A Time Bomb in the Earth

"It doesn't matter how little selenium may get into a stream; in some cases it's too damn much," declares Marv Hoyt, Idaho director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "We've sampled these streams and found selenium in water below detectable limits, but levels in fish, insects and aquatic plants were 10 to 15 parts per million. Those concentrations cause reproductive failure in fish. Increasing selenium in streams by phosphate mining is just plain unacceptable. The Blackfoot and Crow cutthroat populations are really critical--two of the most important left in Idaho, and we're poisoning them."

From 1997 to 2001 the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality whitewashed the selenium hazard in what it called a "Human Health and Ecological Risk Assessment." According to this bogus document "regional human health and population-level ecological risks are unlikely to occur in the overall [phosphate mining area] based on observed conditions." But the department watered down the risks by distributing them over the entire mining area instead of impacted areas. When the Greater Yellowstone Coalition did its own analysis on seven streams in the Blackfoot and Salt River drainages it found that all fish sampled had elevated selenium levels dangerous not just to the fish but to humans who might eat them. In some cases the levels were four times the much laxer health standard now proposed by the Bush administration. The department had already posted a health advisory for consuming fish from East Mill Creek, where selenium levels are lower than in the seven streams sampled by the coalition.

Even more disturbing is the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for J.R. Simplot's Smoky Canyon Mine expansion into the Deer Creek watershed, released December 29, 2005, by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. The conclusion--full speed ahead--is based on misinterpretation of data, much of it obsolete and discredited anyway. The document isn't just grossly deficient; it is slovenly to the point of mocking the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). There is, for example, no mention that the entire length of Sage Creek, including the Pole Canyon drainage, has been added to the list of selenium-impaired streams. The authors evince scant comprehension of the bioaccumulation process, and they appear not to grasp the meaning of "mitigation," defining it as "actions to avoid, minimize, reduce, eliminate, replace, or rectify the impact of a management practice." As one reviewer--Dr. Patrick C. Trotter, a consulting fisheries scientist commissioned by the Greater Yellowstone Coalition--puts it: "I have had considerable experience working on teams that have prepared EIS documents for the NEPA process, and I recall quite a different set of guidances for applying the term 'mitigation' than appear to be used here. Careful design, careful construction, careful operation, and the application of best management practices were things that were expected would be done to prevent or avoid the occurrence of environmental impacts. Prevention and avoidance measures were not credited as mitigation. Mitigation meant measures taken to make right any environmental damage that could not be prevented or avoided despite best management practices or other best efforts."

For most of my career as a fish and wildlife journalist the Greater Yellowstone Coalition has provided me with information that has proved unimpeachable. Still, it's an environmental advocacy group, and for at least some readers its credibility is therefore suspect. So I went straight to the US Forest Service--which co-authored the DEIS and invited J.R. Simplot to cut roads and do test drilling, thereby making the Sage Creek Roadless Area the first casualty under the Bush administration's new roadless policy. The agency's resident selenium expert is Dr. Dennis Lemly, a senior scientist at the Southern Research Station in Blacksburg, Virginia, and one of my main sources in the early 1990's when he was with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and I was reporting on selenium poisoning of fish and wildlife at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge.

Kesterson is in California's Central Valley where selenium has always been present. The prolific wildflowers encountered by John Muir when he hiked down from the Coastal Range were taking selenium in precisely the proper dosage. But as agriculture swept into the area, unhealthy levels were pumped from the earth with groundwater. By the 1980's hundreds of thousands of eggs, hatchlings and adults of at least 20 species of aquatic birds were being fatally deformed or poisoned to death in gross violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The federal government's response was to whitewash the problem and punish the people who discovered it.

Dr. Lemly was calling selenium a "time bomb" back then; and he calls it one today. I asked him if, as a nation, we were doing better at defusing the selenium threat now than when he and I had talked 15 years ago. "Same issue, same problem, different place, different time," he said. "The damage used to be associated with irrigation drainage; now it's associated with mining. The bottom line is that when you start disturbing soils and geological formations containing selenium they're going to leach selenium."

Can phosphate be strip-mined in the Blackfoot and Salt river drainages without hurting Yellowstone cutthroat trout? Dr. Lemly thinks not. "These ecosystems cannot spare any more selenium input," he told me. "They're already at the threshold. We need to look at this in terms of the long-term health of the fish, but the secretaries [of Agriculture and Interior] are going to weigh jobs. So it's the age-old question of pitting environment against development. It's no different there than at Kesterson, but now it's the Mining Association doing the pushing instead of the farmers." According to Dr. Lemly, the NEPA process "is broken with respect for having a procedure in place to identify selenium threats." For the past five years he's been working out a five-step process that considers all sorts of biological, geological and hydrological conditions to figure a TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load); and he is urging his agency to adopt it.

"Is there a safe TMDL for the Smoky Canyon Mine expansion?" I asked him.

"Probably not," he said. "But the agencies haven't gone through the process to determine that." In his review of the DEIS, he observes that, because it ignores and misinterprets data, it "seriously underestimates selenium threats." For example, he quotes the document's repeated claim that "Hardy (2003) showed that cutthroat trout grown for 44 weeks . . . showed no signs of toxicity." This statement, writes Dr. Lemly, "is absolutely not true," and he goes on to extensively quote Hardy's findings that link selenium with potentially fatal fry deformities. "From a fish-health perspective," Dr. Lemly continues, "it is irresponsible for the Agency Preferred Alternative [mine expansion] to be implemented. . . . This ecosystem is a tinder box, and allowing additional selenium discharges will likely start a cascade of irreversible events, culminating in severe toxic impacts to fish and aquatic life for many years to come. . . . The [secretaries] should not permit a process that could cause residual toxicity and place trust resources (and future land managers) in jeopardy for 100-plus years."

Despite the gross deficiencies of the DEIS, it contains three statements with which Dr. Lemly "strongly agrees": 1) "Impacts related to selenium bioaccumulation would be unavoidable." 2) "Indirect impacts to native fishes of the Study Area from further selenium accumulation, if they occurred, could be long-term and moderate to major." And, 3) "Specifically, long-term productivity effects related to cutthroat trout and other native fishes may be sacrificed through the bioaccumulation of selenium in Project Area streams (and eventually, the potential loss of reproductive function in resident fish)."