Call to Action: Thursday's Selenium Hearing - Gagging the Public

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/05/26/18648931.php


A broad coalition of 18 organizations, representing fisheries, tribal and environmental interests, opposes the extension of compliance with water quality standards that the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board is expected to grant to agribusiness polluters on Thursday, May 27. Waste waters from the San Luis Drain are currently 10 times the level considered safe. The coalition believes the pollution should be halted at its source, not sent downstream.

The legacy of agribusiness pollution: These are deformed embryos of the bird species Stilt collected from a single nest from a Tulare Basin evaporation pond in the Southern San Joaquin Valley in 2001. Selenium from west side San Joaquin Valley farms caused massive wildlife deformities in birds at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, exposed by federal biologist Felix Smith, in Merced County in the early 1980s. The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Board is expected to grant more pollution waivers to corporate agribusiness on May 27. Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.



Call to Action-Thursday's Selenium Hearing, Gagging the Public

The Scandal of Failure to Enforce the Law

Dear All:

Thursday at 8:30 AM in Rancho Cordova the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board will consider a “time extension for compliance” to allow the continued direct discharge of selenium laced agricultural toxic water into Mud Slough, a tributary to the San Joaquin River and about 50 miles as the crow flies to the Southern California drinking water pumps.

This toxic brew has caused reproduction failure and death in aquatic life, migratory birds, and salmon. Recent reports estimate up to a 50% mortality in Chinook Salmon exposed to these high toxic discharges. The solution to this pollution is dilution. Dilution from the San Joaquin River and Merced Rivers.

If you read the staff comment report below you will see the public is being gagged. Non enforcement of selenium standards will be sanctioned. There will be no consideration of:

1. Sources of the toxic selenium pollution such as Westlands where irrigating 300,000 acres of toxic lands mobilizes selenium into the waters of the state and thousands of acres outside of the Grasslands area where drainage is discharged or seeps into the federal San Luis Drain and the San Joaquin River. The public input is gagged.

2. Reducing deliveries of water to these toxic lands will not be considered. Public input is gagged

3. No additional monitoring will be considered. There is no monitoring past the confluence of the Merced River and the San Joaquin River. Once there, the fate of hundreds of pounds of toxic selenium is someone else’s problem. Impacts to the Suisun Marsh, the Delta, drinking water are someone else’s problem. Public input is gagged.

4. Impacts to salmon and endangered species will not be considered. This is part of another regulatory action somewhere in the future.

5. Public Health exposure to these increased levels of selenium will not be considered. There will be some warnings to migrants and others who fish the San Joaquin River or those who eat game or shell fish from selenium waters, but no monitoring is required. Sediments high in selenium can be put in residential and industrial fill, but monitoring or assessing public exposures is not part of this hearing. Public input is gagged.

6. Dilution is the solution. The untested and expensive treatment methods that have not worked so far will be relied on to solve the problem. No other options will be considered. Public input is gagged.

7. The Clean Water Act and California’s Porter Cologne Act set out a regulatory framework to treat the source of pollution not to cover it up. Enforcing the law makes sure we do not just treat the symptoms of water pollution.

Please let me know if you can attend this hearing. We need at least a dozen volunteers to get there early and to be seated in the front row. Eva Fields has volunteered to coordinate folks. She will be handing out some yellow gags. We need to coordinate some. So let me know if you can get folks there. We need at least a dozen. More would be better.

Thanks,
Patty

http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/centralvalley/board_decisions/tentative_orders/1005/index.shtml.

For more information, call Patricia Schifferle, Pacific Advocates, <530> 550 0219 or <415> 254 6307 cell.

but instead of harvesting it they let it flow out and destroy wildlife? Not only unconscionable but stupid.