Despite Major Cleanup, Willamette River Still Has a Long Way to Go

As the Willamette River meanders from the Cascades through its namesake valley, through towns, cities and rich farmlands, it becomes a stream of contradictions.

At the pristine headwaters of Waldo Lake it is one of the nation’s cleanest, but farther along advisories warn against sustained eating of its fish.

President Clinton designated it as one of America’s first Heritage Rivers. But the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to list Portland harbor a Superfund cleanup site.

In 1972 the Willamette graced the cover of National Geographic as an example of a river brought back from the dead. It showed a family happily rafting down the river, Old Glory flapping above.

Cleaning up the Willamette was a showcase for the environmental efforts of Tom McCall’s years as governor in the 1960s and 1970s. On the surface, at least, the Willamette fairly glistened.

On the bottom it was, and remains, another story. For a century or more, toxic sludge from a variety of industries and agriculture have been building.

“Tom McCall liked to say that the greatest lobbyist for pollution is indifference,” said Jeff Allen of the Oregon Environmental Council. “We have been resting on our laurels from what Tom McCall did for the past 20 years or more. In the meantime, the population is greater and more intense, and that puts a greater strain on the river.”

Under McCall enormous strides were taken to clean up the river, but it wasn’t until 1997 that a study found highly contaminated sediments, especially in the lower river.

“The more we learn, the worse it gets,” Allen said.

The pending Superfund listing is the third wake-up call, Allen said, after the discovery of deformed fish in the Willamette and the listing of salmon runs as endangered.

“Lots of the chemicals that are leading to the Superfund listing are still being dumped in the river,” he said.

Quantities of mercury, DDT, PCBs, dioxins and other chemicals that used to be manufactured or used along the river’s industrial district still ooze into the water along the harbor banks or are settled on the river bottom.

Collectively they are classified as Persistent Bioaccumulative Toxins, or PBTs, an awful soup of poisons that build up in the organisms that consume them, from plants to fish to humans.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is under state mandate to stop the flow of PBTs into the river, including those already buried in riverbank soils, by the year 2020.

Listing on the National Priorities List, or Superfund, would bring federal dollars for cleanup of a six-mile stretch of the river through downtown Portland and in Portland harbor.

There is no estimate yet of the cost of cleaning up the contaminated sediments, said Michelle Prizadeh of the Environmental Protection Agency in Seattle.

She said studies will be done to consider various cleanup possibilities and to identify responsible parties.

The river is expected to be formally proposed for listing within weeks, now that Gov. John Kitzhaber has dropped his opposition to the idea on condition that the state play a role.

“The [Oregon] Department of Environmental Quality has already done a lot of work on the uplands,” she said. “They are looking at contaminating properties. We don’t want to clean up the sediments without looking at the sources that would recontaminate.”

The sources that recontaminate are plentiful, says Don Francis, who founded Willamette Riverwatch, an environmental watchdog group, and now works with the Sierra Club on Willamette River projects.

“Agriculture, with pesticides and fertilizer, is probably the largest source,” Francis said. He said Portland puts combined storm sewer and raw sewage overflow directly into the river on at least 100 days of the year, some 3 billion gallons annually.

That’s about half of what it was a decade ago, but it’s still enough to fill Memorial Coliseum 15 times.

The city is under mandate to virtually eliminate the problem by 2011.

“We took care of the easy stuff,” he said of the efforts during the McCall years. “We looked at a handful of industries and said, ‘Clean up or go away.’ We restored oxygen levels, but we didn’t look at the whole problem to begin with. In the 1960s and 1970s we didn’t look at the sediments, at the heavy metals or the dioxins.

“We can’t really clean it all up. We haven’t turned off the spigot yet,” he said.

Francis said the river looks better than it did when sludge rafts formed from effluent from pulp and paper mills. “We fixed the things you can see,” he said. “It is proof that when the decision is made to stop pollution, the payback is fast and profitable.”

The revitalization of Portland’s waterfront, he said, was done around the centerpiece of a cleaner Willamette “because nobody wanted to build next to an open sewer.”

Sewage treatment plants were not even required in Oregon until 1938, and then only when voters passed a citizens’ initiative after Gov. Charles Martin vetoed a measure passed by the 1937 Legislature.

The river has taken its punishment over time. By the 1930s it was practically dead, and as recently as the 1950s, from Eugene to Portland, the Willamette was nearly as filthy as any major waterway in the nation.

McCall’s administration did a lot to stop the flow of pollutants into the Willamette, agreed Langdon Marsh, the DEQ director.

“But a lot of the problems are 50 to 100 years old. They were there during the McCall years, but nobody knew about them,” he said.

“We didn’t look under the rug until the last few years, and when we checked the rug we found a lot of nasty stuff. There are probably places we haven’t looked yet where we’re going to find a lot of bad stuff as well.”

He said the state is getting started with an inventory of PBTs to find out where which ones are, and in what quantities.

He said the decision will be made as to whether to then go after certain geographical areas or to pick off certain elements. Mercury has been suggested as an early target.

Pressures on the river continue to grow. Nearly 70% of the state’s population lives within 20 miles of its banks. Corvallis and Camp Adair already draw drinking water from it, and Wilsonville may do so in the future.

But a federal government test of the river recently found the presence of 50 pesticides, while only eight of them have standard levels published, said Laura Weiss, the program director for pesticides and toxics for the Oregon Environmental Council. “Forty-two others were detected, but nobody has measured the quantities that are reasonable for human health.”

Hilary Abraham, the OEC’s program director for drinking water and legislative affairs, said the group opposes using the river for drinking water now because of the pesticides and because, properly utilized, better sources exist to provide adequate water through at least 2050, even taking growth rates into account.

“The OEC doesn’t oppose using the Willamette as a future source of drinking water,” she said. “It can be used as some incentive to clean it up.”

“The river is a mess,” said Karen Lewotsky, the OEC’s director of water programs. “There has been no total daily maximum load established” for toxins, temperatures or other pollutants.

“All the stakeholders have to come together to mobilize . . . to bring the river back to health so people can swim in it, fish in it and drink from it if we have to,” she said. “We are all the culprits, and we all have to change our behavior.”