What we add to our drinking water, we add to our rivers and our salmon. Fluoride is a toxic pollutant that harms salmon and other aquatic life.
The Columbia River and many of its tributaries already suffer from an overload of toxic chemicals that damage the same salmon runs that we all work so hard to restore.
At a time when many families continue to rely on the Columbia's fisheries as an important source of nutrition and employment, we are concerned about a new source of toxic pollution into the Columbia River.
This is what we know:
- Fluoride is harmful to salmon. Scientific studies concluded salmon and rainbow trout are harmed by fluoride concentrations below the concentration that Portland would add to drinking water;
- Fluoridation would put more than 215,000 pounds a year of fluoride into Portland's drinking water, which would create a large fluoride discharge into the Columbia and Willamette Rivers;
- Fluoride bioaccumulates in fish;
- Historically, fluoride chemicals discharged into the Columbia River from aluminum mills seriously impacted salmon migration;
We are concerned that the City of Portland has not evaluated the impact of fluoridation on salmon and the people that depend on them.
Columbia Riverkeeper encourages a "NO" vote on fluoridation.
(Fluoridation level proposed for Portland = 0.7 mg/L; Concentration that adversely affected salmon migration at The Dalles Dam = 0.5 mg/L. Source: Damkaer, DM, et al, Evidence for Fluoride Effects on Salmon Passage at John Day Dam, Columbia River, 1982-1986, North American Journal of Fisheries Management 9:154-162 (1989).
