[env-trinity] Fresno Bee Op-Ed

[Byron Leydecker]

Trinity River water pumped from the collapsing San Francisco Bay Delta
irrigates this land.

 

 

LLOYD CARTER: Selenium poisoning is still a threat today

By Lloyd Carter

07/05/07 04:24:00


It has been nearly a quarter of a century since federal scientists
discovered that selenium in Western San Joaquin Valley farm drainwater was
triggering massive embryo deformities in ducks and shorebirds and killing
all the edible fish at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge. 

The fish die-off and deformities or embryo deaths in more than half the
Kesterson nests were caused by selenium that had been leached from the
western Valley soils by irrigation practices and then dissolved in
subsurface drainwater funneled to the "refuge." Scientists would rediscover
that selenium, while a micro nutrient, is the most toxic of all biologically
essential elements in mammals. 

Officials of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built the federal
irrigation facilities on the west side, and political appointees at the
parent Department of Interior initially claimed the Kesterson selenium
poisoning was an isolated problem. 

But as investigations spread to other national wildlife refuges, selenium
contamination was confirmed in the southern San Joaquin Valley (Tulare
basin), Salton Sea, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico,
Arizona and Kansas. 

Now 25 years later, with hundreds of millions of dollars on studies and
research spent, the Department of Interior still has no selenium safety
standards for wildlife, although a committee was appointed in 1989 to adopt
such standards. Yet the evidence continues to grow that selenium poisoning,
caused by farming, mining, coal burning, oil refining and other industrial
activities, is occurring all over America. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey Web site or other Internet
scientific sources: 

Six horses and between 200 and 300 sheep died from grazing on selenium-laced
plants near phosphate mines in Idaho between 1996 and 2003. Phosphate mining
of shale soils to make fertilizers generates large amounts of selenium-laced
mining wastes, which contaminate waterways and land. 

Hay from western states high in selenium is suspected of causing selenium
poisoning in horses in Missouri, according to University of Missouri
veterinarians. 

Fish and ducks in San Francisco Bay have elevated selenium levels. 

Cutthroat trout are disappearing from streams along the Idaho-Wyoming border
because of selenium contamination from phosphate mining. 

Shellfish and birds in the Great Lakes region have elevated selenium levels.


Although drainage flows to Kesterson were halted in 1985 following intense
media exposure of the problem, selenium-contaminated farm drainage continues
to flow to many wildlife refuges in more than a dozen western states, and
food chain levels of selenium in those refuges reveal a continuing threat to
bird populations. 

Dennis Lemly, of the U.S. Forest Service, who is considered a premier expert
in America on selenium poisoning of wildlife, has described the
disappearance of fish in southeast Idaho as "an insidious ticking time
bomb." 

Seventeen of 26 closed phosphate mines in Idaho have been designated
Superfund sites by the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA officials say
not a single closed phosphate mine has ever been cleaned up. The current
Secretary of Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, formerly served as a public
relations spokesman for one of those phosphate mining companies. 

Although Reclamation officials claimed they were surprised at Kesterson, it
is only because they did not do their homework. Selenium poisoning of
livestock and forage foods had been known for decades in the Dakotas and the
southwest. High levels of selenium were confirmed in the Coast Range --
parent soil material of the western San Joaquin Valley -- in 1939. 

Time magazine complained in a 1933 article that the U.S. Department of
Agriculture was "inclined to silence" about selenium poisoning of cattle fed
wheat, corn and alfalfa grown on high selenium soils in the American
Southwest dating back to the 19th century. 

The late David Love, "grand old man of Rocky Mountain geology," warned in a
famous 1949 memorandum, which he later claimed was suppressed by the
Department of Agriculture, that farming and irrigating high selenium soils
in the American West would create an environmental disaster. 

And closer to home the Westlands Water District, which once funneled its
selenium-laced waste waters to Kesterson, now faces a drainage disposal
problem that may cost in excess of $2 billion. Surrealistically, Interior
officials are suggesting the construction of more Kesterson-like evaporation
ponds as a "solution" to the farm drainage problem. Federal irrigation
districts north of Westlands now drain their selenium-laced waste waters
into the polluted lower San Joaquin River and want to continue doing so. 

In 2007, with the Kesterson debacle a memory, the federal government is
still "inclined to silence" about the extent and seriousness of the selenium
problem. You don't hear politicians giving speeches about the selenium
threat. 

Federal scientists tell me selenium impacts on bird reproductivity are still
occurring here in the Valley and elsewhere in America where farming and
mining on high selenium soils is slowly but surely contributing to the
steady decline of bird and fish populations. 

Lloyd Carter, a Fresno lawyer, is director of the California Water Impact
Network. 

 

 

Byron Leydecker

Friends of Trinity River, Chair

California Trout, Inc., Advisor

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810 

415 519 4810 cell

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org

http://www.fotr.org

http://www.caltrout.org

 <http://www.fotr.org>  

 

 

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