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River pollution study targets 1986 washout Upriver Dam accident sent contaminated sediment downstream

November 10, 2002 Sunday Spokane Edition
Karen Dorn Steele Staff writer
Copyright 2002 Spokane Spokesman Review (Spokane, WA)

Regulators planning new studies of pollution in the Spokane River will look for the first time at a catastrophic 1986 washout at Upriver Dam.

Previous studies of industrial PCBs and mining contamination in the river don't mention the accident that dislodged thousands of tons of murky sediment.

Nobody knows for sure how much pollution washed downstream as a result of the mishap on May 20, 1986.

That night, a 1:16 a.m. lightning strike during spring runoff knocked the power out. All five generators were running at full capacity when the power failed, shutting them down and automatically closing the gates.

Frantic efforts to reopen the gates failed. The water that breached the city-owned dam complex at 3 a.m. was moving at 9,000 cubic feet per second.

The deluge was so powerful it knocked a 13,000-ton powerhouse partially off its foundation. The dam breach cost $12 million to fix.

'It's fair to assume that during the breach, there was a release of contaminants,' said John Roland of the Washington Department of Ecology.

In addition to PCBs from industrial discharges, tons of mining wastes from Idaho's Silver Valley have backed up behind the dam since its construction in 1936. The exact amount of contamination isn't yet known.

The Upriver Dam accident will be studied as part of a new legal consent decree between Ecology, Avista and Kaiser to clean up PCBs in the river.

Charlie Calkins, who lives on the banks of the river's 6.7-mile reservoir behind Nine Mile Dam, vividly remembers the 1986 accident.

That morning, he awoke to see roiling, muddy waters surging across his lawn - about 40 feet higher up the bank than usual.

''We had whole trees, big branches and tons of silt. It killed a lot of fish," Calkins said. ''Nobody from the city ever showed up. I'm afraid that a lot of the polluted sediments have ended up here."

After the accident, the city hired crews to remove debris for seven to eight miles downstream, according to a 1987 project report.

But a fast-track rebuilding of the dam's lost power production was the top priority.

Engineers estimated that enough river muck from the dam complex was released in 1986 - either spilled over both sides of the main dam or washed away from banks near its two powerhouses - to fill 47,000 pickup trucks with more than 75,000 tons of sediment.

At the time, little was known about pollutants in the sediment behind the dam. City documents that describe the washout don't note any pollution concerns, but they express a fear that the gritty sediment could damage power turbines downstream.

Washington Water Power Co., which is now called Avista, had opened the gates of the Upper Falls Dam because the river was running above capacity, said Bruce Howard, Avista's Spokane River license manager. The water spilled over the Monroe Street Dam.

A decade later, federal and state scientists began to learn more about contaminants in the river when they took dozens of shallow sediment samples above and below Upriver Dam.

They detected heavy metals from Idaho's mines and enough industrial PCBs to give the Spokane River top billing as the most PCB-contaminated river in Washington state.

In March 2001, a new health advisory told people to avoid or strictly limit meals of fish caught above Upriver Dam because of the PCBs.

Of greatest concern: a group of chemicals called planar PCBs that act like dioxins in people after they eat PCB-contaminated fish, raising the risks of harm to unborn children.

PCBs, a group of manufactured organic chemicals used in transformers and hydraulic fluid, also have been labeled probable human carcinogens and have been linked to immune system damage. They build up in fish tissue, where they can reach levels thousands of times higher than the levels in water.

PCBs in fish average 13 parts per billion per kilogram of body weight in the state's cleanest streams. In the Spokane River, fish average 321 parts per billion, Ecology records show.

In another study published in July 2001, Ecology said zinc, lead, cadmium and PCBs in the top 10 centimeters of river sediment were detected as far downstream as lower Long Lake at twice the levels known to cause adverse health effects.

None of the toxic chemicals came from Latah Creek, which carries heavy loads of silt from the Palouse into the Spokane River.

The PCBs are from a variety of industrial sources, including Kaiser's Trentwood plant, the Spokane Industrial Park and the Liberty Lake Sewer and Water District.

Nobody has taken deep core samples to measure pollutants in the reservoir behind the Nine Mile Dam, where the river is stopped by a wall of concrete.

A few samples taken in the shallow sediment don't show worrisome pollution levels, Roland said. There are no plans for deep-coring sediment in the reservoir, he said.

There are other problems at the Nine Mile reservoir.

Calkins says he's losing 8 inches to a foot of his property each year as the reservoir fills with sediment, causing the water to rise.

Most of the coarse sediment - about 49,000 tons a year - comes from Latah Creek, a 1999 Avista study says.

The north shore has gotten shallower, but the reservoir is reaching an equilibrium, Avista's Howard said. "The vast majority of sediments are coming in from the Palouse," Howard said.

In 1997, Avista built a sediment bypass tunnel at Nine Mile Dam to protect its turbines. When the turbines are working at capacity, the tunnel is opened, providing a pathway for finer sediment to dump downstream into Lake Spokane, also known as Long Lake.

Two new cleanup plans address pollutants in the Spokane River.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently released a 30-year, $359 million Superfund plan to clean up mine wastes from Mullan to Lake Roosevelt, which includes the heavy metals from behind Upriver Dam.

It acknowledges that not enough is known yet about the Spokane River sediment to decide on a final cleanup remedy, which could include capping or removing them.

Ecology also has released a draft of a proposed legal consent decree to address the PCB problem. Avista and Kaiser have agreed to share the $240,000 cost to study the problem and recommend a cleanup remedy by 2004. Public comments on the draft plan are being accepted through Nov. 23.

downstream residents are asking whether they've been overlooked.

John Jordan is a former corporate headhunter from Friday Harbor, Wash., who has lived on the shores of Lake Spokane since 1997.

The 26-mile lake is formed by the impoundment of the Spokane River between the Nine Mile and Long Lake dams.

Jordan is president of the Lake Spokane Protection Association, a group of 1,200 land and homeowners in Spokane and Stevens counties who live along Lake Spokane and the Nine Mile Dam reservoir.

The association sued the city in the 1970s under the federal Clean Water Act to halt discharges of raw sewage into the river from the city of Spokane. The parties reached a settlement in 1976.

Jordan likens Lake Spokane and the Nine Mile reservoir to a "plumbing trap" collecting pollutants from upstream. He wants EPA and Ecology to test for contaminated sediment and remove them.

The Nine Mile reservoir ''is hiding many sins. If they do core drilling, they'll have the entire ecological record," Jordan said.

''If they find metals, the EPA should step up. If they find PCBs, industry and the city should step up. I want everybody to share in this," Jordan said.