This looks fishy, doesn’t it? Washington residents average just 6.5 grams of fish per day, while Oregonians inhale almost 30 times that? It makes you wonder how on earth Ivar’s manages to stay in business. More worryingly, these fish consumption rates are what the state uses to determine acceptable levels of water pollution.
While the state’s Department of Health quotes the American Heart Association’s advice to eat fish at least twice a week (avoiding the most contaminated), the Department of Ecology is using much older consumption rates to determine if the water the fish swim in is safe. “After extensive public and tribal input, the State of Oregon recently established the nation’s most protective fish consumption rate at 23 meals per month,” writes Bart Mihailovich at HuffPo, explaining that the government wanted to err on the side of people who eat lots of fish.
Urged by the U.S. EPA to update its 1992 benchmark, Ecology tried to do just that in 2012; InvestigateWest found that soon “Boeing and other business interests launched an intense lobbying campaign aimed not just at Ecology but also at the Washington Legislature and then-Gov. Christine Gregoire.”
Here’s what the state’s chamber of commerce had to say: It’s too costly, and besides it’s your fault.
Compliance costs are conservatively estimated at more than $1 billion a year — costs that will be paid by private industry and by the local governments that operate Washington’s 300 water treatment plants. We will all share those costs, and according to a recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), we all share the responsibility. The study found trace amounts of chemicals in the Columbia River from personal care products, household chemicals and runoff from houses, yards and streets.
Our state’s businesses, having polluted our water, seem to be arguing that they shouldn’t have to stop doing that because there’s no easy way to clean it up once pollutants enter the water. Also: “We have made so much progress that the remaining issues are literally microscopic, measured in parts per trillion,” wrote the chamber’s Don Brunell.
Microscopic? In 2011, Boeing spilled 300 gallons of jet fuel into the Duwamish Waterway, part of a larger 6,600-gallon spill, and failed to report it to Ecology for several days, by which point the department had already been made aware of a spill by people who’d seen the sheen on the water. By the time a clean-up was organized, the oil had dispersed into the water, and could not be contained. The fine levied was $102,000. The Duwamish kept the jet fuel.
In the course of InvestigateWest’s search through documents, they found Boeing complaining that higher water quality standards would cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars, keep them from expanding Renton production, and preclude them from adding sites elsewhere in the state. There doesn’t seem to a record of the company worrying that its 86,000 Washington employees might eat contaminated fish. (I’ve asked Boeing to clarify their position on how they hope to improve water quality.)
