Bull Trout are Weak Fish

“Yup, very fragile fish,” was the conclusion Travis and I came to. They are intolerant of warm water and pollution, and susceptible to disease; Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks even pioneered a fairly exceptional initiative called Hoot Owl Restrictions prohibiting fishing between 2 p.m. and midnight to protect bull trout species.

But they survive in the Clark Fork River? So how polluted is the Clark Fork? First off, the USA classifies water quality by their function under the Clean Water Act: see page 5 of this document. A1 means primary contact i.e. skin contact is permissible, C means it’s drinkable, B(CW1) means it supports cold water species while B(WW-2) means it supports warm water aquatic life, and so on. Travis says the Clark Fork is generally pretty clean – “generally” because the river is segmented into sections and each section might have a different rating – and you could swim in it, but you probably wouldn’t want to drink from it. A Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks ranger who later showed us the Milltown Dam said that he’d occasionally have fish from the Clark Fork for dinner with his family, though, so I’m thinking there’s some room for personal interpretation here.

The question how polluted is the Clark Fork? is also complicated by the process of setting pollution standards. While the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets baseline standards for pollution, e.g. the concentration of heavy metals that is allowed, states usually set higher standards from there. Travis identifies it as the principle of primacy––I would later ask the DEQ people about it, but I’ll share more about that session in another post.

“So do you think it’s good that states have leeway in setting their own environmental standards?” Travis answers: it’s not 100% autonomy, the EPA still reviews state standards. But lots of EPA programs are run by the state, so it’s good to have states have a say in their standards, and devolve some authority to them. “In the United States”, he says, “states are kind of like mini countries.”

Perfect. Travis was introduced as ‘a government actor’, so he’d know a thing or two about running these ‘mini countries’. I just did a quick Google search to find his formal job title: Environmental Health Specialist at the Missoula City-County Health Department. That checks out. In the inflatable he told us as much––that his department takes care of human health as much as the environment.

“So what do you do day-to-day? What does a normal workday look for you?”

“Meetings!” He laughed. “We do a lot of well and stream testing, collecting toxic waste so that we can adjust our regulations according to our findings.” For instance, public officials pour chemicals on the roads to melt the snow during winter, but if Travis and co. find that these chemicals’ concentration in the channels are at dangerous levels, they can adjust relevant regulations accordingly. For instance, one of the compounds they can use is ‘road salt’ (including sodium chloride, magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, calcium chloride, calcium magnesium acetate, and potassium acetate [NaCl, MgCl2, KCl, CaCl2, C8H12CaMgO8, CH3CO2K]). These salts reduce the freezing point of water so that it doesn’t freeze up as easily and is more navigable. However, as you can imagine, large amounts of salt entering our waterways pose danger to our ecology by drastically increasing water salinity.

He also deals with channel migration––rivers move, a lesson reinforced more strongly when we arrived in New Orleans, and he regulates how houses cannot be built on floodplains, etc. Most pertinent to the site we visited today, however, he says that the Health Department makes recommendations to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on how to investigate polluted sites like the Smurfit-Stone Mill Site. Let’s dive in.

The paper mill was constructed in 1958 and ceased operations in 2010. It was one of the largest water users and dischargers in Missoula in its heyday, working through up to 40 million gallons of water each day. When converting timber to pulp to be made into paper, chemical processing and bleaching leached copious amounts of nutrients into the waterways. But how were the perpetrators found out? Fish deaths and the discovery of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins in fish tissue. This area doesn’t have residential estates, and land use prior to the mill was limited to a few small farms. It wasn’t difficult to trace the source back to the mill. I asked about the river more generally and Travis explained that the biggest contaminant in the Clark Fork remains arsenic from mining in Butte, and the largest contributors to eutrophication are non-point sources such as runoff or seepage of agricultural fertilisers. But what worries him is the treatment ponds’ proximity to the Clark Fork River and connection to groundwater.

Essentially, pollution by the Smurfit-Stone Paper Mill is aggravated by the mill’s waste disposal strategy or lack thereof. Ignorance or negligence? The certainty is that all the wastewater generated was dumped into treatment ponds that were unlined and separated from the Clark Fork by only a berm: a wall of earth, dirt, and rock. The corporation figured, there’s a river here, let’s use its natural flushing processes to get rid of our waste. How resourceful, huh! They perhaps forgot that other natural processes coexisted within the river: (1) erosion means constant hammering at the walls of the river that could compromise the berm, cause its catastrophic failure, and discharge all the contaminated water into the river; (2) meandering, which is restricted on the opposite bank by buildings and can only occur on the side with the berm; and (3) flooding, a process natural as rain and occurring for millions of years. A real-life horror story: a few years back the Clark Fork river flooded and tea-coloured plumes escaped from the treatment ponds into the river.

And so the million-dollar question: has cleanup started?

“Nope.”

A flat tone from our speakers, who explained that while they wanted cleanup to begin on some parts while investigation continued in others, the EPA was insistent that everything was assessed thoroughly before beginning cleanup. Don’t get me wrong––the Superfund process has been helpful, and growing environmental consciousness since the late 20th century has made sure that sites like this would never be sanctioned again (at that time, it was allowed because nobody even considered the environmental impacts of the mill). The public process means all data is published and shared even with the CSKT, but Travis really wants them to (1) clean up the site and move the wastewater to a high and dry place not in contact with the river, (2) remove the berm and reconnect the floodplain, (3) increase public access to the site, and (4) apply pressure to Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs) who have thus far been difficult in acceding to financially compensating cleanup efforts.

Lots to think about. I’m still mulling over this site weeks after we got off that inflatable and spent nearly an hour attempting to squeeze the air out and roll them into compact sushi rolls. I’ll connect this to the Milltown Dam in another post, but I can’t stop thinking about the great wisdom of hindsight that just evades us in planning, and how it seems history seems to be repeating itself (I'm thinking of climate change) –– and this time, we know the science and consequences of environmental devastation, so many of us youth are attempting to warn our governments and decisionmakers, but their foresight seems to be a massive blind spot. How can we change that? I also thought about how the kindly gentleman who made my flight from Portland to Missoula said he’d moved here a month ago to work on a paper mill… an uncanny connection I didn’t expect to be making!

(5 September 2019)