DEQ excludes much of Oregon’s marine waters from protected waterway listings
Scientists urge regulators to address marine health, sound alarm about acidification
Steven Rumrill watches mass deaths take place deep under the surface of the ocean.
Last summer, he watched hundreds of crabs struggle to reach a part of the ocean where there was enough oxygen in the water to live. Rumrill, who leads the shellfish program at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, watched the bleak scenes on videos captured by cameras on the ocean floor.
Similarly grim scenes are playing out more and more on the Oregon coast, though regulators are dragging their feet on classifying the waters as tainted. The lack of classification delays federal funding and new regulations which could help stem the tide of carbon-induced mass death.
When a cloud of water with little oxygen sweeps over them, Rumrill said, the crabs “will try to run to get away from it, or they’ll hunker down and try to outlast it. And they just didn’t win that battle. And so they succumb, in essence suffocating underwater.”
It’s a disheartening experience to observe animals dying like that.
“Every life matters,” Rumrill said, “so it just breaks your heart to see 300, 400 dead crabs or a dying, struggling sea star just trying to (breathe). It makes you feel bad. You witnessed a horrific event, a fatal event for a large number of organisms. You don’t see that very frequently in life.”
Along the West Coast, crabs, mussels and starfish — all are experiencing periodic mass deaths. Abalone, urchins and plankton perish in acidic or low-oxygen waters too, the death toll of a changing ocean. Last summer, mass deaths of barnacles were reported along coasts in northern Washington and British Columbia. Rumrill estimates that millions of starfish also perished, these from a bacteria that overtook them likely because they were made vulnerable by changing ocean conditions.
This, in turn, disrupts the food chain, harming other species that rely on them, like whales and salmon.
The cause of these mass deaths is a combination of hypoxia and acidification, an interconnected set of effects that are a byproduct of climate change. The increased amount of carbon dioxide amassed in the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean, making it more acidic. It also lowers oxygen levels, ultimately making some stretches of water uninhabitable. Acidification and Hypoxia, or OAH, is a global climate change problem and Oregon coastal waters are the epicenter of OAH ocean changes. Or, as Rumrill says, “Oregon is ground zero.”
Despite this, new water protections are lagging behind and local contributors to OAH along Oregon’s coast are largely unaddressed.
According to public documents, for the last eight years the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has excluded much of Oregon’s marine waters from protected waterway listings, citing various technical reasons, such as insufficient data or testing methods. Scientists have warned Oregon’s coastal health is in peril and needs to be protected.
The lack of protection is tied to a gaping hole in regulation. Despite a legal obligation to protect waterways according to the Clean Water Act, coastal waters go unlisted because the existing laws and regulations aren’t written to address the now-dominant threats to ocean health: hypoxia and acidification.
“Part of the problem is that the Clean Water Act wasn’t created to address climate change, and climate pollutants, and the harm from them,” Sarah J. Adams-Schoen, assistant professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, said. “There needs to be an amendment to address this other type of pollution that’s impairing the waters, more even than the kinds of pollution that the Clean Water Act actually is effectively addressing. It’s a significantly larger problem.”
Ailing Oceans
Scientists are sounding the alarm about the state of Oregon oceans, which have transitioned into a new era of risk in the wake of rapidly worsening climate change. Last July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported findings that waters off Washington and Oregon coasts were at risk of becoming “dead zones” — areas of the ocean that don’t have enough oxygen to support life.
A report from Oregon State University released last summer found the most severe low-oxygen conditions ever observed along the West Coast, conditions had “turned parts of the seafloor off Oregon into a carpet of dead Dungeness crabs and rotting sea worms. (…) Virtually all of the fish appear to have fled the area.”
In dead zones, oxygen levels are so low that sea life dies, or if they are able to swim, they leave, creating what is essentially a biological desert in a place that would normally be teeming with life.
“The chemistry of the ocean is changing, and it’s having huge impacts on ocean life,” said Emily Jeffers, attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Corals, a life form composed of calcium carbonate, are also disrupted by acidity, which prevents them from building skeletons, making them weaker.
“Part of the problem is that the Clean Water Act wasn’t created to address climate change, and climate pollutants, and the harm from them.”
— Sarah J. Adams-Schoen, assistant professor at the University of Oregon School of Law
“In 30 years, there’s very good evidence that corals are not going to be able to live anymore in the conditions that our oceans are heading in,” Jeffers said.
Ocean acidification harms mollusks too, eroding their shells and sometimes preventing them from forming hard shells at all. Oysters, for example, are having an increasingly hard time forming their shells.
Last summer when there were reports of mass die-offs of mussels in Puget Sound and along the shores of British Columbia, HamaHama Oyster Company, an Olympic peninsula business stretching back five generations, documented a mass death of oysters, posting photos and grim jokes on Instagram.
“Welp, for all of you wondering what impact the heat wave would have on the beaches… Here are some images taken yesterday of our clam beds in Hood Canal,” the oyster company posted. “We haven’t yet done any kind of inventory, but these dead shells are impressive in number. We’re making the best of it with all the clam puns we can think of… clamitous being the best so far.”
Seeing the writing on the wall, Jeffers said, oyster farmers have emerged as advocates for ocean health.
All told, last year’s historic heat dome, which baked the Pacific Northwest and drove temperatures to soar as high as 120 degrees, killed roughly 1 billion sea creatures off the shores of Vancouver, Washington and parts of Oregon. This only exacerbates conditions for sea life battling OAH.
“There’s a huge concern that ocean acidification is going to just lead to widespread effects throughout the food chain and throughout the world,” Jeffers said.
Regulation gaps
Earth’s oceans are in peril. Rising carbon dioxide levels are contributing to an acidifying ocean and hypoxia. Each is at a record high. Oregon is an epicenter for both, and yet meaningful new ocean protections are elusive. It’s a problem that extends beyond Oregon.
The Clean Water Act is the primary law protecting U.S. water and mandating that public agencies enforce these protections. It was pivotal when it was passed in 1972, but since then new threats to ocean health have emerged that are outside its scope.
In part, it’s a jurisdiction problem: oceans are vast. Coastal waters are under state jurisdiction for three miles, then they are under the purview of NOAA. Then there are international waters and those under the jurisdiction of other nations.
But, scientists and advocates agree that local regulations still play a role in mitigating OAH, and Oregon’s DEQ has continually left ocean waters unaddressed. In its most recent report on the state’s waterways, the entire Oregon coast was listed as having “insufficient data,” leaving it off the list of impaired waterways.
Regulators explain conditions along the coast vary, and location-specific data is needed before regulations are enacted.
“What we don’t have is good spatial coverage of our information,” said Charlotte Regula Whitefield, ocean acidification policy assistant for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. While there may be information about Astoria, Whitefield said, that information may not be available for Coos Bay, for example. “That’s a huge data gap. And without understanding the data and having that data, we can’t regulate, because it doesn’t make informed decisions.”
This is a common refrain, Jeffers says, and one posited by the EPA at a national level, too.
“They’re concerned about uniformity,” Jeffers said. “I have heard them say enough times that ocean conditions are very different in different parts of the country. So what is good for the goose is maybe not good for the gander. I don’t think that that’s a very good rationale for not acting.”
The Center for Biological Diversity has pushed for accountability, alleging agencies aren’t doing enough to protect imperiled ocean waters.
In 2013, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the EPA for failing to list coastal waters in Oregon and Washington as impaired, a lawsuit they ultimately lost in court. That same year, they also petitioned the EPA to expand water quality criteria to measure ocean acidification and develop related guidelines.
Last March, the Center for Biological Diversity took up the issue again, sending a notice of intent to sue the EPA for violating the Clean Water Act by failing to identify Oregon waters impaired by ocean acidification, citing numerous studies documenting corrosive water conditions in Oregon’s coastal waters, and corresponding damage to local species and ecosystems.
“Scientists love to equivocate and say, ‘well, we need more science,’” Jeffers said. “And of course, we need more science. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t act with the science that we already have that is telling us that we have a limited number of years before this gets out of control.”
While there is debate about the need to acquire data first, it’s clear that waiting for it has resulted in bureaucratic paralysis, with agencies like the DEQ being rendered ineffective by technical hurdles and ultimately failing to make timely changes to protect ocean waters.
OAH came on the radar during the “Great Oyster Crash” of 2007, when oyster hatchery production collapsed along the Oregon coast as a result of ocean acidification.
“Scientists love to equivocate and say, ‘well, we need more science,’” Jeffers said. “And of course, we need more science. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t act with the science that we already have that is telling us that we have a limited number of years before this gets out of control.”
Fourteen years later, the agency still hasn’t developed a system.
“Based on the spirit of the Clean Water Act, these waters should be listed as impaired,” Adams-Schoen said. “Without a doubt, you know, are there technical hurdles to lifting them as impaired? Yes. But there are technical hurdles to listing all waters as impaired.”
In a recent shift, OAH has gained attention as a problem and regulators have started prioritizing it.
Last year, the Oregon Legislature passed House Bill 3114, allocating $1.9 million in funds for addressing OAH. Pushed forward by state scientists, the bill declared the state of Oregon’s oceans an “emergency” and laid out a research plan that will help support regulatory efforts.
“I know it’s at a snail’s pace,” Whitefield said, “I really feel that we as a state are at a really good point for making legitimate tangible change. We might not have moved fast enough, but we really are there now.”
This year the DEQ plans to start developing criteria for testing and classifying ocean waters as impaired, and will convene with a group of scientists and regulators in February and begin the process. But it’s one that can drag out for years: Jennifer Wigal, who took the helm as the water quality administrator at the DEQ in January this year, said the goal is to have the new guidelines operating by the 2024 report.
But changes like this can take a long time, and ocean health has deteriorated at an alarming rate.
In the same way that there are now fire seasons, there is now a hypoxia season. Hypoxia season spans May to August, and each one is more severe than the last. Mass deaths of sea life used to occur every three years or so, Rumrill says. Now, they happen at least once a year.
“We just need to recognize that these changing atmospheric conditions extend into the seawater, and they’re causing stress for large numbers and diversity of marine organisms,” Rumrill said.
For many environmental problems in the climate change era, there is a point of no return after which the environment will be something different. This is true of coastal waters, too, and the onus is on regulators to protect as best they can.
“I mean, maybe we have already passed that tipping point,” Jeffers said. “But I don’t think that we can stop trying.”