Mark Riskedahl paddles his kayak through pounding rain, heading across the Columbia Slough to a riverbank pipe that pours chocolate-brown liquid directly into the water. Holding steady, he reaches out and fills a plastic bottle with the muck -- it smells like gasoline -- and seals it tight for a trip to the lab for testing.

You'd better hope the drainpipe isn't yours.

Because Riskedahl is after anyone draining oil, toxic metals, toilet-dwelling bacteria and who knows what else into our rivers and streams -- even this grimy and abused slough in Northeast Portland.

He's the lone full-time employee of what may be Oregon's toughest environmental enforcer. The Northwest Environmental Defense Center, fueled by Riskedahl's long hours and student volunteers from Lewis & Clark Law School, tracks pollution like a detective and wields the law like a hammer to make polluters clean up their acts. And they're having striking success.

The little band in their Subarus, rain gear and kayaks won more cash penalties from water polluters last year than the entire Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the state's official environmental cop with an enforcement staff of about 110.

"I don't think I'd feel we need to be so aggressive if the state were as aggressive as it ought to be," Riskedahl says.

Or as plain-spoken, perhaps. Riskedahl translates the state's official mumbo jumbo of storm water permits and maximum daily loads into a simple, daunting message:

Stop polluting now.

Or we'll sue you.

Riskedahl prefers not to call it a threat. Instead, he likes to say it's just outlining the law, which provides for fines in the millions if the polluters fight it in court and lose.

But he knows something going in: The polluters probably will lose, because Riskedahl, murky bottles in hand, has the goods. It's a strong incentive for the polluter to sit down with him and work out a deal before a judge gets involved.

Riskedahl, 38, prefers it that way. Although he graduated from law school at Lewis & Clark in 2001, he thinks lawyers tend to drag fights out.

"We get to the same endpoint, whether we get there collaboratively or adversarially," he says.

His group has pursued about 40 water pollution cases in the last five years and gotten its way every time: The pollution ended, and the polluters paid NEDC's legal fees. Instead of the fines they might otherwise pay the government, they donated toward restoration of the very waterways they soiled.

Oh, and they paid for the kayak Riskedahl paddles in search of other scofflaws, as well as the tests he runs on the muck gushing from their pipes.

NEDC is a nonprofit housed at Lewis & Clark but independently operated. It has about 400 members and relies on the college's law clinic, the Pacific Environmental Advocacy Center, for legal muscle. It goes after logging, farm waste and more, and is a thorn in the side of regulatory agencies it contends are weak and ineffective.

But one of its dominant causes now is halting polluted industrial runoff.

NEDC targets admit shock at facing lawsuits for what amounts to dirty rainwater washing off their land. But several said the legal bulldogs turned out to be fair and reasonable.

"I view the whole thing as a productive experience," said Mike Gilbert, president of Independent Dispatch, a freight-forwarding company on Northeast Middlefield Road.

Caught in NEDC's sights earlier this year, Gilbert knew there was a problem with E. coli bacteria, silt and toxic metals washing off his lot, but he couldn't get any direction from government agencies about what to do. Riskedahl put him in touch with specialists who came up with a fix.

Gilbert spent about $60,000 installing a vault to capture runoff and donating to local river restoration efforts. He doesn't resent it.

"If we can do our little piece to help make the Columbia better for the fish, I'm all for that," he said.

But Len Bergstein, spokesman for a huge dairy complex near Boardman at odds with NEDC over air pollution, calls the group "adversarial and cutthroat," and says it pursues legal fights instead of solutions.

"NEDC is at the low end of the environmental food chain," he says. "They're down in the forcing compliance part of the fight," instead of using a "more nuanced and subtle way that gets things done effectively," he says. "It's not an Oregon way of solving problems."

But the law is in Riskedahl's favor. The federal Clean Water Act, backed up by state law, lets citizens and groups such as Riskedahl's enforce the act by suing violators. If Riskedahl's group wins, the other side has to pay its legal costs. If it loses, it pays nothing.

"The liability is so clear, and the consequences are so great, that everybody gets to the point where they say, 'OK, what do you want?' " Riskedahl says. "They just realize that what we're asking for is what the law requires."

Few targets even fight back anymore.

That's in part because of NEDC's dirty work -- literally.

Last year, student volunteers tailed tanker trucks to what they suspected was an illegal chicken rendering plant opened near Astoria by a California company called Modesto Tallow. They clambered down an embankment and grabbed proof in the form of milky chicken sludge geysering into the Columbia River.

"We just needed the evidence of where it was coming from," said Geoff Evans, a third-year law student who recalls washing his hands thoroughly afterward. "It reeked, definitely."

The group alerted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and leveled a lawsuit just as EPA agents raided the plant. The place shut down almost overnight, and its operators coughed up $200,000 for river restoration and salmon habitat.

The cash was among $320,175 toward restoration work that NEDC secured from water polluters last year, according to settlement agreements. That tops $192,110 in water pollution fines collected by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Riskedahl expects to collect more than $500,000 this year.

Budget-strapped DEQ leaders defend their own enforcement record. But citizen groups such as Riskedahl's can sometimes go further, persuading polluters to do more than the law requires, said Anne Price, head of enforcement at DEQ.

"Some of the things they think are high priority we maybe are not able to get to" with the agency's limited funds and staff, she said. "Other things we believe we're doing an adequate job with."

On the Columbia and Willamette, NEDC kayakers snap photos of illegal dumping so they can go after the dumpers. But the group has a soft spot for the Columbia Slough, a beat-down waterway often forgotten by larger environmental outfits.

Once a meandering channel of the Columbia River, the slough became a drainage ditch for Northeast Portland. It's hemmed in by industrial lots, its waters a stew of PCBs, lead, DDT, fecal bacteria and often too warm and starved of oxygen for fish to survive -- not a place where Riskedahl wants to flip his kayak.

That hasn't stopped him and law students, however, from paddling up to drainpipes in the rain and filling bottles with black industrial runoff. They pore through state files, examining water tests companies submit to the DEQ.

Often those tests reveal violations that government agencies have never acted on: Way too much lead. E. coli levels that are off the charts. Every violation carries penalties of up to $32,500 a day, which adds up quickly.

NEDC makes that clear when telling people it's getting ready to sue them.

"Between the reporting and compliance violations, NEDC has evidence that WMO has violated its 1200-COLS permit several thousand times," the group wrote last year to Waste Management of Oregon, a garbage handling company with property draining into the slough.

Its list of violations went eight pages.

"Every time NEDC staff and volunteers have been in the vicinity of WMO's outfalls on the Columbia Slough, we have directly witnessed a vivid oil and grease sheen on the surface of the water," it said.

"NEDC anticipates filing suit against you 60 days from the date of this notice in Oregon Federal District Court, and requesting penalties, as well as injunctive relief."

In about three months, the company installed equipment to catch the pollution, and agreed to cover NEDC's $10,000 in legal costs and donate $35,000 toward restoration and environmental education in the slough. It promised to donate up to another $10,000 if its runoff violated standards.

"They brought it to our attention, and then we took the preventative steps that they helped us identify," said Dean Kampfer of Waste Management. "We want to be a good steward of the environment."

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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News