State EPA director visits, supervisors hire mercury
consultant
Cleanup of the toxic and remote New Idria Mercury Mine, deemed
low priority by the state water board two weeks ago, took on a
sense of urgency over the past week.
State EPA director visits, supervisors hire mercury consultant
Cleanup of the toxic and remote New Idria Mercury Mine, deemed low priority by the state water board two weeks ago, took on a sense of urgency over the past week.
As San Benito County Supervisors pondered a response to one government agency’s assessment of the region’s worst source of environmental pollution, California’s EPA director visited San Benito County on Friday to gauge community support for cleanup.
Winston Hickox left promising action.
Meanwhile on Tuesday county supervisors hired a scientist versed in mercury cleanup projects to help pressure environmental officials and to seek out state and federal grants to mitigate the ongoing environmental damage.
The actions are a culmination of years of local lobbying for the region’s deadly and most blatant waterway pollution, the legacy of the U.S. mercury mining age that began during the Gold Rush and ended in 1972, when the heavy metal’s far-reaching health impacts became known.
The San Carlos Creek meanders to Mendota and eventually to the San Francisco Bay, where food fish record high levels of mercury.
Khalil Abu-Saba, PhD, an expert on acid mine drainage and mercury-polluted waterways throughout the state, was hired by supervisors to come up with a game plan for the county to use to pressure state and federal officials for action.
“We need to get a clear direction here or this thing is just going to bumble along,” said Supervisor Richard Scagliotti. “We need to have a formulated plan.”
In 1998 Abu-Saba did his UC Santa Cruz graduate work on the pollution caused by the abandoned New Idria Mercury Mine.
“I was fascinated not only by the site itself, but also when I asked the question, ‘Who’s in charge here? Why is pollution discharge unabated in the waters of the state?'” said Abu-Saba as he gave a presentation about the New Idria watershed at Tuesday’s meeting.
After he completed the extensive study on New Idria with a fellow student scientist, the San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board hired Abu-Saba after he proved a connection between mercury point sources upstream from the San Francisco Bay, contamination of the bay waters and excessive mercury levels in sea life.
While working for the state, the scientist learned the ins and outs of water quality laws, he said. He currently works as a senior aquatic chemist at the Santa Cruz-based environmental consulting firm, Applied Marine Sciences.
During the meeting Abu-Saba outlined the complexities involved with the pollution pouring from the defunct mercury mine. The orange, murky acid mine drainage has been flowing from the San Carlos into the Panoche River, Silver Creek, Panoche Fan, Mendota Pool, Sacramento Delta and ultimately into San Francisco Bay for some 60 years.
“The problem is acid mine drainage and mercury,” said Abu-Saba. “It kills fish and there’s a potential threat to livestock. Mercury itself is a developmental neurotoxin, it accumulates in the food chain. It’s a real concern especially when it’s transported into wetland areas like the Mendota Wildlife Refuge. It affects the wildlife in the area and people who use the fishery resources in the San Joaquin River and the Sacramento Delta.
“This is about environmental justice,” he went on. “Protection of water quality is a basic right. If that orange water were running through Steven Spielberg’s backyard it would have been fixed by now.”
In 1982 the Central Valley Regional Water Control Board did attempt to regulate what washes out of New Idria by ordering the owners at that time, Idria Land & Development Co., to get a discharge permit. The company hired a private firm called Dames and Moore in 1989 to work out a plan to reduce toxins, and the plan was sold along with the property in 1991 to the current owners, the Herrings. The plan to mitigate the drainage was never implemented. The RWQCB said in a 1999 interview with the San Jose Mercury News that enforcement of the order fell off their radar.
Herring has said he does not own the mineral rights to the land and therefore is not liable for the acid mine drainage. The mineral rights belong to Four G Oil Company of Casper, Wyoming.
Abu-Saba also said the county and landowners along the San Carlos should turn the problem into a water supply issue. In order to get the state’s attention, he told the supervisors a good start would be to rally the stakeholders along the river to form a water association and go before the state water board with demands for remediation.
“They have riparian water rights,” he said.
He said that New Idria was on a low priority for any large-scale planning efforts.
“But that’s OK,” he said. “You don’t need large scale planning in New Idria. You need enforcement. It’s kind of like if you were looking at an urban environment and saw a crack house, you wouldn’t try to zone it out of existence, you’d send the police in to enforce. That’s the analogy in the environmental world.”
The scientist summarized by suggesting the county create rural-urban partnerships with governmental agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area, considering that’s where New Idria’s poisonous byproducts ultimately end up. Potential funding sources for the New Idria watershed cleanup would include the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and the Calfed Bay-Delta Program, a joint state-federal agency that encourages protection of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Delta water bodies.
Earlier this year Abu-Saba alerted county officials that the state water board, which oversees all nine regional state water boards, was getting ready to make recommendations on which impaired waterways should get first dibs on federal EPA cleanup action. Supervisor Ron Rodrigues, who represents District 4 and is spearheading the pollution abatement efforts, went to Sacramento in May and spoke to the board about New Idria’s acid mine drainage and its effects downstream in the Central Valley.
The county also made copies of a thick file that chronicles the details of the New Idria watershed since its heydays in the war years and sent the material to some two dozen top state and federal officials, including the state water board.
In September Rodrigues made conference calls between officials in the San Francisco EPA, Congressman Sam Farr’s office, and various county department heads in an effort to draw more attention to the polluted wasteland.
But on Oct.15 supervisors were stunned to find out that the staff of the State Regional Water Quality Control Board in Sacramento recommended no changes in New Idria’s cleanup status. Under that timetable, the watershed is not slated for consideration until after the year 2015.
But since Hickox supervises the regional water boards his involvement in the issue, prompted by Rusty Areias, who was lobbied by voters on the state senate campaign trail, means that New Idria’s status could change.
Hickox, said Scagliotti, was impressed with the county’s solidarity and zeal to clean up the watershed. On Tuesday he placed his CAL EPA undersecretary Brian Haddix in charge of research on the project.
Editor’s note: Reporter Kate Woods lives downstream from the New Idria mines and is affected by the runoff, so Staff Writer Tracie Cone, who has been reporting on New Idria pollution since 1998, contributed to this report.
