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Editorial: Practical approach needed to keep PCBs out of Spokane River

April 10, 2015 Updated Fri., April 10, 2015 at 8:24 a.m.

Edit: An earlier version of this editorial referred to the Department of Ecology as the Department of Energy. That error has been corrected in the text below.

The Spokane River is not the most PCB-laden in Washington, and it may not have been for a long time.

The data that might support that statement dates to 1999 – 16 years ago – and does not reflect major municipal, county and industry efforts to arrest the flow of potentially cancer-causing PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls – into the river since then.

But critics of those efforts continue to reference the dated information and, unfortunately, a statement that the Spokane River is the most PCB-polluted was included in an opinion last month from U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein. But the fault is not hers.

The collection and analysis of water, sediment and fish tissue samples has progressed tremendously in the past 16 years, continued while the case was pending before Rothstein, and is ongoing.

The Spokane River Regional Toxics Task Force finances much of that work. Among the members are environmental groups, state and local agencies and industry, including the Inland Empire Paper Co., an affiliate of The Spokesman-Review.

One of the questions before Rothstein was whether the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Ecology had improperly outsourced the work of setting PCB pollution cleanup plans to the task force instead of doing the work themselves. She wants the agencies to submit a plan for establishing discharge limits for public and private sewage treatment plants by summer.

The issue? That addresses only 8 percent of the problem and may trigger litigation that will put cleanup efforts on hold.

Decade-old DOE studies estimate that combined sewer/stormwater outlets contribute 19 percent of total PCBs measured at Lake Spokane, unknown Idaho sources 13 percent, Washington public and private treatment plants 8 percent, and the Little Spokane River 3 percent. That’s less than half the total.

The source of most is unknown, although the suspects include hydro seed, aquatic herbicides and possibly even the food fed to hatchery fish.

Task force members are funding further research and are lobbying the EPA to require less PCBs in pigment which finds its way into the environment in food, packaging and paint.

Rothstein acknowledged the lack of comprehensive information regarding PCB sources, which is one of the reasons she gave the EPA and DOE more time to make their case. If she insists on fixed, near-term targets, much good work will stop.

The most PCB-contaminated Washington river, by the way, is the Duwamish, which empties into the south end of Puget Sound. Levels in the water top out at 3,000 parts per quadrillion. The highest level in the Spokane is 650, and the lowest is 56, just below Clean Water Act guidance criteria of 64 and well below the Washington benchmark of 170, which is based on the National Toxics Rule Standard.

The Spokane Tribe’s desired level is more than 10 times lower than federal or state benchmarks and currently unmeasurable.

So the work goes on, with three months for the DOE and EPA to explain why the task force will rid the Spokane of PCBs faster than the conventional approach of setting a fixed attainment level, especially when there is so much still to understand about the problem.

It would help if the critics help find a solution instead of litigating.

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