The new head of the EPA Scott Pruitt gets a healthy dose of his own medicine.
Columbia Riverkeeper, Snake River Waterkeeper, Idaho Rivers United, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, and the Institute for Fisheries Resources filed suit under the Clean Water Act to compel the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create a temperature pollution budget, also known as a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), for the Columbia and Snake rivers in Oregon and Washington.
Dams on the Columbia and Snake create large, slow-moving reservoirs that cause high water temperatures. Warm summer water temperatures pose increasingly severe threats to salmon and steelhead. In 2015, warm water killed roughly 250,000 adult sockeye salmon migrating up the rivers. In response to the 2015 fish kills, EPA stated that “the need to lower water temperatures becomes more critical as the Pacific Northwest Region continues to address…climate change.”
This lawsuit would compel EPA to write a TMDL—a plan to keep the rivers cool enough for salmon and steelhead in the face of global warming.
LINK (via: Columbia River Keepers)
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