Environment Death of a River

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

As it wound through the canyons southwest of Mount Shasta, 60 miles below the Oregon border, the Sacramento River was a babbling stream, rugged enough to attract kayakers, yet so pristine that it supported a thriving population of blue-ribbon trout. Each year the 45-mile stretch of river lured thousands of anglers and tourists, drawn by the bucolic setting and the reputation of its native rainbows and browns.

But now the trout are dead, the fishing is finished, and the tourist industry is suffering. A Southern Pacific tanker car derailed last week on a tricky canyon bridge six miles north of Dunsmuir, Calif., and spilled its contents into the river: 19,500 gal. of metam sodium, a liquid herbicide.

As environmentalists and sports fishermen watched in horror, a 10-mile lime green plume of death drifted slowly down the river, wiping out most of the ecosystem -- aquatic plants, nymphs, caddis flies, mayflies and at least 100,000 trout. Even more alarming to Californians was that the spill occurred 27 miles upstream of Lake Shasta, the state's largest man-made reservoir.

Fortunately, the long-term threat to humans is probably minimal. Lake Shasta holds 550 billion gal. of water and should easily absorb the spill. Health officials say the water is safe to drink. But the incident served as a reminder that no one living in a modern industrial society is safe from an environmental catastrophe like the one that befell the Sacramento. Each year more than 1.5 million carloads of poisons, solvents, pesticides and other hazardous materials are hauled across the U.S. by train. Given the sheer volume of traffic, accidental chemical releases are inevitable, and they occur at the rate of about three a day. In 1988 there were 1,015 toxic rail spills; last year there were 1,254 such incidents, an increase of nearly 25%.

Environmentalists complain that not enough has been done to ensure that the trucks and tanker cars are puncture-proof and that they avoid particularly dangerous routes. The Chemical Manufacturers Association replies that it is already hamstrung by thousands of federal, state and local statutes. But it concedes that those laws were written with an eye to protecting human populations, not the environment. Chemicals that are explosive, flammable or toxic to humans are classified as very hazardous and handled accordingly. A pesticide like metam sodium, which can destroy an entire ecosystem, is still considered nonhazardous.

The death of the river may help change all that. The National Transportation Safety Board has long argued for stronger, safer cars for carrying so-called environmentally sensitive chemicals, and the idea has gained support on Capitol Hill, where the Federal Railroad Safety Act is up for revision. Scientists say it may be 10 years before the Sacramento River has fully recovered. Perhaps by then tanker cars will be safe enough to guarantee that a disaster like last week's can not happen again.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Linda Williams/New York