Lawsuit could be near on water pollution laws
Guy Carl
Napa Valley Register
06/23/2011
Fishing and conservation groups are standing up to the federal government and corporate mega-farmers over the continuing, reckless pollution being released into in the California delta.
Notice has been served under the Clean Water Act that they are taking the issue to federal court to get water pollution control standards enforced to halt this unlawful pollution, and to restore the ecological health of the river and Bay-Delta Estuary.
For more than two decades, Delta-Mendota western San Joaquin Valley irrigators have been allowed to pollute the San Joaquin River and San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary with toxic discharges of selenium.
Selenium is a mineral that is naturally present in the soils of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Although humans can benefit from its role as an antioxidant in the foods that make up our daily nutrition, selenium is extremely dangerous in large doses.
The way in which the body’s biology processes excess selenium can lead to disease in adults and serious deformities in developing embryos.
When the San Joaquin Valley’s selenium-laden soils are irrigated, the mineral leaches into groundwater and surface waters, spreading its toxic legacy. For this reason, some would consider these lands altogether unfit for large scale commercial agriculture due to the water pollution it causes.
Already, 100,000 acres have been retired because discharges contained an unmanageably high level of salts, selenium, boron and other contaminants.
This is not the first time selenium has been in the spotlight in California.
Longtime residents will recall the first shocking photographs published in late 1983 by the San Jose Mercury News of bird embryos with twisted beaks, deformed heads and missing eyes. Birds along the Pacific Flyway died by the thousands at Kesterson Wildlife Refuge near Los Banos, Calif. — one of the state’s worst wildlife disasters.
Numerous studies confirmed that selenium-laced discharges from the Westlands Water District (Westlands) and other west side irrigators produced the selenium waste water that caused the Kesterson disaster.
For decades, state and federal officials have looked the other way and refused to enforce water pollution control standards that restrict the discharge of this toxic substance into the San Joaquin River and other tributaries of the Bay-Delta Estuary.
On March 17, the federal Environmental Protection Agency agreed to allow these toxic discharges to continue another 10 years, in direct violation of the Clean Water Act’s mandate that the nation’s waters be both swimmable and fishable.
“Think twice before you consider fishing, boating or swimming on the San Joaquin River near its confluence with the Merced River,” explained Steve Evans, Conservation Director for Friends of the River. “This is where these irrigators dump toxic selenium-contaminated water at levels high enough to deform wildlife and threaten drinking water, as the polluted discharge swirls past signs posted along the slough and river warning would-be anglers not to eat fish caught in the toxic brew due to the risk of birth defects.”
“For decades, these west side irrigators have received a free pass to pollute,” continued Bill Jennings of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.
“It’s time to enforce the law and make these polluters meet protective water quality standards.”
“It’s been nearly three decades since I held the first deformed chick in my hands,” recalled Felix Smith, a retired United States Fish and Wildlife biologist who documented the selenium waterfowl deformities and is a party to the notice letter. “Since that time I have seen state and federal water officials buckle under the political pressure and look the other way, as they refused to enforce the law to halt these poisonous discharges. Their continuing failure to act threatens to create Kesterson II, unless people wake up and demand that water quality officials do their jobs.”
Instead of cleaning up their unlawful discharges, the polluters — giant west side agricultural powerhouses — have claimed that “dilution is the solution,” explained Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations.
“But their ‘solution’ is illegal,” he said.
“Contrary to the Clean Water Act, their supposed ‘solution’ dumps dangerous pollutants into the public’s waterways, harming fish and wildlife. They just keep loading selenium wastewater that caused the Kesterson disaster into our waterways, threatening the reproduction of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, crab and other fish.”
