Bradwood Landing LNG Update

Aside from volcanic eruptions and 100-year floods, most of the major events that shape our environment occur in appeals courts. Pretty much every approval for every aspect of every LNG proposal in Oregon has been appealed, causing years of delays. Sometimes the delays alone are enough to stop a project, especially when they coincide with a radical regime change like the switch from Bush to Obama. That is why it turns out that Clatsop County wasn’t doing Bradwood Landing a favor when they let Bradwood’s application sail through the county approval process in 2008. Now, two years later, an appeals court has returned the decision back to the county for a second time, because, after all this time, no one has successfully defined the terms “small,” “medium,” and “large.” (I blame Starbucks for the confusion.) Laws protecting the Columbia River state that only small to moderate-sized developments can be approved. I mean, obviously a 55-acre development is large — if you’re opposed to it. On the other hand, it could be medium, or even small. Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, for instance, is 2538 acres. The funny thing is, this issue could turn out to be the one that sinks Bradwood Landing for good.

Farmers vs Oregon LNG

Access to information was at the crux of hearings held last week to clarify conflicts between landowners and Oregon LNG and the Oregon Pipeline. The hearings were ordered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and held over three days in Astoria, Forest Grove and Portland.

I attended the final day, Thursday, at Portland City Hall. Administrative Law Judge Bobbie McCartney was a breath of fresh air, asking sharp questions, putting witnesses at ease, and bringing some humor to the necessary tedium of this kind of thing. She was very understanding of the fact that a lot of the testimony was a little vague. Two and three years ago, when landowners first started hearing that a natural gas pipeline might be passing through their land, they weren’t writing down dates or labeling documents. Their statements were also constrained because their central concern — that a liquefied natural gas company is planning to lay claim to swaths of their property — was outside the scope of the hearings.

The repeated complaint within the scope of the hearings was lack of information. Landowners have had a hard time getting detailed pipeline maps, and frequently were not informed about public hearings. During a tour of the pipeline route conducted by Oregon LNG and FERC, a farmer and her sister followed the tour van around all day in their car because no one would give them the tour’s itinerary. Later when the judge asked this farmer to put an aerial map into evidence she refused to let it go, clutching it like treasure map.

It’s likely that many affected parties didn’t know about the hearing I attended. In a follow-up column written the next day, Joyce Sauber of the Hillsboro Argus writes, “To this date, there are still hundreds of property owners in our Gales Creek Valley and along the two proposed LNG pipeline routes, who do not know there have been hearings, meetings and site tours, or that one of these two proposed LNG pipelines will cross their property.”

After the hearing there was an LNG protest outside City Hall. I milled around, taking photos and trying to gauge the reaction of passers-by. Somehow this protest felt different from protests I’ve attended on other issues. It took me a while to figure it out. It was the informational quality of it — at least in Portland, an LNG protest isn’t about registering opposition, it’s about registering that the issue exists at all.

History/ Drink Recipe: The Angry Sea Lion

A terrible thing happened in May of 2008.

The Fish & Wildlife service announced that six sea lions at Bonneville Dam had found their way into two open traps and been shot to death by unknown attackers.

The news was widely reported. From the New York Times: “State and federal authorities set up traps to humanely catch and remove them from the dam, to be shipped to zoos and wildlife parks. But over the weekend someone shot and killed six of the sea lions as they lay in the traps.”

Things had been tense on the river for a while. Fishermen were noticing increasing numbers of sea lions at the dam, and the sea lions were aggressive, eating a lot of fish and even stealing salmon right off the fishing lines.

In March, Oregon and Washington had received federal authority to remove the sea lions, lethally or non-lethally. In April, the Humane Society of the United States had negotiated a temporary hold on sea lion killing while the society argued the case in court. Also in April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared a “fishery failure” for the Pacific Coast salmon fishery.

And now four California sea lions, including a pup, and two endangered Steller sea lions were dead.

Clearly, someone had decided to take the law into their own hands.

Or not.

A few days later a correction was released. The sea lions had not been shot to death. They had died of heat stroke after entering the open traps, which had somehow closed behind them while the staff was gone for the weekend.

How accomplished of a forensics expert do you have to be to determine whether or not an animal has been shot to death? Actually, the autopsies found that two or three of the sea lions had been shot, non-lethally, at some previous time. Ultimately, the whole thing was written off as an accident.

The Angry Sea Lion

• 1 ounce Black Seal rum
• ¼ ounce hot pepper vodka
• orange wedge and orange peel
• ginger ale

Pour rum and vodka over ice. Squeeze in the juice from a quarter of an orange and trim a bit of peel over the glass, then add. Top with ginger ale.

Serve on the rocks!

Or replace the ginger ale with Coke and the orange with lime and call it a Sea Lion Libre.

Bonneville Sea Lions

The Bonneville sea lions are national news again this year. An Associated Press story from March 8 was picked up in salmon-less places like Dallas, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin. I think people are intrigued by the conundrum of endangered species vs. endangered species, or else they like to get worked up by the killing of sea lions, who are, arguably, the cutest of all predator species.

So far this year, at least eight sea lions have been killed at Bonneville Dam. The idea makes me feel kind of sick, especially after I went up there on Saturday and saw them for myself.

Bonneville Dam is a major source of power for the Northwest, and it’s also a minor tourist attraction, both for the dam itself and for the migrating salmon that you can watch through special underwater windows. For some reason, fish ladders have been deemed an edifying pastime for very young children. I was taken to several as a small child, and found them a real snooze. This weekend, my friend and I were surrounded by families with unimpressed little kids.

Watching the occasional Chinook struggle past the mossy window is a lot more interesting if you care about stuff like politics and sushi.

The kids would probably rather be watching the sea lions, but that is not encouraged. There is an informational plaque inside the visitor center, from which I learned that sea lions have always swum up the river to hunt, since long before there were dams. Somehow I had gotten the impression that this was a new thing — (“They learn,” said an Army Corps of Engineers biologist in the AP article.)

The visitor center is on an island. To the north is the main dam, all roaring water and billows of mist. To the south is a smaller dam, the locks, and a main entrance to the fish ladders. We walked a little ways down a mossy road on this side of the island, where the water is much calmer.

There we saw a little black head in the water, then two and three. Sometimes they would dive with a splash of their tail flippers. Sometimes they would just kind of splash around. They were too far away to get a good photo, or to tell if any of them caught a fish. Overall, there were between eight and ten in this area.

I couldn’t tell if they were Steller or California sea lions, although some of them were enormous. The smaller Stellers are endangered and only the California sea lions are being killed. The historic range of these sea lions is from Mexico to B.C., so I’m afraid the name California brands them unfairly as invaders.

After I came home from Bonneville, I read up a lot more on the sea lion issue, and found two things online that I want to mention.

First, there is an activist network dedicated to the Bonneville sea lions. The Portland branch of In Defense of Animals (famous for their foie gras and fur protests) is involved, and there is a Sea Lion Defense Brigade ( http://sealiondefensebrigade.org/) that has been monitoring the sea lions 24 hours a day from an RV on the Washington side of the river. They had a party this weekend and Tre Arrow provided musical entertainment… so somehow I feel like we’ll be hearing more from these folks in the future.

Second, in trying to find out who all was involved in the initial request to allow killing the sea lions, I came across the website of the Oregon Anglers (http://www.oregon-anglers.org/).

They sound like a reasonable bunch, at first: “Oregon Anglers was formed to find ways to meet the needs of both the state’s diverse wildlife, and the practical and economic needs of the communities that depend on the fishers and hunters.”

But scroll down to the part about sea lions, and they completely lose their cool:

“Since 1999 the California sea lions at Bonneville have had their way with spring salmon and steelhead runs. Now in 2009 they have arrived in even greater numbers.”

Then, in large, bold, underlined letters:

“Now we can begin to even the score!”

Had their way? Even the score? Sorry, Oregon Anglers, you just lost my sympathy.

One final note: Full Sail’s brewpub in Hood River has a nice view and great beer but it feels kind of corporate and the food is pretty expensive.

In like a lion?

I headed up to Oregon City yesterday to look for sea lions.

What’s that, you say? Sea lions live in the sea? That’s how they got their name?

I know, but every spring, sea lions follow the Chinook salmon runs upriver. For years, there’s been all kinds scandals surrounding the issue of sea lions at Bonneville Dam. The dam creates a sort of vertical bottleneck that makes the salmon much easier to get ahold of than they are in the open ocean, and the sea lions are eating them by the hundreds.

To protect the salmon, the Fish & Wildlife Service has tried scaring them away with fireworks and underwater noise bombs. They’ve sent some offending sea lions off to join the marine mammal circus (Sea World), and they’ve killed others.

Like Bonneville Dam, the locks and fish ladder at Oregon City create a barrier that causes migrating salmon to pile up in the Willamette River south of Portland. The Oregon City News ran a pretty thorough piece on the issue last week (http://www.oregoncitynewsonline.com/news/story.php?story_id=126997866815858600).

These sea lion are often portrayed in the news humorously, with reporters using words like “buffet” and “feast” to describe the salmon that sea lions “chomp” and “munch” and “gobble.” One Seattle Times headline reads “Snacking sea lions scarfing up sparse Columbia Chinook run.”

I question whether the jokey tone is appropriate, since this is an issue that drives people apoplectic with rage. Some people are foaming at the mouth that more isn’t being done to stop the sea lions from damaging the fish run. Others are flipping their wigs that the Fish & Wildlife Service is killing innocent mammals. At one point, killing of lions at Bonneville was halted by the Humane Society.

There aren’t currently any plans to kill the sea lions at Willamette Falls, but Fish &

Wildlife is planning to start trying to scare them away. I was hoping I might be able to see or hear them in action, but it didn’t work out that way.

Willamette Falls is one of the biggest waterfalls in American, not in height but in width. In fact, its broad horseshoe shape makes it the seventeenth widest waterfall in the world, according to the World Waterfall Database (http://www.world-waterfalls.com/home.php).

These falls really are an awesome sight. There was a time when men came to this remarkable natural wonder and rubbed their eyes in amazement, unable to believe that there could be such a perfect place to build a paper mill. And so, part of what makes Willamette Falls such an awesome sight today is the rusty, rickety labyrinth of buildings, tanks, steaming chimneys and rushing torrents of wastewater that overlay the natural geography. It’s really impossible to tell where the paper mills end and the falls begin.

A scenic path runs along the east rim of the river gorge, providing epic views — most of it is closed right now, though. I took the second photo on this post from that path last summer. There’s also a bit of scenic pathway running right along the river, attached to the upper path by a scary metal staircase. But all this is on the wrong side of the river to see the locks or the fish ladder.

I poked around on the west side of the river a little, but I didn’t find a good way to get near the water.

My best view was from a turnout along Highway 99 (across the street from a very nice bar called the Highland Still House, FYI). There were at least two other people there looking for sea lions, and a few others that were probably tourists.

It was windy and raining.

A bit further south is another, smaller viewpoint. From there, I saw a sleek little black head in the water. It was near the small blue building in the first photo.

The sea lion was swimming against the current, and quickly went underwater. I saw it a few more times, or else some other sea lions, in the rough grey water below the mills. I started thinking about how long it takes to drive from Portland to Astoria. This sea lion swam farther than that — over 100 miles, against a strong current — to get here.

I’m not going to try to resolve the sea lion issue, but I do think they deserve a little more respect, if not from Fish & Wildlife, then at least from the people who write about them. There’s a hint, in many accounts, that the sea lions are somehow not playing fair. And no one’s talking about what happens out in the ocean, where pollock fishing is killing tens of thousands of salmon every year (http://www.yukonsalmon.com/whatwedo/Fact%20Sheet%20Salmon%20Bycatch%208-08.pdf).

Toxic River Update

Could both the mayor and the state department of environmental quality be reading my blog? Or is it just a total coincidence that emails from both Sam Adams and the DEQ arrived in my inbox yesterday having to do with the issue of pollution in Portland rivers?

Well, it’s just a total coincidence. There’s no way the city of Portland could have developed a master plan for cleaning up and developing the North Willamette Reach in just this past week. Adams announced the plan in a “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” editorial in the Oregonian, which he also sent to everyone on his mailing list. The plan identifies key “pearl” sites in which to focus environmental restoration. This kind of gives me the creeps. I mean, pearls are usually pretty small, right?

Meanwhile, the DEQ is revising its water quality standards based on a new fish consumption rate and separately is releasing a report on persistent toxins in Oregon waterways. One hundred and eighteen different toxins are identified in the report. This also give me the creeps, obviously.