October 2, 2001

Environmental Watch: Alliant to study plant's energy needs

SEATTLE -- Alliant Energy Integrated Services has been chosen to provide energy management and planning services for the King County Department of Natural Resource's West Point Treatment Plant near Discovery Park.

Alliant will evaluate the operation of the plant and make recommendations for capital improvements and an energy management plan.

Alliant will work with Brown & Caldwell and Moore Engineering in developing their recommendations.

The West Point Treatment Plant can process up to 440 million gallons of wastewater a day. The plant also has an on-site co-generation facility that burns digester gas, providing power to the plant. Excess power is sold to Seattle City Light.

KJM opens new office for cleanup work

BELLEVUE -- KJM & Associates has opened a new office in Concord, Calif. to support its work on the cleanup of the Hunter's Point Shipyard site in San Francisco.

KJM has a contract to provide cost and scheduling management services to the IT Group's environmental remediation of the shipyard, now a Superfund site.

KJM's new office, in Concord, Calif., will be headed by Jack Hatmaker. Del Andres will serve as project controls manager on the IT Group contract.

KJM provides program and construction management services from nine offices in six western states.

Sammamish River planting set

SEATTLE -- Volunteers will plant over 4,000 native plants as part of Sammamish ReLeaf 2001, beginning this weekend in Woodinville.

The planting, and the removal of invasive species, will take place over five weekends. The plantings are designed to boost the heath of the river and nearby wildlife.

"The hands and hearts of these volunteers are helping salmon, the Sammamish River and King County's quality of life," said County Executive Ron Sims.

This Saturday, October 6, volunteers will gather at 145th Avenue Northeast at State Route 202 in Woodinville beginning at 10 a.m. Future planting days will be held in Redmond and Bothell.

See the King County Department of Natural Resources Web site for more information at http://dnr.metrokc.gov/wlr or call (206) 296-8359.

Endangered species grants awarded

WASHINGTON --- The U.S. Department of the Interior has awarded more than $16 million in grants to 25 states to promote the conservation of threatened and endangered species.

In the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific Region, the States of Washington, California, Oregon and Hawaii will receive a total of $7.2 million in grants.

The grants help local partnerships acquire and protect crucial habitat and support the development of Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs) that allow private landowners to use and develop their land while conserving listed species.

The state of Washington will receive $3.7 million for projects.

These include $358,000 for a Douglas County HCP that will improve land management across a

landscape of one million acres to benefit 63 species, among them Ute ladies-tresses, bull trout, steelhead, spring chinook, and bald eagle.

A grant for $100,000 for a chinook recovery Habitat Conservation Plan on the Skykomish River in Snohomish County. The HCP would encompass approximately 12,000 acres and is being designed to serve as a model/pilot program for acquiring or otherwise securing rights to lands that can benefit species.

The Scatter Creek watershed in Thurston County will receive $300,000 to develop an HCP encompassing the entire Scatter Creek Watershed of 27,423 acres and including more than 30 species that are listed under either the federal or state Endangered Species acts or considered to be of special concern, including the Northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, bull trout and bald eagle.

For more information go to the Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific Region Web site at http://www.r1.fws.gov/.

Lower Kootenai fish under ESA review

SPOKANE -- The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will conduct a formal review of the burbot fish found in the lower Kootenai River to determine whether that population of the fish should be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Burbot are the only freshwater member of the cod family. They are a cold water, bottom-dwelling fish that are extremely elongated in shape.

At one time, the lower Kootenai River supported a thriving winter burbot fishery, but declines began around 1960. The population declined further after the installation of Libby Dam in Montana in 1972.

Despite numerous fishing regulations, including the closure of all burbot fishing on the river in the early 1990's, the fish's numbers have continued to decline almost to nothing.

Attacks raise concerns about nuclear dump

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 have prompted the Department of Energy to take another look at the threat of a plane crash at a proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada.

"We're considering what needs to be done," said Joe Ziegler, a nuclear engineer with the department and senior technical adviser to the Yucca Mountain Project.

Ziegler told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that project scientists have not analyzed a scenario involving an aircraft crashing into an aboveground building where spent highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods would be repackaged for placement deep inside the mountain.

He said, however, that once the nation's 77,000 tons of radioactive waste is entombed 1,000 feet beneath the mountain's surface, an airplane crash would have little or no effect.

Meanwhile, the Nevada Test Site on Tuesday began accepting low-level nuclear waste for the first time since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

A preliminary site evaluation released in July called the chances of an airplane crash at the site so remote that analyzing the consequences wasn't necessary.

Steve Frishman, a geologist and consultant to the state's Nuclear Projects Agency, said the federal government cannot now dismiss a threat to Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as remote.

"In light of current events, it points to a cavalier approach DOE has taken to screening out risks regardless of what the consequences are," Frishman said.

Hatchery clubbing to resume this fall

PORTLAND (AP) -- Oregon hatchery workers will use clubs and electricity to kill thousands of surplus salmon this fall to avert a deluge of hatchery fish that would weaken the dwindling gene pool of wild coho.

Earlier this year, state officials said they'd use overdoses of carbon dioxide to kill off extra hatchery fish, but changed their minds after discovering the gas didn't kill fish quickly.

"Clubbing is by far the most effective and most humane method of killing fish," said Steve Williams of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's fish division.

Home videos of state hatchery workers clubbing salmon in 1999 at the Fall Creek Hatchery near Alsea spawned lawsuits and criticism that still reverberated in the state capitol this spring.

Gov. John Kitzhaber vetoed a bill which would have placed a moratorium on destroying hatchery salmon, and a state judge upheld the department's right to club fish.

Hoping to avoid a public relations nightmare this fall, the fish and wildlife department will donate more than 100,000 hatchery coho to food banks, sell some lesser-quality salmon for pet food and spread other carcasses in spawning streams to decay naturally and fertilize the organic food chain.

Bonneville, the state's largest hatchery, is using electrocution to kill hatchery fish.

Only a small percentage of hatchery salmon and steelhead, from a few hundred at smaller hatcheries to a few thousand of each species at Bonneville, are needed to generate new generations of fingerlings.