[env-trinity] (no subject)

Mon May 23 12:56:29 PDT 2005

This refers to the principal destination of diverted Trinity River water.
San Joaquin Drainage Reevaluation Plan environmental document, and an
alternative included within it, is evaporation ponds.  The report won't be
out for public comment until later this month.  The attachment is a picture
of Kesterson birds.  The clear best alternative for this budding 950,000
acre Superfund Site is land retirement.  Even Westlands is interested in
retiring a third of its lands - 200,000 acres.  Land retirement is to be
included in the draft document, as is reflected in the story below, but to
what extent is not known by me.  Is it 450,000 acres identified in the
"Rainbow Report" as toxic land that should be retired?  I doubt it. 

Byron

New Kesterson plan has familiar look; Evaporative ponds proposed for
Westside 

Modesto Bee - 5/23/05

By Juliana Barbassa, Associated Press staff writer

LOS BANOS WILDLIFE AREA -- A federal plan to drain mineral-laden irrigation
water from farms includes a proposal similar to one that caused an
environmental disaster more than two decades ago, leading to bird
deformities and deaths. 

Environmentalists fear that leaving the tainted water to accumulate in
evaporation ponds, even if it's treated to reduce most of the toxic
minerals, could lead to problems similar to what happened in the Kesterson
Wildlife Refuge in the 1980s, when entire colonies of birds died and many
were born with missing limbs. 

"It's insanity," said environmentalist Lloyd Carter, who wrote about
Kesterson as a reporter for The Fresno Bee in the 1980s and now works for
the California attorney general's Fresno office. "We've tried that before,
and it was a disaster." 

The contaminated ponds in Kesterson were finally covered up with dirt in
1986, and birds have flocked back to the region, a stopover point for birds
migrating along the Pacific flyway. 

But the federal officials who run the Central Valley Project, a massive
irrigation complex that makes farming possible in the arid western half of
the Central Valley, remain under court order to find a way to dispose of the
tainted water. And forming new evaporation ponds is one of several options
outlined in a draft environmental impact report to be released this month by
the Bureau of Reclamation. 

Another option in the draft report is taking poorly drained land out of
farming, but that would rob some farmers of their livelihoods and is
strongly opposed by the agriculture industry. The report also suggests
pumping out the contaminated water, either into the ocean just south of Big
Sur, or into the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta, where millions of
Californians get their drinking water. 

The report won't be issued until later this month, followed by a 60-day
public comment period. But alternatives it envisions are generally described
in a document on the agency's Web site, said Mike Delamore, chief of the
bureau's San Joaquin Drainage Division. 

What to do with the water is one of the most vexing dilemmas in the Central
Valley. Farming here depends on irrigation, but the clay underlying much of
the farmland in the west side of the Valley keeps excess water from draining
away. The leftover water, heavy with salts and minerals, damages crops and
eventually renders land infertile if left in the fields. As it drains, the
water also pick up pesticides and other chemicals -- but it's selenium, and
its effects on bird reproduction, that worry most biologists. 

Few realized selenium was toxic when agricultural water was first pumped
into Kesterson, which is part of the 26,609-acre San Luis National Wildlife
Refuge. 

As the water evaporated, the selenium reached 350 parts per billion --
enough to turn what had been a vibrant wildlife refuge into an quiet,
foul-smelling bog where thousands of birds died, said Gary Zahm, a retired
federal wildlife biologist who managed the refuge at the time. 

"The birds were feeding their young insects that had hatched in the
reservoir," Zahm said, remembering baby birds born with three eyes, no legs,
or crooked beaks. "It was like feeding them poison pills." 

The bureau now proposes to treat the water until no more than 10 parts per
billion of selenium remains before pouring it into ponds, and then to
periodically "scrape" the ponds of salts and minerals, Delamore said. 

The evaporation units would be in remote agricultural land, not near
wildlife refuges, but they would be within the Central Valley. That's just
where the Pacific flyway -- the route migrating birds take when traveling
from North to South America -- narrows down like the waist on an hourglass,
pinched in by the Sierra Nevada range and the coastal range. 

And research shows concentrations as low as 2 parts per billion harm bird
reproduction, according to Joe Skorupa, the biologist in charge of
researching selenium's effect on birds for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service in California between 1986 and 2003. 

"There's always a better alternative than evaporation ponds," said Skorupa,
who now works at agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. "It's a matter of
having the imagination and taking the time." 

The Westlands Water District, the largest agency delivering federal
irrigation water to farms, has been working with farmers to take 108,000
acres of land out of production with the help of a federal buyout to ease
the area's perennial water shortage, and to take some of the most poorly
drained land out of production. 

Environmentalists and others in California's fast-growing midsection like
the idea of freeing up the water that has been poured onto soils that may
eventually be too salty to farm. But farmers don't take easily to proposals
of giving up their land. 

"Farmers have been very resistant to looking at abandoning their livelihood
and their lifestyle to solve political and social problems," said Westlands
spokesman Tupper Hull. 

Some farmers elsewhere in the valley have tried their own short-term
solutions, which include small evaporation ponds. The presence of selenium
forces them to harass birds to keep them away from the water. 

"There are no easy answers, but there are probably combinations of solutions
that will allow for sustainable agriculture on the west side," said Hull. 

The bureau doesn't officially favor one option over the others, Delamore
said, but few observers believe the public would accept dumping the drainage
water into the delta or the ocean. 

Officially, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials aren't choosing one
option over the others, but said they'd "prefer to avoid creating a problem
rather than have to mitigate once it's created," said Al Donner, an
assistant field supervisor in the agency's Sacramento office. 

Any injuries to migratory birds would likely show up in the Los Banos
Wildlife Area, a state refuge just north of the proposed evaporation pond
sites and a few miles from Kesterson. 

Biologists like Eileen Edmunds, with the California Department of Fish and
Game, are watching closely over the birds' well-being. Gently, she reaches
into a small cloth bag and closes her hand around a song sparrow frantically
flapping her wings. 

Nestled in her fist, the plump, rusty brown bird settles down and submits to
a check of her wingspan, weight, and general health --all to be recorded in
a database. 

Then, with a little tag placed around its ankle, the sparrow flies away.

Byron Leydecker, 

Chair, Friends of Trinity River

Consultant, California Trout, Inc.

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810 ph

415 383 9562 fx

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://www.fotr.org

http://caltrout.org

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