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Analyzing the Slough data should have taken me about six months but instead it took about three times that. From the outside, it probably looked like DEQ didn't care very much. In retrospect, I think perhaps I cared too much. At any rate, I was eventually offered another position in the agency and I gratefully accepted it. The final report came out a year after I had moved on. It covers a bunch of issues besides toxics. The toxics portion contains very little of the work that I did and is much easier to read than what I wrote. It doesn't mention "chemicals of special interest". Sigh.
I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out if we had in fact found something both big and nasty in the Slough. Say, for example, dioxin in quantities sufficient to give nearby residents the ravaged visage of Viktor Yushchenko, the recently-elected president of the Ukraine. On his rocky road to becoming president, it appears that he narrowly survived a poisoning attempt involving dioxin.
I probably would have written, out of a sense of professional decorum as well as personal self-consciousness with complex roots, a dry report that would have been difficult to distinguish from hundreds of other reports the agency generates every year, except for the numbers that it contained. Local environmentalists would have seized on the results as vindication for all their efforts. I believe they deserve credit for the fact that the Slough is not a whole lot worse than it is.
There is a regulator-type in Erin Brockovich. Ostensibly, his job is to review data on drinking water. When Erin encounters him, he is watching T.V. at his desk. She quickly wins him over with her winsome ways, and in exchange he lets her have at the files. Once she has what she wants, she makes no secret of her contempt for him. I've always figured that is how some members of the public view us, but it is still a little tough for me to watch.
After I quit working on the Slough and began to get a life, it occurred to me to wonder if perhaps I'd deluded myself a bit. I'd had this idea that if I did a good job, I might be sparing the residents of Portland poisoning by dioxin. Or at least painful and possibly unnecessary hassles at the hands of a chemical like DES. By the same token, if I did a bad job, I wouldn't. Stressful way to live, that.
It also occurred to me to wonder what Putting the Problems of the Slough in Perspective might look like. I'm still trying to do this. I have a bunch of ideas. They feel half-baked. I want to share them anyway.
I suspect this need to share comes from the same place that my obsession with toxics in the Slough did. There is a scene towards the end of "Erin Brockovich" where Erin tells one of the victims of the chromium poisoning that she is going to get $5 million dollars and that it will be enough, more than enough, to pay for everything, and everything will be okay. Part of me scoffs and another part of me wants more than anything to be Erin Brockovich saying that. Let me fix it for everyone, let me tell them it is going to be okay, let me bask in their gratefulness.
I am not Erin Brockovich. About the only thing I have in common with her is that when something doesn't look quite right, sometimes I can't leave well enough alone.
A question that banged around the back of my mind while I analyzed data on the Slough was, how did we end up looking for these particular chemicals? What else could we have looked for? And what might we have found if we had?
A few years after I stopped working on the Slough, I stumbled across the fact that there are over 70,000 chemicals in use in the U.S. economy. Strange how once you manage to take in something like that, you start seeing it all over the place. I've now run across several variations on that surprising little factoid.
Having some idea of the extraordinary number of chemicals in use, made the question of why we looked for what we looked for, more urgent. It still took me a few more years to get to the point where I figured I could handle the answer. A year ago, I finally got there.
The Slough got tested for all of the chemicals on EPA's Priority Pollutant List, plus a few dozen other ones. I decided to focus on the Priority Pollutant List itself.
Back when I worked on the Slough, I asked my various co-workers at the city and at DEQ about the origins of that list. No one seemed to know. All they could say was that it had been around for a while. After rummaging around on the Internet for awhile, I gleaned a few things. It seems it was promulgated in the mid-70s after an extended, pitched battle between environmental groups (the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, to name a couple) and industry (Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon and Monsanto, to name just a few). As to the origins of the list itself, well, that was pretty murky. The librarian I met over the Internet who helped me get as far as I did, said I'd probably have to do a Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of it.
Near as I could tell, it was the result of some sort of brainstorming exercise conducted by the EPA in the early 70s. Environmental groups seized on it and said to EPA, "unless you come up with something else, this is going to be it". The EPA didn't manage to come up with something else, and the rest is history. Since that time, tens of thousands of chemicals have made their appearance in the U.S. economy. Not a single one of them has been added to the Priority Pollutant List. Six chemicals have been removed.
So let's do the math: if there are 70,000 chemicals, give or take, in use in our economy and the list of Priority Pollutants is 120 chemicals long, that means that as far as water quality is concerned, we are regulating 0.17% of the chemicals out there. To put matters as bluntly as possible, we are regulating an out-of-date and possibly arbitrary 0.17% of the chemicals out there.
Well.
As I mentioned, I figured this out a year ago. Since that time, I have been trying to figure out what the implications of this are. The first thought that came to my mind was, it is a good thing microorganisms can't read. Especially the ones that live at sewage treatment plants. They spend their lives dutifully gobbling waste and converting much of it to simpler compounds such as carbon dioxide and water. If they could read, and if they considered themselves contractually bound to consume only those compounds on the Priority Pollutant List, we'd be in a world of hurt. But they don't operate that way, and we don't for the most part monitor the performance of sewage treatment plants in terms of the Priority Pollutant List either. Instead we rely on a few surrogates with names like Total Suspended Solids and Biochemical Oxygen Demand.
But just because microorganisms can't read doesn't mean we are safe either. I was recently given a report to congress done by the EPA in 1991 that discusses the ability of treatment plants (hereinafter referred to as POTWs, or Publicly-Owned Treatment Works) to remove toxic substances from the waste stream. It suggests that the ability to do so is highly variable. To be specific, it states that:
Toxic pollutants present in the raw sewage entering secondary treatment plants may have several fates. Some toxic organic pollutants may biodegrade to varying extents. Those that are not biodegraded are either partitioned to sewage sludge, volatilized at various stages in the treatment train, or discharged to receiving waters. Metals are not biodegraded; they either enter sewage sludges or remain in the POTW's waste stream and are discharged in the effluent.
The removal of most toxic pollutants from wastewaters by POTWs is largely incidental to the treatment of conventional pollutants and should be considered in terms of partitioning among alternative pathways; pollutants may be shifted from one medium to another (to the air through volatilization or adsorbed to sludge), as well as removed through biodegradation.
This report may be accessed at: https://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/owm0244.pdf.
Near as I can tell, having an absurdly short and out-of-date Priority Pollutant List means we don't really know what toxics to look for. And if we did know what to look for, we would probably find out that our treatment plants aren't completely up to the job of treating them.
I am surprised by the silence around this problem. I work in the permit program at DEQ. We regulate the discharge of chemicals to waterbodies in Oregon. You would think we would have some idea of how many things we are regulating vs. how many things we aren't regulating. And you would think that if we didn't bring it up ourselves, environmental groups would bring it up for us. Not so. I have been at DEQ for 14 years. The only time I have heard these issues brought up is when I have mentioned them.
Silence begets silence. The bigger the silence, the more powerful it is. Silence can become so all-encompassing that one is not even aware of it. In such instances, entire constellations of thoughts, questions and conversations simply do not arise. Or, if they do, the pervasiveness of the silence makes them seem dangerous. Perhaps the last person who tried to break the silence got in trouble, perhaps she became a pariah, perhaps she lost her job.
Between when the Priority Pollutant List was first promulgated and now, critics of DEQ have been busy pointing out that we don't apply our rules often enough or consistently enough. They tell us it is hard to keep up with the constantly changing regulations. They say we don't do enough to regulate stormwater and they also say we try to do too much. They tell us that dischargers should be required to meet water quality standards at the point of discharge and not, say, 100 feet downstream. They tell us the fish consumption rates that our risk analyses are based on do not reflect the consumption patterns of minority groups and we need to re-do them. They tell us our permit backlog is too big, and our permits are too complicated.
Yes, agreed, and in the decades that we have been debating these issues, the number of chemicals we perhaps ought to regulate has mushroomed almost beyond imagining. But no one is talking about that.
How hard would it be to take on this subject? What would happen if we did? I recently got the nerve to try and find out, as a result of watching a movie about racism called "The Color of Fear". I found it to be both searing and cathartic. I saw it at work. Afterwards it occurred to me that if DEQ management was committed to encouraging staff to watch this movie, perhaps there was more room than I thought for other kinds of difficult conversations as well. So I have begun initiating them. The main thing I notice is... I have more energy.
I don't claim to know what fixing the problem of toxics would look like, but I doubt it would look like what we have already been doing, multiplied by some large number. I also don't think it would look like the end of "Erin Brockovich" where a corporation pays up and the victims wind up rich. I find myself instead picturing a big, messy conversation between lots of very different people who finally get that they need to talk. And maybe they don't get around to talking to toxics right away. It hasn't escaped my notice that not everyone perceives the issue to be as important as I do. Perhaps first they talk about subjects such as religion, racism, the implications of corporate power, nationalism, sexism, class-ism.
Erin Brockovich knew about class-ism. It was the biggest challenge she had to overcome in order to do what she did. Erin Brockovich was white trash, the uppity kind, and her co-workers would have little to do with her. But she had a heart bigger than Texas, and she used it to connect with the victims of the chromium poisoning. She met with them in their homes. She memorized their names, their diseases, their phone numbers.
The lawyers she worked with, encased in privilege and education, couldn't or wouldn't do that. Even her boss couldn't do it, and he had a heart almost as big as hers. He did the next best thing: he trusted Erin Brockovich to do it. Together they formed a delicate bridge across the divide. Remembering that makes me want to see the movie again. Perhaps Erin Brockovich contains a parable for our time, after all.
* Sonja Biorn-Hansen is an Environmental Engineer with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
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