining. A number of threats face salmon and steelhead in the Willamette, but the largest, by far, are the dams; there are 13 large dams on Willamette tributaries operated by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Along with other factors — like habitat degradation, overfishing, hatchery practices and poor ocean conditions — dams have caused populations of chinook salmon and steelhead to collapse, according to the Willamette River Biological Opinion. It was authored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2008 and updated in 2015. The report detailed a number of steps the Corps should take to improve the river, steps which it is legally required to take under the Endangered Species Act. The Corps is quick to point out that some action has already been taken, though critics say they aren’t acting fast enough.

That sense of urgency, amplified by increasingly concerned Northwest conservation groups, led the advocacy group American Rivers to list the Willamette this week as one of the most endangered rivers in the country in 2019.

“There was an expectation that [the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] would have made improvements to their dams within 10 years,” said Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper, which first sued the Army Corps of Engineers over its dams in 2007. But some of the projects have been delayed.

Some of these dams are over 100 feet high and lack fish ladders to permit returning fish to continue upriver. The water impounded behind these insurmountable barriers doesn’t move or mix, so water at the top of the lakes becomes too warm for the fish, while water at the bottom becomes too cold. Depending on the time of year, that also means very cold or very warm water could be sent through the dams, making downstream temperatures inhospitable, too. Young fish returning downstream to the ocean either travel over the dams’ spillways or through the turbines. The pressure change can be deadly.

The Corps, advised by NOAA, can take on a number of projects proposed for the Willamette River Basin to save the fish. They include floating platforms and towers that can draw water from different depths in the reservoirs to help control water temperature downstream; collection sites that channel adult fish into holding pools, where they wait to be trucked up over dams and released again to spawn in the tributaries upstream; and downstream passages to help young move safely past the dams and out to sea.

Once they reach the ocean, the fish are vulnerable to threats from commercial fishing and challenging ocean conditions — some of which are the result of climate change. Unusually warm ocean waters may have caused fish populations to decline, and decreasing snowpack in the Cascades means that some of the fish’s spawning grounds are no longer productive.

But younger fish face the biggest challenges by far, and they’re the most difficult to overcome from an engineering standpoint.

“What we really stress in the biological opinion is that they need passage downstream,” said Anne Mullan, an endangered species biologist with NOAA. “There’s very low mortality for fish on the way up, but there’s just not safe passage downstream.”

About 2,400 winter steelhead had been counted going above Oregon City’s Willamette Falls as of April 2, 26 miles upriver from the Willamette’s mouth. According to NOAA, between 3,000 and 4,000 steelhead could swim up the Willamette before the year is over. That’s more than double last year’s run and significantly higher than the all-time low of 800 fish counted in 2017.

But that isn’t cause to celebrate, Mullan said.

“If we hit 4,000, it might be the fifth-lowest run. Maybe the sixth,” she said. “It’s an uptick compared to the last two years, but it’s not even going to reach the 10-year average.”

And that 10-year average that has also been declining.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife considers steelhead populations to be imperiled enough that in 2018 it took the drastic step of killing sea lionsthat predated on the fish at Willamette Falls.

Plans for a downstream passage for fish at Cougar Dam on the McKenzie River were delayed, and now the construction isn’t expected to be completed until 2022.

The Corps is quick to point out that some of the projects on NOAA’s list have been completed. They installed a temperature-control tower at Cougar Dam on the South Fork McKenzie River east of Springfield and made improvements to the adult fish collection facility east of Salem on the Santiam River, where fish are transported upstream and over the dams. They’ve also changed the ways they release water to try to improve downstream temperatures until they can build more temperature-control towers. Other projects, though, have stagnated.

Modifying dams is expensive and challenging, the Corps says — far more difficult than simply building a fish ladder.

“These things take time, and it’s important to do them right,” the Corps’ Greg Taylor said. “If we do them too fast, they’re not right, that’s bad. And if we take too long, the populations go extinct.”

In some cases, modifying the dams has proved controversial. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been sued twice recently over proposed fish-friendly modifications to dams on the Santiam River, a tributary of the Willamette — by environmental groups who think they’re not acting fast enough and by people who live and recreate on the Santiam that think the project shouldn’t happen at all because it might endanger their water supply.

The pace is frustrating to the environmental groups that have been advocating for fish-friendly dam modifications for more than a decade. “It just feels like the Willamette isn’t a priority,” Williams said.

Taylor said the Corps is working with NOAA to re-evaluate their plans for dam improvements. He said some timelines might get moved up, but others might get delayed.

That’s not acceptable to Williams. “We don’t want to see timeline extensions. We want to see work on these projects,” he said.

It’s hard to tell if any of the changes the Corps and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife have made are helping the fish, said Anne Mullan of NOAA. The populations are so vulnerable to things like climate change and ocean temperatures. A combination of El Niño and a warm water phenomenon called “the blob” could have played a role in the low runs of 2017 and 2018, masking any benefit from the dam improvements.

But scientists do know that restoring passage for fish to good habitat works. And while populations are extremely low, Mullan said, things aren’t dire yet. “There’s a kind of resilience there, even if we get below a thousand fish. If we can get them up to spawning ground, we can see a return,” she said.

Anne pointed to extreme examples, like areas where dams were entirely removed and populations rebounded. That’s not an option for any of the Willamette’s dams. They provide crucial flood control in the rainy spring, help irrigate farms during dry summers and provide hydropower. While modifying them is challenging and expensive, Mullan said it’s worth it.

“These things take a long time to get done,” Mullan said, “but they are, in our opinion, the strongest improvements needed. We need passage upstream and passage downstream.”

 

 

Washington Budget Funds Group to Study Snake River Dam Removal

Courtney Flatt 

Northwest Public Broadcasting

April 29, 2019 12:02 p.m.

 

Tucked into Washington’s $52.4 billion operating budget passed Sunday night by the Legislature is controversial funding for a “stakeholder group” tasked with looking into what would happen should the four Lower Snake River dams be removed or altered.

Supporters say this group will make sure Washingtonian’s voices are heard in the often contentious conversation around dam removal. Critics say the effort is a waste of time and money – too similar to a discussion already happening at the federal level.

Gov. Jay Inslee had asked for $750,000, following the recommendations of the state’s Southern Resident Orca Task Force, a group created by the governor to find ways to save the orcas.

“Funding the Snake River stakeholder discussions is critical for Washington communities and stakeholders to assure their voice is heard and interests addressed if the four lower Snake River dams are removed - which the science shows is essential for the salmon and orca,” said Bill Arthur, the Sierra Club’s salmon campaign coordinator, in a statement.

Critics of Washington’s dam removal study have said the federal process is enough and what the governor asked to spend money on essentially duplicates the federal government’s assessment.

“Calls for additional processes and forums that undermine the existing study are counterproductive, not based in science, and divert resources from the creation of a credible plan that is best for salmon and the Northwest,” Kristin Meira, executive director of Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, said in a statement.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon ordered federal regulators to take a hard look at all options to protect salmon, including the potential (and controversial) removal of the four dams on the Lower Snake River.

“Despite billions of dollars spent on these efforts, the listed species continue to be in a perilous state,” Simon wrote. “The (Federal Columbia River Power System) remains a system that ‘cries out’ for a new approach.”

That kicked off a years-long process, where federal agencies began studying ways to protect imperiled salmon on the Columbia and Snake rivers. A final decision on that study is expected in September 2020.

In an earlier statement, Washington Republican U.S. Reps. Dan Newhouse and Cathy McMorris Rodgers said spending taxpayer money to look at removing or altering the dams (something they both oppose) would be a waste.

“Congress has the sole authority to authorize breaching our federal dams, and as representatives of Eastern Washington communities that depend on the many benefits they provide, breaching them is out of the question. We commit to do everything in our power to save our dams,” the representatives said in the joint statement.

At a salmon conference in Boise April 23, Michael Garrity said there’s “new urgency” around these issues in the state because of the connection between salmon and orca health. Garrity is the Columbia River and Water Policy Manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“There’s a call for exploring the social and economic benefits of breaching the Lower Snake River dams,” Garrity said during a panel.

At the same conference, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said he has started to ask “what if” questions, looking more deeply at what should happen if the dams are removed or altered. What happens to Lewiston (the most inland port in the West)? What happens to farmers? How do growers transport their grains?

“There are an awful lot of questions that have to be asked, because you need to address these if you are going to solve this problem,” Simpson said.

Simpson challenged the group to come together to save salmon. Conservation groups are now drawing comparisons to that challenge, with the funding of Washington’s stakeholder task force.

“We are encouraged to see leadership emerging in both states. The problems facing salmon, orca and energy in the Northwest can’t wait,” said Sam Mace, Inland Northwest program director for the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition, in a statement.

The funding ask was the result of recommendations from the Southern Resident Orca Task Force. The whales mainly feed on chinook salmon. Their population has dropped to 74 orcas, as they face threats from a dwindling food supply, water pollution and vessel noise. (The task force did not recommend breaching the dams.)

In the budget, the stakeholder forum funding will be split between fiscal years 2020 and 2021.

“Should it be determined that it’s time for the dams to be removed, then communities must have the opportunity to collaboratively develop a transition plan to ensure the region’s needs will continue to be met. We must insist on a path forward that works for salmon and people,” said Wendy McDermott, Puget Sound and Columbia Basin director of American Rivers, in a statement.

 

 

US House Passes Bill to Improve Tribal Fishing Sites

Cassandra Profita 

OPB

April 29, 2019 3:15 p.m.

 

On Monday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would provide $11 million to improve unsafe and unsanitary living conditions at tribal fishing sites on the Columbia River.

Over time, the federal government created 31 in-lieu fishing sites for Native American tribes to make up for the land that was flooded when the Columbia River dams were built.

The tribes were also promised new housing to replace what was lost. But that promise still hasn’t been fulfilled. In the meantime, many tribal fishermen have created makeshift residences at the in-lieu fishing sites.

U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., visited one of those sites near The Dalles a few years ago.

“It was really horrific,” he said. “Sewage, electrical lines patched together. It really wasn’t safe for human habitation and there were dozens of people there.”

Blumenauer sponsored the bill, which would pay for upgrades to the kind of conditions he saw.

The bill now moves to the Senate.

Wilbur Slockish, chief of the Klickitat Tribe within the Yakama Nation, said he was grateful to Blumenauer for getting some money to upgrade the fishing sites. However, he said, those sites were once tribal villages, and the government never replaced what was lost when they were flooded.

Slockish said his family fished for generations in one of the flooded areas below Bonneville Dam.

“All of a sudden we hear the government owns them, but we were never compensated,” he said. “My grandfather, my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles and some of my cousins that utilized that area they’ve all left these world. I’m 74 and I’m hoping my children don’t have to wait another 70 years. It should be viewed as replacing what was lost to the original families that occupied that area.”

Blumenauer called Monday’s House vote “a good start,” though it doesn’t provide the tribal housing that was promised decades ago.

“We have not met our obligations to native people,” Blumenauer said. “What things have happened have been only after a struggle and they have not been adequate. The native people have been waiting for decades.”

 

 

Trump Administration to Relax Offshore Safety Rules Sparked by 2010 Gulf Oil Spill

Valerie Volcovici

Reuters

May 2, 2019

 

May 2 (Reuters) – The Trump administration will unveil on Thursday its final plan to roll back offshore drilling safety measures put in place by the Obama administration after the fatal 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the worst in U.S. history, raising concerns by some groups over potential risks to workers and the environment.

The Interior Department will announce the final revised rule at an afternoon event in Port Fourchon, a Louisiana seaport that services over 90% of the Gulf of Mexico’s deepwater oil production.

Last year, the agency’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement proposed revisions to the 2016 offshore well control rule, which had required the real-time monitoring of operations and certification by third parties of emergency devices, among other measures.

That reflected changes sought by the oil and gas industry, that said the Obama-era rules imposed financial burdens that would curtail future development and production.

The BP Macondo well blowout and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20, 2010 killed 11 workers and cost billions of dollars for Gulf Coast restoration.

Environmental groups warned that relaxing the well control rule was reckless and another example of the Trump administration catering to industry demands.

“The Trump administration is putting industry cost savings ahead of safety just weeks after the anniversary of the worst oil spill in U.S. history,” said Diane Hoskins, campaign director for Oceana. “We should be implementing new safety reforms, not rolling back the too few safety measures currently in place.”

The American Petroleum Institute said this week that voluntary standards already adopted by the oil and gas industry have increased offshore drilling safety.

“This progress goes hand-in-hand with the proposed revisions to a number of offshore regulations to ensure that smarter and more effective regulations are constantly evolving, as we move forward with safe and responsible offshore development,” said Eric Milito, API’s vice president for offshore operations. (Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

 

 

It's 'All Hands on Deck' To Protect Columbia River Salmon From Invasive Northern Pike

Courtney Flatt

Northwest Public Broadcasting

May 7, 2019 6:41 a.m.

 

Northern pike are some of the most troubling aquatic invasive species in the Northwest. So far, they haven’t made it past Washington’s Lake Roosevelt. Two dams stand in their way. And lots of people trying to stop them.

If the fish make it past Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River, they could greatly harm imperiled salmon downstream.

“In a lot of ways, the fight to save the Columbia River as we know it is going to be won and lost on Lake Roosevelt,” said Justin Bush, executive coordinator of the Washington Invasive Species Council.

American Indian tribes are joining with the state and public utility districts in what’s being billed as the largest coordinated event of its kind in the state. The groups are working for a week to catch northern pike on the lake.

“We are at a critical moment in time where northern pike have not spread into salmon habitat,” said Kelly Susewind, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, in a statement. “If northern pike move downstream, the State of Washington will consider this an environmental emergency.”

Northern pike are non-native to the Northwest. They were illegally introduced here in the 1990s and have made their way down the Pend Oreille River into Lake Roosevelt.

They are extremely aggressive and can wipe out fish populations in waters where they aren’t native. In Alaska and California, northern pike have reduced some fish runs so much it’s effectively crashed fisheries, Bush said.

“Northern pike prey on fish that we value, such as trout, salmon and steelhead,” Bush said.

One problem is that Lake Roosevelt is so big (151 miles long) that it makes it hard for biologists to find and kill the invasive fish. Right now, the fish have been spotted about 12 miles from Grand Coulee Dam. That’s 90 miles from where anadromous fish are in the Columbia River, Bush said.

“There have been some new areas found to be colonized within Lake Roosevelt. I think we’re near seeing some really devastating effects within Lake Roosevelt,” Bush said.

In other areas that have faced northern pike problems, fishery communities have “totally flipped in terms of what was present,” Bush said.

Before the fish made it to Lake Roosevelt, they’d invaded the Pend Oreille River. Using gill nets placed in northern pike spawning grounds, the Kalispel Tribe of Indians was able to suppress the northern pike population in that river’s Box Canyon Reservoir.

Officials are asking anglers to report any northern pike they catch and turn them in for a bounty of $10 a head. Reports help biologists know where the fish are in Lake Roosevelt.

Keeping northern pike from reaching salmon habitat could risk billions of dollars that’s been invested in salmon and steelhead recovery, officials said.

“We have been cooperatively working to slow or stop the spread of northern pike, but realize they are poised to continue downstream,” said Dr. Brent Nichols, division director of the Spokane Tribe’s Fisheries and Water Resource Division. “One of the tools in our toolbox is this all-hands-on-deck approach, working with other partners who care about the Columbia River ecosystem.”

 

 

Portland, State of Oregon Team Up To Pay For Willamette River Superfund Cleaning

OPB Staff 

OPB

May 10, 2019 2:35 p.m.

 

Portland, Ore. - The city of Portland and the state of Oregon say they’re partnering to tackle the Portland Harbor cleanup efforts. Last December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the entire Portland Harbor site must meet certain goals toward figuring out a cleanup plan by the end of 2019.

The cleanup site spans about 10 miles of the Willamette River starting around Sauvie Island, extending just north of the Broadway Bridge.

Under the new partnership proposal, the city and state will each contribute up to $12 million to a fund that will be used to encourage the groups and companies responsible for cleaning the river to create their own cleanup designs.

“I think something like this is good because it demonstrates leadership by the city and the state of Oregon,” said Travis Williams, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Willamette Riverkeeper. “And it’s also the kind of leadership that will hopefully incentivize others in this process to complete their agreements with the EPA and to begin design work to clean up some of this site down at Portland Harbor.”

Pollution in the area has been deemed the responsibility of more than 100 different entities including the Port of Portland, Union Pacific Railroad Co. and Chevron USA.

After designs are finalized, the actual cleanup work is expected to cost about $1 billion and take approximately 13 years, according to the EPA.

“Our waters and our lands are some of our most precious resources, and this project will help ensure that they will be enjoyed by generations to come,” Gov. Kate Brown said in a news release. “It’s a great example of how working together brings forward cost-effective solutions.”

The partnership proposal goes to the Portland City Council next week.

 

 

Oregon's Oldest Large Wind Farm Could Get Tech Upgrade

Courtney Flatt 

Northwest Public Broadcasting

May 15, 2019 5:22 p.m.

 

One of Oregon’s oldest wind farms could soon be getting an upgrade. New technology could help the wind farm in Eastern Oregon work more efficiently. Officials are voting Friday on the updates to the wind farm.

Wind turbines are expected to last about 20 years. Oregon’s Stateline Wind Farm is getting up there – construction started way back in 2001. That’s why the farm’s owners are asking to update part of the facility.

“That would involve removal of the blades and the (gearboxes) from those existing wind turbines and replacing them with new components,” said Sarah Esterson, an energy siting analyst with the Oregon Department of Energy.

The governor-appointed Energy Facility Siting Council will decide whether the 43 turbines can be updated as planned.

When wind farms reach the end of their lifespan, they can either be shut down or updated. In the wind world, that’s known as decommissioning or re-powering the farm.

The Stateline Wind Farm would be the first wind-energy operation under Oregon’s jurisdiction to be re-powered. A smaller wind farm under county control near Arlington has also been updated recently. State officials aren’t aware of any wind farms that have been decommissioned in Oregon.

Stateline Wind Farm, near Helix, Oregon, straddles the Oregon-Washington border. These updates would help the farm run more efficiently.

The company that owns the wind farm, NextEra, has re-powered multiple wind farms across the country, said spokesman Bryan Garner.

At this wind power site, the turbine blades would be slightly taller, increasing the blade tip from 416 feet to 440 feet. The ground clearance would shrink from 110 feet to 85 feet. The rotor diameter would increase and the gearboxes would be more advanced.

Garner said the longer blades would allow the turbines to generate energy more easily.

“You’re able to generate more electricity with each sweep of the rotor blades,” Garner said. “So rather than generating electricity 50% of the time when the wind is blowing, you may be able to generate electricity at lower speeds because you’re capturing more wind with the longer blades.”

NextEra would first try to recycle the nine tons of waste from the gearboxes and blades. If that doesn’t workout, the waste would go to a landfill.

Garner said wind turbine parts often go to technical programs at state schools and community colleges. Sometimes, he said, the parts can be used as replacements at wind facilities.

Using haul trucks, boom trucks and cranes, the construction would take three to four months with 150 workers, Esterson said. New blades, hubs and gearboxes would be delivered to the site and installed with a crane. Then it’s back to operating, with no new risks, Esterson said.

“If it allows this renewable resource to continue within the footprint that’s already been permitted, it seems like it certainly works within our process, with minimal environmental impacts,” Esterson said.

Esterson said she knows of one other wind facility in Oregon has looked into re-powering its turbines with newer technology.

 

FSO-MS Flotilla 78 Vancouver, WA

APRIL 2019

Quick Summary:

 

3/19/2019: Safety Alert 02-19 – Not all navigation lights are created equal

The Inspections and Compliance Directorate published Marine Safety Alert 02-19, “Not all navigation lights are created equal,” to assist all mariners in understanding the difference between navigation lights used on power driven vessels and those used on sailing vessels.

 

Scientists Getting New Tools to Monitor the Northwest's Volcanoes

Portland, Ore. - If Glacier Peak were to wake up tomorrow and start rumbling, it would be hard for scientists to tell. The National Volcanic Early Warning and Monitoring Systems Act, passed in February, sets out to change that.

 

Idaho Utility Spurns Coal, Pledges 100 Percent 'Clean' Energy By 2045

Idaho Power plans to stop using coal energy and rely instead on hydroelectric, solar and wind resources, the utility says. The public utility vows that 100 percent of energy will come from “clean” sources by 2045.

 

From Walmart To Google, Companies Teaming Up to Buy More Solar and Wind Power

Going green is often easier said than done, but a new business organization is hoping to change that. While focusing on large-scale energy buyers, the group plans to push for changes that could make renewable power more accessible for all Americans.

 

Recreational Crabbing Open on The Oregon Coast

The Oregon Departments of Agriculture and of Fish and Wildlife announced Thursday that recreational crabbing is open on the Oregon Coast.

 

This Ship Could Provide Relief After a Cascadia Megaquake

A former Navy landing ship commissioned during World War II could come to the rescue when a big Cascadia earthquake hits someday. A group based in Astoria, Oregon, envisions a new role in disaster relief for the storied vessel Salvage Chief. The Salvage Chief Foundation is seeking public money to repair and upgrade the private boat for an unusual mission. The ship could clear the Columbia River channel, so relief supplies could move in by water after The Big One.

 

Willamette Falls Trust Receives $7 Million Donation for Riverwalk Project

Willamette Falls Trust announced Thursday $7 million in donations toward the Willamette Falls Riverwalk — a project that will develop former papermill sites to provide public access to the iconic Oregon City waterfall.

 

Washington Politicians Mull Options for Removing Competition For Orcas

Politicians and wildlife managers are engaged in a fresh debate about whether to intervene in nature to save an imperiled species. The question is whether humans can get seals and sea lions to lay off Chinook salmon so there’s more for orcas to eat.

 

Salmon Fisheries Set As Managers Start Process To Protect Endangered Orcas

The organization that sets limits for commercial, recreational and tribal salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest wrapped up their work Tuesday at a meeting in Northern California.

The Pacific Fisheries Management Council bases the limits on salmon run projections up and down the coast.

 

 

 

Details about each can be found on the following pages.

 

3/19/2019: Safety Alert 02-19 – Not all navigation lights are created equal

Posted by LT Amy Midgett, Tuesday, March 19, 2019

The Inspections and Compliance Directorate published Marine Safety Alert 02-19, “Not all navigation lights are created equal,” to assist all mariners in understanding the difference between navigation lights used on power driven vessels and those used on sailing vessels.

Navigation lights intended for use on power driven vessels may be different from navigation lights intended for use on sailing vessels. Although the horizontal arc of visibility is the same for all lights, the vertical divergence (i.e. vertical arc of visibility) requirements for lights on vessels under sail are larger to accommodate greater heeling. Manufacturer labeling may not discriminate between the different requirements. Navigation lights that claim compliance with the navigation rules may meet the vertical visibility requirements for a power-driven vessel, however, they may not comply with the vertical visibility standards for sailing vessels. Manufacturer labeling may not indicate that the lights are designed for use on power-driven vessels only.

Annex I (COLREGs section 10 and Inland 33 C.F.R. part 84.16 “Vertical sectors”) prescribes the degrees and intensities that navigation lights must meet on the vertical plane. Many boat owners may not be aware of the +/- 25-degree vertical light divergence requirement for sailing vessels, a 17.5 degree increase from the power-driven vessel standard. Installing a navigation light, designed for use on a power-driven vessel, on a sailing vessel may result in the light losing visibility when the vessel heels beyond the narrower +/- 7.5 degree vertical divergence angle established for power-driven vessels. A sailing vessel operator in this situation would likely not realize that the sailing vessel’s lights were not visible when heeling beyond 7.5 degree.

 

What does this mean?
If your sailboat does not have the correct lights (sidelights, masthead lights, all-round lights, and/or combined lantern) and it heels past a certain degree, it may not be observable by other vessel operators.

Why is that important?
You may not know that other vessels cannot see you due to the heel of your vessel. Failure to operate with the correct navigation lights may create a situation where you mistakenly believe another mariner is able to ascertain your vessel’s aspect or operational condition, which increases risk of collision.

 

Although a navigation light designed for a sailing vessel will not meet the vertical visibility requirements for a power driven vessel, it does not pose a commensurate safety concern (see diagram above). Manufacturers should be aware of the larger vertical visibility requirement for lights installed on sailing vessels. Likewise, sailing vessel operators and vessel repair facilities should ensure the installed lights meet the applicable requirements in Annex I. Since not all navigation lights are designed similarly, ensure that when you install a navigation light it is USCG certified for the length and type of boat. Such information should be readily available from reputable sources such as the light or vessel manufacturer.

Safety Alert 02-19 is provided for informational purposes only and does not relieve any domestic or international safety, operational, or material requirement. Developed and distributed by the Office of Navigation Systems. Questions may be sent to [email protected].

 

 

Scientists Getting New Tools to Monitor The Northwest's Volcanoes

Erin Ross

OPB

March 22, 2019 10:16 a.m.

 

Portland, Ore. - If Glacier Peak were to wake up tomorrow and start rumbling, it would be hard for scientists to tell. The National Volcanic Early Warning and Monitoring Systems Act, passed in February, sets out to change that.

Glacier Peak, a volcano in Washington’s North Cascades, is only monitored by one seismometer, which is a device designed to detect shaking. That makes it difficult to tell if shaking is from something volcanic — like an earthquake or a small explosion — or caused by something more ordinary, like a small rockfall, or a glacial “icequake.”

Eighteen volcanoes are classified as “very high threat” in the United States; eight of them are located in the Pacific Northwest. And right now only Mount St. Helens is considered well-monitored. The other seven are Mount Rainier, Mount Baker and Glacier Peak in Washington, and Mount Hood, the Three Sisters, Newberry Volcano and Crater Lake in Oregon.

The volcanoes get their high threat ranking because of their likelihood of eruption and close proximity to groups of humans.

None of them currently have the type of surveillance that scientists say they would need to accurately predict volcanic eruptions and model potential hazards.

At a press conference Thursday in Vancouver, Washington, Sen. Maria Cantwell, who spearheaded the legislation with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, gathered with geologists and local public safety officials to discuss the impacts of the new legislation.

Dan Douthit, a spokesperson for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Communications, said eruptions from Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood, Mount Adams or Mount Jefferson (the latter two are considered high threat volcanoes) “could cause ashfall in the urban area, and also send mud and debris down the Columbia River, disrupt travel and the economy, and require the close coordination of government agencies throughout the region.”

An early warning system would give governments time to coordinate emergency response, he said, and mitigate the impacts of the travel disruptions.

“This legislation gives visitors, land managers and organizations like ours peace of mind while spending time in this majestic and impactful landscape, and ultimately, it will save lives in the event of an eruption,” said Ray Yurkewycz, executive director of the Mount St. Helens Institute.

Washington’s Mount Rainier has about half the monitors of Mount St Helens. It’s of particular concern to Cantwell. “It is estimated that 150,000 people who live near that area could see the impacts of a lahar off of Mount Rainier, and they might only have as much as 40 minutes to respond to that type of incident.”

Accurately predicting eruptions is incredibly important. Even remote volcanic eruptions can cause lahars, which are massive flows of mud, debris and rock caused by melting glaciers and snow during eruptions. Those lahars can travel far downstream and destroy local communities. If a lahar started on Mount Rainier, for example, the town of Orting, Washington, would only have an hour to evacuate to high ground.

After the press conference, Seth Moran, a geologist with the Cascades Volcano Observatory, took Cantwell and reporters on a tour of the U.S. Geological Survey facility.

To demonstrate how more sensors are better than one, Moran gestured to a screen showing data coming in live from seven stations on Mount St. Helens. “This is what we’re kind of aiming at, Mount St. Helens has a pretty good network,” Moran said.

If something only shows up on one seismometer, it could be an anomaly — even the wind can give a false positive. “The important thing is when there’s an earthquake you’ll see it on all these stations,” Moran said.

Different types of tools can help scientists interpret a volcano’s rumblings too. Moran showed seismometer readings taken on March 11 at Mount St. Helens. Something had caused one of the crater seismometers to spike, in a way that seemed similar to the spikes caused by the sorts of small explosions volcanoes make when they move fluid around and wake up.

But they had other seismometers on the mountain, and tools besides seismometers in the crater. One, an infrasound sensor, can detect the pressure waves caused by sound. It didn’t hear anything: There was no explosion.

Similar things can happen on other monitored volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest. The movement of glaciers can show up on seismometers, and those same glaciers can generate icequakes. It can be hard to differentiate an icequake from the sort of small earthquake active volcanoes make — but icequakes are more localized, so having more than one monitor can help.

These tools aren’t just for predicting eruptions. Volcanoes don’t just build up. As we learned in 1980 from Mount St. Helens, they come down as landslides too. And while the destructive landslides of Mount St. Helens were associated with a volcanic eruption, they can also be triggered by ordinary rainfall and weathering. By placing more monitors on the Cascades’ steep peaks, geoscientists will be able to continue to measure active landslides and catch others.

In addition to authorizing funding for improved volcano monitoring, the bill creates a national Volcano Watch Office. Right now, volcanoes are monitored locally. But during the 2018 Kilauea eruption in Hawaii, the staff needed time off to sleep. Other volcano monitoring stations stepped in to fill the gaps. The idea is that the Volcano Watch Office could do the same.

Correction (March 22, 2019) — An earlier version of the story did not correctly describe what Congress has done to finance improved volcano monitoring. Congress has authorized funding for this initiative.

 

 

Idaho Utility Spurns Coal, Pledges 100 Percent 'Clean' Energy By 2045

Bill Chappell 

NPR

March 28, 2019 7:16 a.m.

 

Idaho Power plans to stop using coal energy and rely instead on hydroelectric, solar and wind resources, the utility says. The public utility vows that 100 percent of energy will come from “clean” sources by 2045. Public utilities have made similar pledges in only a handful of states.

Idaho Power customers increasingly see clean energy that doesn’t rely on carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels as a priority, the company says.

“We believe this goal is attainable, “Idaho Power President and CEO Darrel Anderson said in announcing the plan.

Idaho Power says it has already agreed to stop using two coal power plants by 2025, and that it’s considering how to shut down its third and final coal plant.

“The company that serves over half-a-million customers calls the effort ‘Clean Today, Cleaner Tomorrow,’ ” member station Boise State Public Radio reports. “Nearly 50 percent of the electricity the company currently generates comes from hydro power. About a fifth comes from coal.”

As it announced the news, Idaho Power also said it has reached a deal to buy electricity from a 120-megawatt solar farm, which will be built south of Twin Falls. That facility is still in the planning phases, and the deal will require state regulators’ approval.

“Similar clean energy pledges have been made by utilities in Iowa, Minnesota, and California,” Boise State Public Radio’s Matt Guilhem reports for NPR’s Newscast unit.

Across the U.S., Idaho is far from alone in shutting down coal power plants. As NPR’s Jeff Brady reports, the domestic U.S. coal industry is declining — even as exports to China and other Asian countries are rising.

“Despite President Trump’s effort to boost the domestic coal industry, power plants continue to shut down. They can’t compete against cheaper natural gas and renewable energy,” Brady reports for NPR’s Newscast. “Environmental groups have cheered the decline as scientists warn carbon dioxide emissions will have to be dramatically reduced quickly to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”

In 2018, the U.S. exported more coal than it had in the past four years, the Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday.

But the agency also reported exponential gains for solar and wind over the past decade, saying, “U.S. solar generation has increased from 2 million MWh [megawatthours] in 2008 to 96 million MWh in 2018, and wind generation rose from 55 million MWh in 2008 to 275 million MWh” last year.

When hydroelectric power is included, renewable energy sources in the U.S. generated “a new record of 742 million megawatthours (MWh) of electricity in 2018, nearly double the 382 million MWh produced in 2008” the EIA says.

Idaho Power says it has 17 hydroelectric plants on the Snake River. It also owns three power plants that are fueled by natural gas, which is burned to spin turbine blades and produce energy.

The Idaho plan was welcomed by the Idaho Conservation League, which says it’s been working for years to see the state’s power utility commit to clean energy.

“We’re enthusiastic about it and eager to continue to assist the utility on how to achieve this goal,” said Ben Otto, ICL’s energy associate, in a published statement. “We’re hopeful this means they’ll work on developing renewable sources of energy built in Idaho by and for Idahoans. That way, Idaho’s economy, businesses, workers and families benefit, and we can wean ourselves of a dependence on out-of-state sources of energy.”

In an interview with the Idaho Press, Otto added, “Climate change and clean energy shouldn’t be a political issue.” Of the officials at Idaho Power who made the decision for the utility to go green, he said, “They’re following the dollars, they’re following the science.”

Adam Richins, the utility’s vice president of customer operations and business development, tells Guilhem that the company’s plans acknowledge the possibility that new technologies could further reshape how electric utilities serve their customers.

Those new technologies could include nuclear power — which may be produced by small modular reactors that the U.S. Department of Energy and its partners plan to test in eastern Idaho. They would be the first such reactors in the country, the Associated Press reported when the deal was reached in late 2018.

The modular nuclear plan centers on the Idaho National Laboratory, in Idaho Falls. After Idaho Power announced its clean energy plan, Mayor Sean Colettti of nearby Ammon, Idaho, asked the utility via Twitter if it will include nuclear energy.

“We’ll be evaluating all kinds of new, existing and emerging technologies to help us reach our goal,” the utility replied. “That includes looking into nuclear technology, such as the small modular reactors planned in eastern Idaho.”

Nuclear power has deep roots in Idaho. As the Department of Energy has noted, it was a reactor in Idaho that generated the first electricity from nuclear energy, in December of 1951.

 

 

From Walmart To Google, Companies Teaming Up to Buy More Solar and Wind Power

Camila Domonoske 

NPR

March 28, 2019 6:30 a.m.

 

Going green is often easier said than done, but a new business organization is hoping to change that. While focusing on large-scale energy buyers, the group plans to push for changes that could make renewable power more accessible for all Americans.

Companies from a variety of industries — including Walmart, General Motors, Google and Johnson & Johnson — are forming a trade association to represent firms that purchase renewable energy and remove barriers that make it complicated to shift away from carbon.

The new organization, the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, is building on years of work between corporations and climate advocacy nonprofits. Currently, about 200 companies, cities and universities are involved.

Miranda Ballentine, the CEO of the new trade group, says the organization will help push energy markets and public policies to make it easier to actually choose to buy green energy.

It’s harder than you might think for a company to choose renewables, Ballentine says.

“Especially in today’s day and age, when we see many renewable energy technologies that are meeting or beating brown [conventional] power prices, you would think, ‘Hallelujah! The day has come, clean energy is here, we can now just go out and buy it.’ But there are a number of barriers,” she says.

One is the way energy markets are set up. They vary by region — some areas allow more choice than others. But in many locations, buyers can’t select a source for the energy they get from a utility.

“They can’t actually say, ‘I want power from that wind project over there,’” Ballentine says. “They literally cannot contract directly for certain sources of power.”

In other cases, there are technological challenges. “Some renewable energy technologies like wind and solar don’t produce 24/7 — they produce when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing,” Ballentine says. “And we as energy consumers … we need our power 24/7,” she says.

REBA hopes to flex its purchasing power to support technological innovation and push utilities to offer more green options — calling for changes to public policy where necessary.

“The demand side of the equation really has a unique role to play and really has a unique voice and ability to drive the clean-energy market,” Ballentine says.

Many companies have set green energy targets as part of overall sustainability efforts — whether out of a sense of corporate responsibility or in the pursuit of positive PR.

But Steve Chriss, director for energy and strategy analysis at Walmart, says there’s a financial calculation as well.

Walmart has “a great desire to operate as cleanly and sustainably as possible,” he says. “But we also want to operate at the lowest possible cost. With where renewable energy costs have come, we feel that in a number of markets renewable energy is going to be the best cost option.

“It’s not just a specialty play for the interests of a few [companies] who are really into it,” he says. “It’s really about a business play to deliver the lowest-cost resources possible.”

Walmart, operating on a massive scale, organizes multiple sources of renewable power — from rooftop solar to complex arrangements with utilities. Other companies might be interested in green power, but “don’t necessarily have the scale or capabilities of a Walmart” to pursue those options, Chriss says.

REBA will aim to open access to green energy to all its members, not just the most powerful mega corporations.

“As access points increase, more gets done, economies of scale drive lower costs,” Chriss says. “We try to look towards … getting to where renewables can be the lowest-cost resource in every market.”

Priya Barua, a senior manager for utility innovation at the World Resources Institute, says the work of the new trade group could have implications well beyond its members. The institute is one of the four nonprofits that helped establish REBA.

“It’s not just creating options for [corporate and industrial] customers, but using their collective buying power … to create options in the market that would benefit everybody.”

 

 

Recreational Crabbing Open on The Oregon Coast

Meerah Powell

OPB

March 31, 2019 8:41 a.m.

 

The Oregon Departments of Agriculture and of Fish and Wildlife announced Thursday that recreational crabbing is open on the Oregon Coast.

The crabs were previously off limits due to high levels of the marine biotoxin domoic acid.

Domoic acid is the same biotoxin that has left parts of the coast closed to razor clamming — due to high levels of the toxin in clams and other shellfish.

Crab samples taken from north of Port Orford to the California border show levels of the biotoxin are below the unsafe limit.

Even though the domoic acid levels in crabs are below the closure limit, officials still warn people to eviscerate, or gut, their crabs before cooking, as the biotoxin may seep into cooking liquid from the viscera.

In general, officials do not recommend any consumption of crab viscera.

The Oregon Departments of Agriculture and Fish and Wildlife will continue to monitor crab biotoxin levels and relay any updates.

 

 

This Ship Could Provide Relief After a Cascadia Megaquake

Tom Banse 

Northwest News Network

April 4, 2019 6:30 p.m.

 

A former Navy landing ship commissioned during World War II could come to the rescue when a big Cascadia earthquake hits someday. A group based in Astoria, Oregon, envisions a new role in disaster relief for the storied vessel Salvage Chief. The Salvage Chief Foundation is seeking public money to repair and upgrade the private boat for an unusual mission. The ship could clear the Columbia River channel so relief supplies could move in by water after The Big One.

For more than 50 years, the Salvage Chief responded to groundings and shipwrecks up and down the West Coast. Mostly famously perhaps, her crew helped refloat the Exxon Valdez supertanker after the terrible 1989 oil spill in Alaska. Portland-based Fred Devine Diving & Salvage mothballed the Salvage Chief a decade ago. Then in 2015 Astoria businessman Floyd Holcom bought the retired, 194-foot long boat.

“The machinery on this ship as you’ll see is in great condition,” Holcom said. “It’s a tool.”

Holcom pictures the Salvage Chief as a floating disaster response platform. As he led a tour through watertight doorways, down narrow passageways and up and down steep ladders, Holcom pointed out equipment that could be repurposed. Five large generators and a water purifier could supply electricity and drinking water for Lower Columbia towns that find themselves isolated after a major earthquake. There are three cranes on board and a helipad over the rear deck.

He sounded most proud about the six 100-ton winches originally used to drag grounded cargo ships and barges off ocean beaches.

“It’s the only vessel that could pull the debris from the Astoria and Longview bridges after they collapse,” Holcom said in an interview.

But first the ship needs to go into dry dock for repairs and upgrades needed to regain Coast Guard certification. The wish list includes hull repairs, engine upgrades, a fresh coat of paint and added satellite communication capability. To pay for that, Holcom and the nonprofit Salvage Chief Foundation are asking the Oregon Legislature for $1.9 million.

“We’re not going to have bake sales enough to take the Salvage Chief back to dry dock,” he quipped.

The initial response from state senators to the request has been positive, but there are still many hurdles ahead.

“That was quite a sales pitch, folks, quite well presented,” said Oregon Senate Veterans and Emergency Preparedness Committee Chair Alan Olsen at the close of a public hearing in late March.

The chief sponsors in the Legislature for the Salvage Chief are former committee chair, Sen. Brian Boquist, R-Dallas, and state budget writer Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose.

If the Oregon Legislature ponies up, Holcom says he will turn to the Washington Legislature next since the two states share the Columbia River.

Cowlitz County, Washington, emergency management coordinator Lorraine Churchill endorsed the campaign for the ship, which has adopted the slogan “Ready the Chief.” She testified to the Oregon Senate about the projected damage and likely delays in getting outside help after a Cascadia Subduction Zone temblor.

“Our bridges westward are forecasted to fail,” Churchill said. “Our roads are expected to fail. Rail … all impacted and impassible.”

The one highway remaining through the Lower Columbia region would be the Columbia River, Churchill said.

“With her shallow draft, her winches’ power, her communications hubs, the Salvage Chief will be key in reopening the Columbia River maritime highway, key to enabling resources and commerce to re-enter our region again,” Churchill continued.

Supporters of readying the Salvage Chief are also fielding skeptical questions. Like, could the boat survive being torn from her moorings if a tsunami follows the great earthquake? Retired ships officer and now Salvage Chief Foundation chairman Don Floyd expressed confidence given the vessel’s armored hull.

“It would be a really good surge but it really wouldn’t affect the ship physically,” Floyd said. “It could withstand it.”

Floyd said the salvage gear onboard could enable the ship to winch itself back into the water if it got tossed onto a beach by a tsunami. The Salvage Chief is moored just upriver from Astoria in the lee of protective Tongue Point, but the ship’s pier is well within the tsunami inundation zone.

Then there is the perennial question, “Isn’t the boat too old?” Floyd deflected that concern too.

“It’s still got a lot of time left on it,” Floyd said in an interview. “Heck, I think it’s good for another 70 years at least.”

Floyd said building a new ship with the same capabilities would be cost-prohibitive, probably in excess of $100 million.

A major quake could strike the Pacific Northwest next week or 200 years from now, according to seismologists. In the meantime, the Salvage Chief continues to be used for seamanship training with Job Corps students and separately, by special forces soldiers. The U.S. Army leases the ship to periodically run commandos through training scenarios involving a mock foreign vessel.

 

 

Willamette Falls Trust Receives $7 Million Donation for Riverwalk Project

Meerah Powell

OPB

April 11, 2019 10:22 a.m.

 

Willamette Falls Trust announced Thursday $7 million in donations toward the Willamette Falls Riverwalk — a project that will develop former papermill sites to provide public access to the iconic Oregon City waterfall.

 

The funding came from two sources: Connie Ballmer of Ballmer Group donated $5 million and the Ann and Bill Swindells Charitable Trust donated $2 million.

 

“[The donation] is really catalytic in what it can and will do for the Riverwalk project and as such Oregon City, the Portland metro area and the state of Oregon,” said Andrew Mason, the executive director of Willamette Falls Trust, the philanthropic and community engagement partner of the Riverwalk project.

 

The Riverwalk project is set to break ground in late spring of 2020. It will repurpose one of the former mill buildings into an overlook structure where people can view the falls and the Willamette River. It will also restore “habitat and gathering spaces as well as historic and cultural interpretation of the site,” according to a news release. 

 

One of the donors, Ballmer — whose husband is former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — worked at an old mill west of the falls, the Crown Zellerbach mill, as a college student. 

 

“It’s as if someone put a roof on the Grand Canyon and kept it hidden away for all these years,” said Ballmer about Willamette Falls. “It’s time to lift the roof off Willamette Falls so that more Oregonians can experience this beautiful place.”

 

Mason also spoke on the lack of public access to the falls. 

 

 

“Willamette Falls is sitting behind four locked chain linked fences — the nation’s second largest waterfall by volume — which is a disgrace to Oregon legacy and Oregon pride,” Mason said. “It has been a place of value and excitement for people to come and visit and this is our opportunity to turn it around.”

 

Phase one of the Riverwalk, which will include the public access area, has a fundraising goal of $35 million. It’s expected to be finished by 2022, Mason said.

 

The public partners group, the Willamette Falls Legacy Project, has already contributed $19.5 million, and the additional $7 million has brought the project to over 75% of its fundraising goal. 

 

Mason said he hopes for a Metro parks bond measure to be on the ballot in November to help spur future phases of the project to further improve the area.

 

Along with food carts and community events, Mason said the Riverwalk will also highlight the area with “cultural events that allow it to be a place of reverence and inspiration that it always has been — to be able to understand what this [place] means, not only to its industrial history but to its tribal history and the natural history.”

 

 

Washington Politicians Mull Options for Removing Competition For Orcas

Tom Banse 

Northwest News Network

April 15, 2019 6:30 a.m.

 

Politicians and wildlife managers are engaged in a fresh debate about whether to intervene in nature to save an imperiled species. The question is whether humans can get seals and sea lions to lay off Chinook salmon so there’s more for orcas to eat.

Chinook — or king — salmon are the preferred food of the critically-endangered Pacific Northwest orcas. But growing numbers of sea lions and the robust population of harbor seals eat Chinook too.

“This is that classic mix of the predators being a protected species and the prey being a protected species,” said Nate Pamplin, policy director for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We don’t know the level of consumption in terms of whether or not humans should intervene.”

The current population of 75 southern resident killer whales is near the record low of the past 30 years. Whale scientists have identified a lack of sufficient salmon to eat as a major contributing factor to the orca population’s decline along with environmental pollution and disturbance from vessel traffic and noise.

Earlier in the current Washington legislative session, a bipartisan group of state representatives argued that culling seals and sea lions would have an immediate impact on boosting Chinook salmon, the favorite food of the orcas. They introduced a measure to direct WDFW to seek a federal permit for “maximum lethal take” of seals and sea lions. It passed out of one committee and then died in February.

Now lawmakers are haggling over funding to implement a prior recommendation from the Washington governor’s southern resident killer whale task force. The task force urged state and federal agencies to evaluate how to reduce predation by seals and sea lions on the valuable fish.

The Washington Senate proposes to spend millions of dollars for biological studies, analysis of management options and possibly blocking or removing some log rafts and docks where seals haul out to rest in Puget Sound. The proposed House budget, however, allocated zero dollars to this. The two chambers have to reconcile their spending blueprints before the governor can sign a two-year budget into law, presumably next month.

“We would definitely like to have resources in the final budget to address seal and sea lion predation of salmon,” said Democratic Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, the state House Environment Committee chair. “We know that is a significant pressure on Chinook salmon populations and that has an impact on orcas as well.”

Fitzgibbon said other initiatives to increase the orca food supply are moving ahead, including funding to temporarily increase Chinook production at selected salmon hatcheries and increased protection for salmon spawning and rearing habitat.

“We just have to make hard choices sometimes about what we can and can’t afford,” Fitzgibbon added in an interview Thursday.

Southern resident killer whales and multiple Chinook salmon runs are listed under the Endangered Species Act. By contrast, sea lions and harbor seals are abundant in the region, but Pamplin noted the pinnipeds are shielded too by a different federal law. 

“Congress, in 1972 when they passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, treated marine mammals as a very special species and gave them really strong protections,” Pamplin said in an interview. “There are very limited opportunities to actually do removals for management purposes. Furthermore, we know this will be highly scrutinized.”

Meanwhile, a different population of orcas known as transients, or Bigg’s killer whales, are being seen more often in Pacific Northwest waters. Unlike the resident orcas, these visitors prey on seals and sea lions, a welcome habit in the current context.

The marine mammal-eating orcas are putting a modest dent in the local harbor seal population, according to a recently published paper. Volunteer researchers led by Monika Wieland Shields of the Orca Behavior Institute in Friday Harbor, Washington, estimated transient orcas consumed 1,090 seals in the Salish Sea in 2017 — or more than 2 percent of an estimated harbor seal population of 51,000 in the Strait of Georgia and Washington’s inland waters.

“The population controlling effects of transient killer whale predation on harbor seals should be considered when evaluating any pinniped management actions in the Salish Sea,” Shields and her co-authors wrote.

A longer-running discussion about the same issue in the Columbia River has resulted in expanded sea lion cullings. Since 2008, state and tribal wildlife biologists have removed an average of 19 California sea lions per year that were observed repeatedly preying on salmon and steelhead below Bonneville Dam. Some of the sea lions were shipped off to aquariums, but most were trapped and then killed by lethal injection.

The removals have not ended the toll on salmon at the dam, so late last year Congress passed a law to give wildlife managers more latitude to remove sea lions upstream of the Interstate 205 bridge and expanded the target list to include Steller sea lions.

 

Salmon Fisheries Set As Managers Start Process To Protect Endangered Orcas

Jes Burns 

OPB

April 18, 2019 10:24 a.m.

 

The organization that sets limits for commercial, recreational and tribal salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest wrapped up their work Tuesday at a meeting in Northern California.

The Pacific Fisheries Management Council bases the limits on salmon run projections up and down the coast. While the 2019 chinook salmon catch will be slightly lower than last year, the coho fishery in Washington and northern Oregon will be much improved. Recreational anglers would benefit most from this.

In addition, the council is starting work on plans to rebuild five Northwest fish runs considered to be “overfished,” a technical designation for when the three-year average of salmon returning to a river to spawn falls below a threshold set by fishery managers.

“The overfishing doesn’t necessarily mean we caught too many fish. It could be because of a drought. It could be a result of many, many environmental things that’s going on in the streams,” said Butch Smith, a charter fisherman who chairs the Salmon Advisory Sub-panel for the council.

The overfished runs include fall Chinook from the Klamath and Sacramento rivers and coho from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Snohomish and Queets rivers. Over the next few months, the council will determine if fishing limits should be adjusted next year to help increase the number of salmon.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council also kicked off a process that could lead to more salmon being available for orcas in the Pacific Northwest. The council learned last month that the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency responsible for administering Endangered Species Act protection for marine species, are planning to step in to assess how fishing affects southern resident orcas.

The endangered southern residents spend most of their time in Puget Sound but feed off Oregon and California certain parts of the year. There are fewer than 80 left and they depend on chinook salmon for food.

Ten years ago, a similar assessment determined commercial, recreational and tribal fisheries did not have a significant effect on the orcas’ food supply. But in a lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity argued new information about where the whales get their food warrants another look.

“We definitely intend for this consultation to not just result in a new document with a new date stamp on it, but it will actually inform how they manage these fisheries. And they could take measures that are going to help the orcas recover,” said center lawyer Julie Teel Simmonds.

New science shows that the southern resident orcas depend on several of the same salmon runs regulated by the fisheries council — runs on rivers as far south as the Rogue, Klamath and Sacramento.

While federal officials say the likelihood that this process will result in fishery closures, the notice to council members said, “any activities that affect the abundance of Chinook salmon available to Southern Resident Killer Whales have the potential to impact the survival and population growth of the whales.”

There has been concern that Northwest fishermen will disproportionately be penalized in order to protect the orcas.

“It’s just not a one-stop shopping fix. I think a country [Canada] and Alaska have to also be engaged in the recovery of these whales,” Smith said.

The consultation won’t affect this year’s fishery, but officials aim to have the process complete in time to set salmon limits in 2020.

 

 

FSO-MS Report July 2017

---

Water samples positive for invasive mussel larvae in Tiber Reservoir

Water samples from Tiber Reservoir east of Shelby have tested positive for the larvae of aquatic invasive mussels, with similar tests from Canyon Ferry Reservoir near Helena showing “suspect” or inconclusive results, according to officials at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks . 

FWP, along with other state and federal agencies and the Montana Invasive Species Advisory Council (MISAC), are now working to determine whether adult mussels are present in Tiber Reservoir and to get further test results on Canyon Ferry.

“This is the first positive test in Montana for the larvae of quagga or zebra mussels,” said Eileen Ryce, FWP fisheries division administrator. “Although we hoped we would never see these invasive species in Montana waters, we’ve been preparing for this possibility for some time, and we’re going to work together to address this threat.”

Recent site inspections at Tiber and Canyon Ferry did not turn up any established populations of adult mussels, but officials will be conducting more extensive inspections with the assistance of stakeholders such as dam operators, marina concessionaires and other groups.  

FWP for many years has conducted regular testing of the state’s rivers, lakes and reservoirs for aquatic invasive mussels. Water samples from Fresno, Holter, and Hauser reservoirs have come back negative, as did samples from Lake Frances, the Marias River, and the Milk River. Testing at Fort Peck Reservoir and the entire Missouri River system is ongoing.

“The recent test results are definitely bad news, but they do indicate our detection system is working,” said Ryce. “The results from Tiber Reservoir show the larvae exist at very low densities, which improves our chances for containment.”

State agencies are making arrangements to bring in dogs that may detect mussels at Tiber and Canyon Ferry reservoirs. The dogs have proven effective in Canada and other states in identifying adult mussels attached to boats and other watercraft. At the reservoirs, the dogs will inspect boat docks, launches and shorelines.

Bryce Christiaens, chair of the governor-appointed MISAC, said “I’m pleased with the initial response from the agencies, and the expertise they bring to the issue.” He stressed the importance of all boaters and anglers practicing Montana’s “Clean – Drain – Dry” protocol:

• Clean you boat and equipment every time you use it, especially if you move it to a new location.
  
  
• Drain all standing water, including any that may be left in the engine’s cooling system, live wells, and bilge areas.
  
  
• Dry everything that has come into contact with water.

 

Quagga and zebra mussels are aquatic invasive species not known to be established in Montana. In other parts of the country, such as the Midwest, Southwest and the Great Lakes areas, mussel populations have impaired hydroelectric, municipal and agricultural water infrastructure. The mussels can also impact fisheries and other aquatic resources; they can also damage recreation facilities. 

For more information on aquatic invasive species, visit the Montana Invasive Species Advisory Council web page at http://dnrc.mt.gov/divisions/cardd/MISAC, or FWP’s website http://fwp.mt.gov/fishAndWildlife/species/ais/prevention.html.

Contacts:

Eileen Ryce, FWP fisheries division administrator, 444-2448 John Grassy, DNRC public information officer, 444-0465 Stephanie Hester, MISAC Coordinator, 444-0547

---

Distressed Distress Signal A potentially dangerous issue.

The Coast Guard has withdrawn the Certificate of Approval (160.037/23/0) for NAMMO LIAB AB Orange Smoke Hand Distress Signal, and the approval status of this certificate is now marked as “Former- Do Not Use.” This action was taken because the chemical makeup of the signal was changed in October 2013 without Coast Guard approval and the signal that was manufactured is at risk of spontaneous combustion when dropped.

These smoke signals may be labeled and marketed as “Polar MK 4” by NAMMO LIAB AB or as “IKAROS” by Hansson Pyrotech. “IKAROS” Hansson Pyrotech is the more current manufacturing name. Datrex Inc., of Kinder, LA, is the only distributor for these products in the United States. There are approximately 2,790 signals with the potentially defect in the US market.

Datrex has removed all of its remaining stock from sale and is working with customers to replace these potentially dangerous signals. Any signal manufactured after October 2013 must be properly disposed of and replaced with a product that satisfies the vessel’s carriage requirements. For questions or concerns, contact Datrex at 337-738-4511 or via email at [email protected].

This safety alert was developed by the Coast Guard Office of Design and Engineering Standards and distributed by the Office of Investigations and Casualty Analysis. Any questions, comments, or incidences of accidental ignition involving these signals under this Certificate of Approval should be sent to sent to: [email protected]

---

Coast Guard notifies public of urgent marine safety alert; EPIRB recall

U.S. Coast Guard Coast Guard Digital News Room Update
04/26/2016 05:09 PM EDT

LOS ANGELES-- Kannad Marine issued a recall for all SAFELINK EPIRB’s Monday, April 25, 2016, due to a possible defect that could result in the beacon not operating in emergency situations.

The SAFELINK EPIRB’s yellow body plastic may prematurely age when subjected to specific environmental conditions, which has the potential to impact its long term effectiveness in the field.

The Coast Guard strongly recommends that if you own or use a SAFELINK EPIRB automatic or manual model, you should NOT use it as a primary search and rescue beacon onboard your vessel and to seek replacement devices as soon as possible.

Parts No. Affected

K1202311EPIRB SAFELINK Manual+ GPSAll Dates

K120202367EPIRB SAFELINK Auto GPSAll Dates

Kannad recommends that all owners of SAFELINK EPIRB’s register their ownership, location and contact details via the dedicated website in order to order a replacement:
http://www.safelinkepirbsupport.co.uk

The website will first ask you to enter your SAFELINK EPIRB’s CSN number which is located on the EPIRB’s label. (See image below.) Once the CSN is entered an additional webpage will open where more detailed owner information is entered to arrange provision of a replacement EPIRB.

---

Marine Safety Information Bulletin 004-15-2015

WATER JET DEVICES

The Coast Guard Office of Commercial Vessel Compliance has recently received numerous inquiries concerning operations involving water jet devices (WJD).For the purposes of this bulletin, the acronym “WJD” includes Jetpaks™, Jetlevs™, Flyboards™, Jetovators ™, HydroliftTM, and JetsurfTM, and other similar devices where individuals ride a hydro-powered apparatus above the surface of the water while connected to a personal watercraft (PWC) or other power source that supplies thrust to the WJD through a hose connecting the two devices. When the PWC and WJD devices are connected they are considered to be one vessel. This MSIB identifies where a passenger for hire operation exists, the licensing requirements and the safety-related procedures specifically for navigable waters over which the Coast Guard has jurisdiction (see Title 33, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 2).The safety-related guidance provided can, however, be applied wherever a WJD is used including purely recreational applications.

Typical commercial passenger for hire operations involve one passenger riding the levitation portion of the WJD who controls the directional movements and another individual or an operator controlling the thrust of the WJD either from the PWC or remotely via wireless control. In many cases, the individual riding the WJD has provided economic benefit or profit also known as “consideration”, to ride the device.Where consideration is present as a condition of carriage, the individual riding the WJD is considered a “passenger for hire” as defined in 46 USC 21011 and therefore the operator must hold a Coast Guard-issued Merchant Mariner Credential (MMC), endorsed at a minimum as Operator, Uninspected Passenger Vessel (OUPV) per 46 CFR Part 15.6052. An Uninspected Passenger Vessel is defined as a vessel less than 100 Gross Tons, carrying not more than 6 passengers, including at least one passenger for hire. This type of operation will be discussed further below. Exceptions to the passenger for hire situation are when the WJD is (a) leased, rented or chartered to an individual for noncommercial personal use; (b) operated by the WJD owner for their personal noncommercial use; and (c) used by the WJD owner for demonstration purposes.In these instances the vessel is considered a recreational vessel, and recreational boating safety requirements should be applied. Per existing regulations, no person may use a recreational vessel unless at least one wearable Personal Flotation Device (PFD) is onboard the WJD for each person.

As a Coast Guard MMC is required when a passenger for hire situation exists, at a minimum the following three endorsements may be acceptable depending upon the location and type of operation: OUPV, OUPV Limited, and OUPV Restricted. The local Coast Guard Officer in Charge, Marine Inspection (OCMI) determines which of the three licenses are appropriate for the particular operation in question. If an operator does not have sufficient service time to obtain an unrestricted OUPV credential they may consider applying for either an OUPV Restricted or OUPV Limited license. For more information on these types of licenses, see CG-543 Policy Letter 10-04 of 10 MAY 2010, including enclosures (1) through (3) (on the internet at:

Current versions of the United States Code (USC) can be found at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/
Current versions of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) can be found at www.ecfr.gov

HTTP://WWW.USCG.MIL/HQ/CGCVC/CVC/POLICY/POLICY_LETTERS/543/CG-543_POL10-04.PDF or HTTP://WWW.USCG.MIL/NMC/.

Due to WJD vessel’s novel design and configuration, current and conventional vessel safety regulations may not fully address safety concerns unique to these vessel types and their operation. It is recommended that safety procedures and training for both the operators and passengers should be developed to address circumstances unique to these operations that are not addressed in special operating requirements for Uninspected Passenger Vessels. Specific procedures should include but are not limited to items such as:

• Emergency procedures for injuries, drowning, loss of vessel control, retrieval of conscious persons in the water, inadvertent dragging of passengers, and subsequent notifications to the company office, family members, and Coast Guard.
• Assessment of adequate gear quick release(s), power shut offs, and other disengagement mechanisms.
• A safety briefing is provided to the passenger by the vessel operator or crew explaining communications, WJD passenger operated controls, permitted and prohibited operations and how to use safety equipment.
• Adequate communications including a clear two-way communication arrangement between the vessel operator and passenger when a WJD vessel utilizes a two-person operation
• Establishment of safe environmental operating conditions such as weather, sea state, and operating area (e.g. surrounding vessel traffic, obstructions above and below the water, water depth, etc.)
• Assessment of the need for an additional person(s) and/or a chase boat to provide assistance and maintain situational awareness of the WJD operation and surrounding/oncoming traffic, particularly in congested areas.
• Assessment of PFD flotation adequacy, particularly when any equipment worn could overcome the PFD’s buoyancy. Some WJD backpacks are designed with built in positive flotation and some are not.

Operators of WJD vessels are reminded that they must comply with the Navigation Rules3 at all times. Operators of other vessels should also be aware that while the WJD is in operation the PWC has limited maneuverability.It is recommended that vessels operating in the vicinity of the WJD take this into consideration and maintain a safe distance from the connected PWC.

With passengers for hire embarked, WJDs powered by PWCs are considered to be Uninspected Passenger Vessels, and must meet 46 CFR Subpart C requirements as well as all marine casualty reporting and chemical testing requirements found in 46 CFR Parts 4 and 16. Keep in mind certain States may have additional requirements with regard to regulations concerning PWC and, by extension, devices (WJDs) connected to a PWC.As a result, a State may require additional equipment for these operations that may exceed Coast Guard requirements.

This information bulletin was developed with input from numerous field commands and compiled by Coast Guard Atlantic Area with the assistance of the Office of Commercial Vessel Compliance, Commandant (CG- CVC). Questions concerning this bulletin may be directed to 202-372-1251
or [email protected].

The current version of Navigation Rules can be found at www.navcen.uscg.gov

---

News Release 

September 21, 2014

Coast Guard Public Affairs Detachment Astoria
Contact: Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Klingenberg
Email: [email protected]
Office: (503) 861-6132

Mobile: (206) 391-5864

COAST GUARD RESCUES 2 FROM CAPSIZED VESSEL NEAR LONG BEACH, WASH.

 WARRENTON, Ore. — A Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment 47-foot Motor Life Boat crew rescued two people from a capsized vessel near Long Beach, Wash., Sunday.

The two people were safely recovered by the Motor Life Boat crew and taken back to Station Cape Disappointment with no medical concerns. 

Coast Guard Sector Columbia River received a report from Pacific County dispatch stating that a 21-foot pleasure craft was disabled off Long Beach. Sector watchstanders contacted the crew of the disabled vessel and determined that the vessel was taking on water and they could not keep up with flooding, at which point they were advised to don lifejackets. Sector Columbia River directed the launch of the MLB crew and an Air Station Astoria MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew in response.

The MLB crew arrived on scene to find the vessel capsized. A 46-year-old man and a 52-year-old man from the capsized vessel were quickly located nearby by the MLB crew. 

“This case illustrates the importance of having lifejackets and other life saving emergency equipment aboard a vessel while boating in the Pacific Northwest,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Kevin Zariczny, an operation specialist at Sector Columbia River. “Weather and sea states can be unpredictable and it is best to ensure you are prepared for any type of emergency situation.”

The pleasure craft reportedly sank with no signs of pollution and is not a hazard to navigation. The weather at the time of the incident was reported as 18 mph winds and 6-foot seas.