Part one of two parts
The phoebe flew back and forth over the contours of a familiar eddy in the stream. Its wings beat erratically. Alighting on a rock, it moved its head about sluggishly, as if in a daze. If I could assign a mood to a bird then it was bewilderment. There was nothing to eat.
One week earlier, at quarter to ten under a new moon on Sunday, July 14th 1991, a Southern Pacific freight train was laboring up and around Cantara Loop several miles upstream. It was a long train, ninety-five cars in all and only eleven of them were loaded. The rear end of the train was weighted by six heavy gondolas full of scrap metal. Eighty-four empty cars connected the scrap metal to the payload towards the front. One of the tankers in the payload contained a soil sterilizer with the trade name Vapam, or metam sodium. As the torque of the load increased around the tight loop, an engine jumped its rails, snake-whipping the train behind it. Some of the cars were forced to the right of the rails, others to the left, gouging a quarter-mile of skid marks into the ties in the rail bed as the train came to a halt. Before it did, an engine and the tanker full of metam sodium toppled off the bridge into the Upper Sacramento River.
Looking at the site, you could imagine the panic of the train crew as the accident occurred. It's a thirty-foot drop off the bridge into the river, not a dive you'd enjoy at the throttle of a locomotive. Heart pounding, the conductor grasped his lantern and walked back to the middle of the bridge, peering over the side. A foul, eye-stinging odor rose up. The conductor hurried back to the engine, radioed headquarters and checked the manifest for the contents of the derailed tanker. It was listed only as "non-toxic, weed-killer" and the conductor informed his superiors that he's disconnecting the engine from the train and "getting the hell out of here."
Left behind was the tanker with two gashes no longer than fifteen inches apiece. A green milky ooze poured out of them both into the finest stretch of wild trout fishery in California.
As a fisherman who had never fished that stretch of river, I took the news of the spill as a hard loss. The image of 45 miles of dead river took hold of me. Fishermen are acutely aware of the biological aliveness of the waters they fish. In ocean salmon fishing, we look for a particular color of water, "dirty water" and "slicks" which signal a biological richness which draws in plankton, krill, bait fish and therefore salmon. In steelhead fishing the color of the water becomes glowing aquamarine after the heavy winter rains wash the sediment out of the tributaries. There is a particular color we are looking for, and if it isn't there, we don't fish.
I thought I might learn something about biological "aliveness" if I could see what a dead river looked like. After thinking about it I realized that I did know what a dead river looks like. I'm from Philadelphia. But I've never seen a freshly-murdered river. So Ed and I, who had fished many north coast rivers for steelhead, took a break from the summer ocean salmon fishing to drive to the Lake Shasta area and take a look around.
On our way up to the spill area we stopped at The Basshole, a bait and tackle shop in Lakehead, and talked to the owner about the effect of the spill on his business. There's a bar connected to the bait shop with a newly installed sign: "UN-Contaminated Beer." At that time the plume remained stuck in the upper arm to Lake Shasta. Normally, this would have been a big weekend with fishermen coming from all over the state to try their luck on the vast number of fishing spots in the area. The owner took us back to the bait shop and showed us a tank of minnows that should have sold briskly on a weekend like this.
Had they told you how soon they think they'll have this area cleaned up? "No, they don't really know how long it's going to have an effect on the river."
Do they seem to know what they're doing? "No. That's the worst part about it. Now they're going to try something they never tried before in their lifetime: blow a bunch of air bubbles down there and try and bring that gas out. If the wind picks it up they'll evacuate six miles around here. They started this morning."
He opened up the cash register behind the counter. "I didn't even put any change in the sucker. No need to." He open the refrigerator to show us the stacks of styrofoam containers filled, top to bottom, with nightcrawlers and crickets. Had he been able to get some compensation from Southern Pacific for the damage to his business? "No, we don't even know what to do. They're so godamn busy they won't even talk to us now. They're just trying to cover their butt. All we can do is burn electricity and watch these things die in the tank. I just been feeding them to the crawdads, but they're full of eating minnows. Can't take 'em back, can't get a refund on 'em. So they just sit here."
We were able to get down to the river at Dunsmuir after being turned away by CHP near the upper end of Lake Shasta. Aside from the bright chuckle of the stream, there was deathly quiet. Foliage drooped down and lost all sparkle and a hank of grass at the edge of the water had given up and flopped over into the water. No birds were visible nor could they be heard. Then we saw that pathetic phoebe, accustomed to its territory but finding nothing to eat. What should have been green moss was dead and brown and slimy. Native brown and rainbow trout littered the bottom of the streambed and remained jammed into the crevices of the rocks.
I felt sick to my stomach and my eyes were burning as if holding back tears. A thin bubbling scum, like soap detergent, coated an eddy that might normally hold a dozen feeding trout. You could turn over rocks and find hundreds of dead aquatic insects: hellgrammites, stone flies, caddis larvae; everything was dead. A pair of mud dogs, large salamanders, nestled in a pocket of shallow water.
Wasps and yellow-jackets, carnivores after dead meat, lined the edges of the water like miniature vultures. We dug into the wet sand along the bank and found nothing stirring. Much of the algae on the rocks had burned off, leaving an red iron oxide patina. The air smelled like a septic tank. The water was unusually clear, with none of the color associated with good fishing. We did not at first notice one striking fact when we visited the river a week after the spill, the implications of which sank in slowly. None of the dead fish in the river had begun to decompose. They were as bright as if you had just landed them. There was nothing there to nibble their corpses, no bacteria to rot them.
Two days after the derailment the green slick had traveled more than 11 miles. While offering its apologies to the citizens of California for the tragedy, Southern Pacific had yet to take any measure to stop the spreading contamination. Six days after the spill the slick had drifted downstream 45 miles and still nothing had been done about it. Close to 200 people living along the river in the town of Dunsmuir were treated at a nearby hospital for respiratory problems. Robert Holquist, a reporter for the Redding Record-Searchlight, saw trout leaping from the water and onto the banks, choosing to suffocate there, rather than in the contaminated water.
Metam sodium reacts upon contact with water to become a noxious fume. This fume was reported to be mustard gas by the media, but a researcher in chemical recycling wrote into the Santa Rosa Press Democrat to correct the mistake: it was akin to "mustard oil."
Whatever the make-up of the spilled chemical and its fumes, it had a slaughterous effect on every living thing in the Upper Sacramento River. Vapam, the trade name of the chemical, is used on agricultural land. It kills all biological activity: weeds, bacteria, nematodes, and insects in the soil. Like a sterilizer, it leaves no "dirty life" behind. While metam sodium is "safe for humans to drink for short periods of time" at levels of 1 part per million (ppm), levels of 0.1 ppm kill fish. In fact, this level is the outer limit of detection. This raised serious questions about the integrity of the supply of the Bay Area's drinking water, since the Upper Sacramento is the fountainhead of that supply.
The public is treated much like a fearful child in these situations. Reassurances were issued by state officials that the drinking water supply for the Bay Area was " -even before the real nature of the contamination was fully known. First suggestions were that the spill would likely dissipate in the 597 billion gallons of water in Lake Shasta. "We're comparing the spill to a grain of sugar in a cup of coffee," said Bill Gengler, spokesman for the state Fish and Game Department. He assumed that the milky green plume would diffuse into the main body of the lake, rather than cohere and sink to the bottom. But the chemical did cohere and sink to the bottom of Lake Shasta, which is 800 feet deep in some places. As it entered the lake, the plume was measured at 26 ppm. One resident told me that "it's just like that movie The Blob - everything it touches, it kills."
This was indeed a problem for state water quality agencies, who would be unable to show the public that levels of metam sodium in the water had dropped down to "safe" levels. Thus they concocted a plan to "aerate" the upper lake area. While they said that they planned to disperse the chemical into the air, it is obvious that the real intent was to stir up Lake Shasta like a giant martini and forced the dilution of the chemical down to "safe" levels below 1 ppm.
What is metam sodium? Why is it used? Doesn't it seem as though we are swimming in chemicals? Is this stuff necessary? Are we being alarmist when we question the safety of such small levels of toxins? Am I boring you? At the risk of sounding like your chemistry teacher, metam sodium is a fumigant. "Fumigants, as a group, are narcotics. Their mode of action is more physical than chemical. The fumigants are liposoluble (fat-soluble); they have common symptomatology; their effects are reversible; and their activity is altered very little by structural changes in their molecules. Fumigants induce narcosis, sleep or unconsciousness, which in effect is their mode of action on insects. The more common fumigants are: Methyl bromide, Ethylene dibromide, Ethylene dichloride, Hydrogen cyanide, Chloropicrin, Sulfuryl fluoride, Vapam, Telone, Aluminum phosphide, Chlorothene, Ethylene oxide, Naphthalene (crystals), para-dichlorobenzene."-Fundamentals of Pesticides, by George W. Ware.
What are fumigants used for? One of the main uses of fumigants in Northern California is for preparing soil for expensive rootstock-wine grapevines, to be specific. Last month a color picture appeared showing the new Gallo vineyards, a huge, moonscaped expanse north of Windsor, with the caption: "A sea of plastic wraps the hillsides south of Cloverdale where brothers Ernest and Julio Gallo, owners of the largest wine empire in the world, are preparing the soil for vineyards. An oak tree, saved from the bulldozer, protrudes from the plastic sheet, which is used to seal chemical fumigants injected into the soil. The fumigants rid the soil of nematodes and fungus. Soil fumigation is a widespread practice in preparing new vineyards in the North Coast."
Fumigants are used to control several specific pests which threaten young rootstock, but they have the effect of suppressing all life in the soil.
"I think it is stupid to pour hundreds of millions of gallons of organic chemicals on the soil to destroy little worms in a non-specific fashion. Better techniques exist.... Soil fumigation in agriculture is, I think, an outmoded technique that is not necessary in most instances." -(John W. Hylin, Professor and Chairman, Department of Agricultural Biochemistry, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI).
Fumigants like metam sodium being used today are believed to be safer than the chemical that was used up until August 1977, a compound called DBCP. It was taken off the market because is was a known carcinogen and testicular toxin. Workers at Occidental Petroleum in Lathrop California found in 1977 that they had become sterile from working with DBCP. After taking two showers, a worker put his finger in a goldfish bowl and killed the fish.
832,000 pounds of fumigants were applied to the agricultural soils of California in 1977. The fumigants are applied and covered with tarp to keep the gases from spreading. Fumigants re-activate when in contact with water and break down into other deadly compounds. As the plume resting at the bottom of Lake Shasta graphically demonstrated, fumigants tend to resist dispersion. They are extremely deadly to fish.
As salmon fishermen can tell you, those that have fished the Russian, the Navarro, the Napa and the Sacramento Rivers since the 1950s when there were hundreds of thousands of fish spawning up river each year, the fish are gone. They started to go in the late 1960s when the conversion of agricultural land into vanity vineyards producing $15 varietals. If fumigants are as deadly to fish as was demonstrated on the Upper Sacramento this summer, and if fumigants are as widely used along the watersheds as the wine boom indicates, there is little question that there is a connection between the use of fumigants and the decline of coastal fisheries.
Meanwhile, Al Roberts from the U.S. Department of Transportation assured the public: "This stuff is not by any measure considered to be acutely toxic... If you dumped a truckload of sugar that would kill a lot of fish, too." This blithe attitude characterized the deep failure of state and federal regulatory agencies to assume responsibility for either the bane of the accident or its remedy.
Rep. Barbara Boxer (D.-Greenbrae) called it an 'outrage' that the government has not listed metam sodium as a hazardous chemical although the Coast Guard classifies it as a dangerous marine pollutant. When Boxer asked Don Gray, assistant administrator for the Emergency Response Office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, whether he might want to add metam sodium to its list of hazardous chemicals if it killed people as well as fish, he replied: "The number of fish killed or the number of people killed is not the criterion we use." Boxer stared in disbelief, then said: "This is an outrage. I'm stunned."
We wondered what we are paying these state officials for, who are charged with the protection the environment and ensure clean water, when their main activity seemed to be offering declarations on the safety of the Bay Area's water supply. Whatever the inadequacies of these well-paid bureaucrats, Southern Pacific must bear the major share of the responsibility for the spill. What it called "an unbelievable combination of events, defying the odds" was in truth a predictable consequence of irresponsibility and contempt for the environment. The section of tract where the derailment occurred had no less than forty-one accidents in the last fifteen years. A short hike into the to the site of the accident showed us that spikes had been sheared off at their heads, bent and deformed rails had resulted from the derailment, but to our amazement the track was still being used. The tanker involved in the spill was a model with a shaky history. State agencies had asked railroads not to use this particular model while transporting dangerous chemicals. The make-up of the train might have amused HO-scale model train conductors, with its heavy cargo of scrap metal in the rear, 84 empty cars, and five payload cars at the front. It was an economical way to configure it, but unsafe, since the huge weight at the end of the train clearly played a role in the derailment.
Southern Pacific claimed it didn't "discover" the spill until the next morning. But the truth came out when Tom Stienstra reported, not on the front page, but in the sports section of the following Sunday's San Francisco Examiner, that an older couple had been listening to the scanner the evening of the spill and heard the reaction of the crew to the accident. Since the fumes were overpowering enough to send the crew hurrying away from the cite, Southern Pacific clearly knew that the tanker was leaking into the river. An hour later, they reported the derailment to the state Office of Emergency Services. The report read, "creek name unknown." That little "creek" was the Sacramento River.
As Stienstra reported, the railroad conglomerate was more concerned about getting their "power unit" out of the river than doing anything about the spill. The corporation tried to shift blame onto state and federal regulatory agencies for "unclear labeling" of the contents of the tanker. The railroads' lobby, in fact, had prevented a law which would have provided for more strict labeling practices.
Although Southern Pacific officials denied that over-lubrication of the track had a significant role in the derailment, our visit to the site revealed that the hydraulics used to oil the wheels were covered in excess grease, and that it looked to us as if some attempt had been made to wipe up this excess in the aftermath of the derailment. Rails are lubricated so they last longer, saving the railroad money. Estimates for the clean-up, which Southern Pacific will eventually be forced to assume, will run in the millions of dollars.
The Upper Sacramento may sound like a wide, deep and muddy river but at Cantara Loop it is no more than two-and-a half feet deep. The simplest plan to limit the impact would have been to halt releases from Siskiyou dam just above the spill, plug up the two small holes in the tanker, and create a pond somewhere downstream where the chemical could have been pumped out. Instead, Southern Pacific concentrated its efforts into salvaging its capital outlay in the downed engine before making any attempt to clean up the spill. When the spill had gotten out of control and threatened the fish in Lake Shasta, not to mention the winter-run salmon (only 250 of which are estimated to exist) that were just then spawning in the Sacramento River, state agencies and Southern Pacific agreed on their scheme to stir up the blob. But the state Air Resources Board balked at the proposition of sending a toxic gas cloud into the air just next to Interstate Highway 5. John Spivak, an "environmental specialist" with Southern Pacific, was able to state that this objection was "the kind of thing that has crippled this effort." Ultimately the plan went ahead after a few delays and was declared a "success."
While Southern Pacific tried to shift responsibility for the spill onto the U.S. Department of Transportation for "improper labeling" of the chemical, its own lobbies had successfully opposed legislation that would impose stricter labeling procedures.
We had already seen that local businesses had been dealt a crippling blow by the spill, and as we talked to local residents we became aware of deep ambivalence as to who was to blame. In the town of Dunsmuir, we talked to a young man working at the ACE Hardware. He gave us a picture of the town's reaction to the spill, the media, and their loss of trade.
"With all the media going around there's a lot of stuff being said that's really not true. They're saying that the water's undrinkable, but it's fine. Dunsmuir still has 'the best water on earth'."
Cal Trans workers stopped traffic on I-5 and handed out leaflets advising motorists to roll up their windows and drive like hell through the spill area without stopping. In the town of Dunsmuir, where residents depend on tourist dollars for their existence, there was a lot of anger at both state officials and news media which made light of the town's motto: "The Best Water on Earth." The drinking water in fact came from Mossbrae Springs, not the river, and was indeed some of the best water I've ever tasted.
Were you able to go down to the river when it happened? "Yeah, you could see fish floating down the river, dead fish on the bottom of the river. You could smell it in the air. If you were to go down there and take a big deep breath it would knock you over. It was strong stuff.
"It's sad. It probably could have been prevented. My dad is a conductor for Southern Pacific, and he has this book with all the chemicals that they carry and the precautions they should take in case there's a spill, and this chemical wasn't even listed."
I know that there's about three hundred people in this town who work for Southern Pacific...
"It's a railroad town."
...Is there any kind of split in the community as to whether Southern Pacific caused it or didn't cause it?
"Well... It's kinda hard to say... People are more concerned with the rumors going around... Everybody knows that SP had something to do with it. And I think there's someone else that has something to do with it, not just SP. People don't know what to think. Today a guy came in and was arguing with my boss, saying that property values are going down all along the river. Environmentalists are saying that if all the plant life along the river is killed, it will take 20 years for it to come back. And Dunsmuir was just coming back on an uprise, we had a bottling company coming in, we had a theater open up. We were rising and here we are falling again."
Indeed, capital is more flighty than that sad phoebe we saw tottering over the river. How many millions of dollars of equity evaporated from the area as a tanker drained itself into the Sacramento River?
The local chamber of commerce pressed for a media campaign to assure travellers that the area was safe. They wanted the river to be restocked with hatchery fish as soon as feasible. (The wild trout, for which this stretch of river is famous, will restock the river gradually as tributaries above the spill contain unmolested fish, but that might take years.) While the business community fretted over lost tourist dollars, local residents had more pressing needs for information about the health consequences from exposure to the fumigant.
continue: part two, "The Dead River"
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