Kayak Crusaders
Persuade Polluters To Come Clean
November 14, 2005 — By Michael Milstein, The Oregonian
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."
To see more of The Oregonian, or to subscribe the newspaper, go to
http://www.oregonian.com.
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
|