Yakama Nation has put the federal government on notice that the tribe intends to sue over delayed cleanup plans for Bradford Island, part of the Bonneville Dam complex about 40 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River.
Yakama alleges the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' plans for the site violate federal cleanup rules, and that the Corps hasn't adequately included the tribe as a participating government agency. The tribes and bands of Yakama Nation have treaty-protected rights to fish there.
Two decades ago, the Corps pulled up piles of electrical debris that had been dumped into the river near the dam, including electrical insulators, switches and capacitors. Other industrial waste was for decades disposed of on the island, including light bulbs, paint debris and parts of old transformers, which contained volatile chemicals and heavy metals.
The implications were bad: Some of the equipment contained oils made of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), which regulate heat in electrical applications. The now-banned chemicals can cause cancer and reproductive health issues. That's particularly true for people whose diets consist largely of fresh fish, including members of the Yakama Nation, whose traditional fishing grounds include areas near the 1933-built dam.
The Corps later dredged out polluted sediments near the island in 2007; but in 2011, years after that cleanup, native fish like smallmouth bass showed PCB levels among the highest in the country. One of 38 fish tested had 183,148 parts per billion of PCBs, though another showed as little as 13 parts per billion. The mean was 11,608 parts per billion.
To put that in context, the highest PCB levels tested in the Lower Duwamish Waterway were closer to 640 parts per billion, and about 6,500 in Portland Harbor, says Rose Longoria, regional superfund projects manager for Yakama Nation Fisheries. The highly polluted Hudson River has shown tests of about 20,000.
"So when we consider Bradford Island and the 183,000 parts per billion, that's an order of magnitude higher than any other superfund site that we're aware of in the United States for PCBs in fish tissues," Longoria says. "Right in that vicinity, we have tribal members who are catching fish and taking that fish home to their families. So we became very concerned about the information."
The acceptable tissue levels for PCBs are only 0.57 parts per billion for subsistence tribal fishers who eat a significant amount of fish on a daily basis, and 4.7 parts per billion for recreational anglers, according to federal guidelines.
Since 2013, Oregon and Washington have advised that no one eat any of the native fish (excluding migratory fish such as salmon and steelhead) near Bonneville Dam, including carp, bluegill, sucker, small and largemouth bass, sturgeon, yellow perch, crappie, walleye and catfish.
After years of trying to work with the Corps to plan to address the pollution, the governments of Oregon, Washington and the Yakama sought help from the Environmental Protection Agency, which last March listed the island as a superfund site on the national priorities list. Those projects are considered the most important cleanup sites in the country.
Things appeared to be improving last April, when the Corps agreed to work with the tribe to have a federal facilities agreement in place within a year and expedite the cleanup. But a year later that plan hasn't materialized, and the Corps has restricted communications with the tribe.
"For decades, many words have been shared regarding contamination concerns at Bradford Island," Yakama Nation Tribal Councilman George Meninick stated at this year's April meeting with the Corps. "No one is listening."
So last week the tribe sent federal officials a 60-day notice of intent, a precursor to a lawsuit.
The Corps is reviewing the notice now, says John Morgan, a spokesman for the Corps' Portland District. He notes that a regional advisory board for the cleanup is meeting this week to gather more public input, and people can learn more on the Corps' Bradford Island web page.
"We're reading through that thoroughly and working through the Yakama Nation's concerns," Morgan says of the notice. "We're working toward what everybody wants, which is the cleanup of this site."
The tribe continues to ask that the Corps better study the area to find exactly where the contamination is coming from and where it ends up in the river. Yakama Nation also asks to be meaningfully included in government-to-government planning as the cleanup moves forward.
"For what we gave up, for what you developed that contaminated our world," says Yakama Nation Tribal Councilwoman Terry Goudy-Rambler by email, "all we want is a seat at the table to see what can be contributed to fix the problem." ♦