The Bonneville Dam is leaking oil into the Columbia River and, despite knowing about the problem for over a month, it is still not fixed. No one wants to swim through an oil sheen. Or eat a freshly caught salmon covered in a glistening layer of oil. Yet the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the federal agency that operates the dam—is downplaying yet another oil spill on the Columbia. It is time for the Corps to come clean and level with the public. Dinosaur dams like Bonneville, built in the 1930s, must be up to snuff with modern-day protections against oil spills.
It was just over a year ago that the Corps reported a spill of 1,500 gallons of PCB-laden transformer oil at the Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River. That oil contained PCBs 14,000,000% greater than state and federal chronic water quality standards. According to the Corps, the spill current spill is not large. But in the year since the toxic oil spill at Ice Harbor, we continue to see oil spills from dams but the Corps has not announced any plans to address these spills at the Columbia and Snake River dams. We think this is a serious problem. Oil & salmon do not mix.
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