Start of Cleanup at Shasta Lake Called Success

Southern Pacific officials claimed their first success Sunday in cleaning toxic pesticides from Shasta Lake using an experimental system they said has “trapped” the poison in a narrow bay and is slowly removing it from the water.

The Department of Fish and Game also announced that levels of the chemical are now so low in the Sacramento River that test trout placed in the river in cages survived overnight.

“There clearly is dramatic improvement,” said James Strock, head of the new California Environmental Protection Agency.

The progress in cleaning up the spill came nearly a week after a Southern Pacific train derailed and dumped up to 19,000 gallons of metam-sodium into the river, killing all aquatic life along a 45-mile stretch of the waterway.

With the pesticide plume moving slowly in the lake toward Shasta Dam, cleanup crews set up a floating decontamination system on barges near Sugarloaf Marina.

Huge pumps sucked the tainted water from the lake and sprayed it into the air to speed up decomposition of the chemical. At the same time, large hoses washed the vapors back into the lake to prevent dangerous fumes from escaping and endangering public health.

By recycling the water through the aeration system around the clock, railroad officials said they hope that they can reduce the poison to safe levels within several days.

“It’s working perfectly,” said Herbie Bart, a Southern Pacific expert brought in from Houston to head the operation. “I know I’ve got it trapped.”

Bart said the combination of sunlight, air and fresh water will cause the chemical to break down quickly into harmless elements as the tainted water is pumped out of the lake and sprayed upward.

Measurements of the mist show that near the spray nozzle, the pesticide is still at levels that exceed safety standards. However, Bart said, the “protective canopy” of water sprayed over the site is not letting any poison escape into the air.

The detoxification system is processing 5,200 gallons of lake water per minute, Bart said, equivalent to one-third of the water entering the lake from all its tributaries.

As the pesticide plume traveled more than three miles into Shasta Lake, the poison spread out and became more diluted. Southern Pacific experts said they were confident that they had set up their operation in the right location to flush out most of the chemical.

“It’s hard to determine just where the head of the plume is,” said John Spisak, president of Southern Pacific Environmental Systems. Water quality tests conducted by the state indicate that “the majority of the material is still upstream” and will soon flow down to the aeration pumps, he said.

Just in case, the U.S. Coast Guard is setting up a less sophisticated aeration system more than a mile down the lake to bubble up contaminated water that escapes the first unit.

Spisak also expressed confidence that the toxic threat would soon diminish because the pesticide is deteriorating with time.

“More than half the material is disappearing and decomposing each day,” he said.

Strock, the California EPA secretary, said in an interview that he was “heartened” by the progress of the cleanup and that area residents had not been exposed to new vapors.

He added that it will take more research to determine whether declining pesticide levels in the lake are because of the aeration operation, the increased mixing of the water, or the natural breakdown of the chemical.

On shore near the cleanup operation, the smell of dead fish wafted over the work crews. But there were also signs of life. Minnows darted in the water across the bay from the operation and a duck with three ducklings trailing swam within several hundred yards of the barges.

Up the Sacramento River, Department of Fish and Game biologists were pleased to find that their four cages of test fish survived in eddies where they believed high levels of pesticide could be present. As a result, plans to pump out such “hot spots” along the river have been abandoned.

“The fish were alive and apparently healthy after 24 hours in (backwater) areas that were thought to contain larger concentrations of the toxic than the river itself,” said Bill Gengler, spokesman for the department.

However, the department cautioned that it could take many years before the river could support populations of fish because the entire food chain was destroyed by the chemical.

Crews began cleaning up thousands of dead fish along the river, in part to prevent rare bald eagles that inhabit the area from feeding on the carcasses. Some fish were sent to labs and preserved for evidence in what are certain to be costly lawsuits over the spill.

Also, non-contaminated fish from a nearby hatchery were put out on the riverbanks in an effort to keep the eagles from eating the poisoned fish. For osprey, which only eat live fish, two tanks stocked with fish were trucked in and set up near their nesting areas, Fish and Game Department spokesman Paul Wertz said.

“It’s an experiment. We’re not holding our breath on this one working,” Wertz said.

As the level of poison declined in the river, the state announced that it was safe for people to come in contact with the water along a 40-mile stretch of river north of the lake.

“Extensive sampling of river water indicates that levels in the river should present no hazard to humans,” the Department of Health Services and the California EPA said in a statement.

County officials said that extensive testing of drinking water systems along the river had found no signs of contamination.

“It sounds like we’re nearing the end of the human health phase and we’ll have to focus on the ecological phase,” Strock said.

His agency, created just last week, will turn its attention to recovering the state’s cost of the cleanup, filling in scientific gaps in knowledge about specific pesticides, and enacting tougher regulations for the transport of toxic material in environmentally sensitive areas.