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Analysis: Endangered rivers moving targets

BOULDER, Colo., April 14 (UPI) -- Each year, a conservation group called American Rivers issues a report that details the most threatened of the nation's rivers.

The latest report, "America's Most Endangered Rivers in 2004," places the Colorado at the top of the list. It calls the threat to the Colorado a "looming pollution crisis," with the river under heavy assault by nitrates from overloaded septic systems.

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"Monitoring wells in the Lake Havasu (Ariz.) area have recorded nitrate levels four times higher than the limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency to protect public health," the report said.

The river also is contaminated with perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel that has been measured in Lake Mead at concentrations of 24 parts per billion. It also contains pollution from an inactive uranium tailings site in Utah.

Dawn Taylor Owen, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Natural Resource's Water Conservation Board told United Press International that no one at the agency had seen the report yet, so they would have to reserve comment.

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Gail James, executive director of the Colorado River Energy Distributors Association in Tempe, Ariz., was less inhibited.

"I'm surprised that they are listing the Colorado at the top," she told UPI. "Expenditures in the upper basin are about $10 million for recovering four species of fish. It was authorized in 2000 and we participate along with Utah, Wyoming and Colorado."

James said there is an additional $10 million adaptive management program in the Colorado's lower basin, the result of the Grand Canyon Protection Act, and funded entirely by power revenues.

Nonetheless, the report argues, the Colorado "is at a crossroads, and the next 12 months will determine whether these problems will continue to fester or a vigorous cleanup effort will begin. The situation as a whole warrants a massive, coordinated federal effort, and there are immediate steps that should be taken to address these pollution sources."

Along with the Colorado, the report lists nine other rivers that face various environmental threats:

-- the Big Sunflower, in Mississippi;

-- the Snake, in Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon and Washington;

-- the Tennessee, in Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee;

-- the combined Allegheny and Monongahela system in Pennsylvania and West Virginia;

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-- the Spokane in Washington and Idaho;

-- the Housatonic in Massachusetts and Connecticut;

-- the Peace in Florida;

-- Big Darby Creek in Ohio, and

-- the Mississippi, the nation's largest, which stretches from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

The report's authors have identified a host of environmental issues facing the rivers on the list.

"Scientific data make it clear that this is not the time to yank the teeth out of the nation's clean water laws," the report said, and charged the Bush administration with doing just that. "While America's waters became progressively cleaner from 1973 to 1998, that trend has now reversed itself."

The report warns that the White House and Congress have cut the federal budget for enforcing environmental laws. "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is issuing less than half as many 'violation notice' to polluters" under Bush, and those fines are smaller, it said.

The problem with all this is there is not a great deal of consistency, year to year, in ranking the rivers the group deems endangered.

In the new list, for instance, only two rivers are included that were considered "most endangered" just a year ago, in 2003 -- the Big Sunflower and the Snake. But last year, the report ranked the Klamath -- an important spawning habitat for the recovery of wild salmon -- as the second most endangered.

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Since 2003, some of the problems affecting the Klamath have indeed been addressed, by the "2004 Klamath Irrigation Project Operations Plan" developed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. For example, the plan allows higher stream flows below an important dam to help protect some salmon runs.

On the other hand, BuRec is allocating one-third less water to wildlife refuges on the river than 41-year-average low-flow levels, something that is bound to harm those areas.

Nevertheless, the report has de-listed the Klamath, even though the BuRec plan has not yet been put into effect and other conservationists continue to challenge many of its provisions.

Another listed river, the Snake, moved from number eight in 2003 to number three in 2004, even though the threats to that river have been largely unchanged. The Snake also is an important wild salmon recovery habitat, and four dams on the upper river are favorite targets for removal by conservationists.

"Despite the fact that scientists believe that removing the four lower Snake River dams would be the surest and best way to recover wild salmon," the report said, "the federal government's 2000 Federal Salmon Plan did not call for dam removal."

The value of dam removal is questionable. Recent scientific studies have demonstrated the strategy's environmental effects can be unpredictable. According to a story in this week's Science News, for example, increased water flows wash out accumulated nutrients and reduce the ability of the sediment to retain nutrients. Some species of fish benefit while others decline, and pollutants that may be stored in sediments behind dams can contaminate rivers far downstream after a dam is removed.

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A 1973 dam removal on the Hudson washed tons of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, downstream, the Science News article said, and the river eventually had to be closed to fishing.

Among other environmental threats to the listed rivers, the report cites the Big Sunflower, number two, as facing wetlands destruction and river dredging.

The Tennessee faces pollution from inadequate sewer systems; while the Allegheny and Monongahela receive abandoned coal mine drainage. The Spokane endures water withdrawals for irrigation and toxic pollutants. The Housatonic contains pollution from PCBs, some of the most toxic substances known.

The Peace contains drainage from phosphate mining operations, while Big Darby Creek exhibits the ill effects of urban sprawl.

The Mississippi is endangered from "navigation infrastructure, levees and pollution."

American Rivers cites the Bush administration's water quality policies as worsening the situation in all cases.

"Although the days of pleading ignorance about the consequences of water pollution have passed, the White House and Congress are deliberately carving giant loopholes into the clean water laws and regulations written by earlier leaders who sought to spare other rivers from the Colorado's fate," Rebecca Wodder, the organization's president, writes in the report's introduction. "Senator James Jeffords (I-Vt.) describes the current administration's record as a series of 'pervasive actions to undermine our clean water laws.'"

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Dan Whipple covers the environment for UPI Science News. E-mail [email protected]

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