ENVIRONMENT
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2020
HERMISTONHERALD.COM • A7
Activists want EPA to step in on groundwater ‘emergency’
Group concerned about nitrate
levels in groundwater in
Umatilla, Morrow counties
By JADE MCDOWELL
NEWS EDITOR
A coalition of activist groups,
known as Stand Up to Factory
Farms, fi led a petition with the
Environmental Protection Agency
on Thursday asking the agency to
take emergency action to address
nitrate levels in the Lower Uma-
tilla Basin Groundwater Manage-
ment Area.
The area, which was estab-
lished in 1990 in response to ele-
vated nitrate levels in the ground-
water, covers 550 square miles of
northwestern Umatilla County and
northern Morrow County.
Among the petition’s requested
actions is banning all new Concen-
trated Animal Feeding Operation
(CAFO) permits in the affected
area, which would block Easter-
day Farms from its plans to open a
dairy on the site of the former Lost
Valley Farm mega-dairy outside of
Boardman.
“Raising and warehousing cows
for milk and meat production — in
extremely unnatural numbers for
both the animals and the environ-
ment — is contaminating drinking
water in Eastern Oregon,” Cris-
tina Stella, senior attorney at the
Animal Legal Defense Fund, said
in a written statement. “The EPA
must act to stop the contamination
and regulate factory farms like the
industrial polluters that they are.”
Lost Valley Farms went bank-
rupt in 2018 after owner Greg
te Velde faced various criminal
charges and the dairy racked up
hundreds of thousands of dollars
in fi nes for wastewater permit vio-
lations. Three weeks ago the Ore-
gon Department of Agriculture
declared that cleanup of the site
was complete.
The petition submitted to the
EPA was signed by Food & Water
Watch, Friends of Family Farmers,
WaterWatch of Oregon, Colum-
bia Riverkeeper, Humane Voters
Oregon, Animal Legal Defense
Fund, Center for Food Safety and
the Center for Biological Diver-
sity. They cite the possible nega-
tive health effects from drinking
water with nitrates above the EPA’s
HH fi le photo
Twin carousels simultaneously milk 80 cows on each side while slowly
revolving in the milking parlor at the Columbia River Dairy outside of
Boardman in 2016. Signers of a petition to the EPA blame dairies in the
Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area for elevated levels
of nitrates in the area’s groundwater.
recommended level and blame
CAFOs for most of the problem.
Local participation
Eileen Laramore, a Hermiston
resident who founded local envi-
ronmental advocacy groups, such
as Friends of Oxbow and Tour of
Knowledge, is the only individual
to sign.
She said after she was contacted
by one of the groups about signing,
she had reservations about adding
her name, since she doesn’t usually
get involved with efforts by “out of
town” groups and she formerly sat
on the LUBGWMA committee.
“The LUBGWMA people are
great, they work really hard,” she
said. “But they don’t have the peo-
ple, don’t have the money to do
anything.”
She said reading the petition’s
language describing the health
effects of nitrates above the EPA’s
recommended limit of 10 mg/L
“hit hard.” The EPA has stated that
young children exposed to high
nitrate levels can experience dan-
gerous “blue baby syndrome” from
too-low oxygen levels in their
blood.
Research on other possible
health effects cited in the petition,
such as cancer and thyroid disor-
ders, has been less conclusive. The
Oregon Department of Environ-
mental Quality states that “some”
research has supported a link, but
“little is known about the long-
NEW 2020
TACOMA TRD
DBL CAB SR5
4X4
$
term effects of drinking water with
elevated nitrate levels.”
Cities must conduct tests on
their drinking water each year for
a variety of substances, includ-
ing nitrates, and the city of Herm-
iston’s water reports for 2017 and
2018 show the highest levels of
nitrates were at 5.97 mg/L and
5.11 respectively, falling below
the EPA’s 10 mg/L limit. However,
people living off of well water in
the area could be drinking water
with higher nitrate concentrations.
Laramore said she doesn’t want
to panic people about drinking
well water or tap water in the area,
but she does care about improving
water quality in Umatilla and Mor-
row counties. So she signed the
petition in the hopes that the EPA
will be able to provide some “mus-
cle” to implement the policy pro-
posals from the LUBGWMA advi-
sory committee.
NOWA response
JR Cook, president of the
Northeast Oregon Water Associ-
ation, said there are “hot spots”
of high nitrate levels through-
out LUBGWMA, but provided
a map using data from the Ore-
gon Department of Environmental
Quality that shows large swaths of
the area painted in colors indicat-
ing nitrate levels below the EPA’s
recommended limits.
There is still work to be done, he
said, but progress has been made.
He described dairies as one
of the most highly regulated and
monitored industries in the LUB-
GWMA, and said that more local-
ized data over years shows there
is no “smoking gun” pointing to a
single cause for the nitrate levels.
He said the groups that wrote the
petition used cherry-picked well
numbers and over-generalizations
to “attack one industry.”
“This petition is not about fi x-
ing the nitrate problems in the area
the NOWA members live and raise
families in,” he wrote in a state-
ment from NOWA. “This petition
is about trying to stop one specifi c
development.”
Cook told the East Oregonian
that many of the nitrates in the
groundwater came not from cur-
rent operations, but from past prac-
tices that have since been halted.
Those include unlined washouts
at the Umatilla Chemical Depot,
well construction that didn’t use
modern best practices, plumes
from past unlined storage loca-
tions along the railroad and old city
wastewater systems that have since
been upgraded.
He said the desert climate
means nitrates aren’t fl ushed out
by rainwater regularly, making it
“very hard to get out of the system
without pumping and bioremedia-
tion or through artifi cial recharge
and artifi cial dilution.”
NOWA has been working with
other area stakeholders on an aqui-
fer recharge project that would
help with that.
Another development on the
horizon is a bill introduced by
Sen. Bill Hansell, R-Athena, for
the 2020 legislative session. The
bill would appropriate money to
the Oregon Department of Agri-
culture for gathering and review-
ing research on LUBGWMA and
creating an “implementation plan
to improve ground water quality
and obtain full or partial removal
of ground water management area
designation.” The project would
create a task force to help coor-
dinate the efforts of stakeholders,
such as irrigators, the tribes and
state departments to reduce nitrates
in the groundwater.
Hansell said the idea came from
a policy option package, or POP,
from the Department of Agricul-
ture in the last session. POPs are
requests that aren’t an actual part
of the budget, but are a suggestion
that an agency hopes the Legisla-
ture will take and fi nd funding for.
“There really wasn’t opposi-
tion to it, just in the budget pro-
cess it got lost in the shuffl e ...
The Department of Ag already did
the research, they determined the
need, I’m just trying to build on the
work already done,” Hansell said.
Petition requests
The petition fi led with the EPA
this week asks the federal agency
to take six actions under the author-
ity of the Safe Drinking Water Act:
• Supply free, clean drink-
ing water to all residents of LUB-
GWMA whose well or public
water source contains nitrate levels
above the safe limit set by the EPA.
• Conduct additional research to
“more accurately trace the sources
and quantities of nitrate-nitro-
gen pollution, and work to iden-
tify which CAFOs and manure
management practices are causing
nitrate contamination.”
• Issue orders requiring farms
and dairies to modify their prac-
tices to “cease overburdening the
area with nitrogen pollution.”
• Issue an order to stop any new
CAFOs from opening in LUB-
GWMA until nitrate levels across
the area consistently fall below 10
milligrams per liter.
• Investigate why Oregon’s best
management practices for CAFO
nutrient management have not pro-
tected groundwater, and what prac-
tices would be necessary to do so.
• Determine what enforce-
ment action would “effectively
reduce nitrogen pollution from
these sources, and initiate those
enforcement actions as soon as
practicable.”
Amy van Saun, Senior Attor-
ney with Center for Food Safety,
said in a statement the groups that
signed the petition will not sit by
as mega-dairies “treat communi-
ties like a hazardous waste dump
and sacrifi ce the health and safety
of neighbors in the pursuit of
profi ts.”
“Mega-dairies
externalize
their signifi cant public health and
environmental costs to the people
of Oregon, and if our state legis-
lators cannot protect Oregonians,
we must enforce our federal laws
to protect community drinking
water,” she said.
329
PER MONTH
WITH STANDARD SAFETY SENSE!
Stk# 20H196. MSRP $43,163. Cap Cost $41,232. GFV $31,077. $2,950 down = $329 mo. Closed end 3yr/10,000 mile
year lease. On approved credit. No security deposit required. Plus $650 lease acquisition fee. Plus tax, title, $75
doc fee & added dealer accessories. See dealer for details. Offer expires 01/31/20.
2 500
$
ALL 2019
HIGHLANDERS
,
IN STOCK!
CUSTOMER CASH
WHILE THEY LAST!!
Stk# 19H1003. New 2019 Toyota Highlander XLE AWD. In stock vehicles only. On approved credit. No security deposit required. Plus $650
lease acquisition fee. Plus tax, title, $75 doc fee & added dealer accessories. See dealer for details. Offer expires 01/31/20.
$
NEW 2020
RAV4 XLE AWD
289
PER MONTH
WITH STANDARD SAFETY SENSE!
Stk# 20H229. MSRP $30,859. $2,500 down = $289 mo. After $500 lease cash from Toyota Financial Services. Closed end 3yr/10,000 mile
year lease. On approved credit. No security deposit required. Plus $650 lease acquisition fee. Plus tax, title, $75 doc fee & added dealer
accessories. See dealer for details. Offer expires 01/31/20.