Unjaded
I'm from the government and I'm here to help. No, really.
This post is one of a series on travel through the lens of water.
Last week, a friend at a state agency emailed me in response to a link I’d sent:
I may be one of the last unjaded people that still thinks governments can be a force for good in helping buffer citizens from these burdens. In general, the people I work with at Ecology and Health believe our mission is to serve and are constrained only by our authorities and resources. But the tides seem to be turning away from government as a problem solver. I hear people say that government is too slow, too limited, doesn’t truly care, and is too rigged towards corporations to be relied on. I just don’t think the solution is to abandon government. Every year in our state legislature, I see organized coalitions of friends, neighbors, doctors, professional organizations, and businesses, persuade our state government to adopt better laws and fund programs that help people.
My friend’s sentiment is one I share, and her words stay with we me as we travel across Washington State on our way to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where my wife is competing in an Ironman 70.3 triathlon. There are water and environmental stories all along the way. My usual form is to tell you all about be the problems, and I will, but this time I’m going to highlight some of the good work that government—state, and yes, sometimes still federal—is doing to alleviate them.
We leave Whidbey Island on a ferry, a Washington State Ferry, run by the Washington State Department of Transportation. Although plagued in recent years by an aging fleet and a crew shortage exacerbated by COVID, the system is recovering, is building new hybrid ferries, and is converting others.
We choose to take the scenic route, crossing the Cascade mountains on US Highway 2 through Stevens Pass, rejoining Interstate 90 further east. From Everett to the pass, we follow the Snohomish River, constrained between levees across its former floodplain, where the state Departments of Fish and Wildlife and Natural Resources are using EPA National Estuary Program funding to help the Tulalip tribes restore floodplain function. Further along, the Snohomish’s tributary the Skykomish is a federally designated wild and scenic river. Just to the north of the river lies the Wild Sky Wilderness, one of my favorite hiking areas, but alas also the site of the Bolt Creek Fire in 2022. Washington State Department of Natural Resources is working on a Post-Fire Recovery Program with federal funding.
Less that 100 miles from home, we cross Stevens Pass, leaving behind Puget Sound and entering the Columbia River basin, a drainage area the size of France that covers over half of Washington and Oregon, most of Idaho, parts of British Columbia and Montana, and reaches into Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.
We follow the Wenatchee River down through Bavarian-themed Leavenworth to Wenatchee, self-proclaimed apple capital of the world, where we meet the mainstem of the Columbia River. Fruit stands offer the first of this year’s cherries, grown a little further north in Okanogan County. The fruit pickers are migrant workers, some from Mexico, others from the Carribean. They return every year, following the ripening fruit from cherries to apricots, plums, peaches, apples, and grapes through the hot summer and down the middle of the state.
During COVID, many staff at the state Department of Health were drafted into the response. A friend at the Office of Drinking Water was assigned to contact tracing for migrant farmworkers many of whom got sick, and in some cases died. He told me of the bunkhouses, where workers would sleep 20 or more to a room; of wages so poor that pickers couldn’t afford to take time off sick and would literally fall out of the trees. “It’s like The Jungle,” he said, referring to Upton Sinclair’s early 20th century exposé of working conditions in the meatpacking industry, “a hundred years, and nothing has changed.”
But some things did change. Washington State Department of Labor and Industries hit one of the fruit farms with a $2 million fine over the death of two workers from COVID. In a settlement, the company agreed to invest that $2 million in worker housing and health.
Alas now, because of the administration’s crackdown on immigrants, some of those seasonal migrant workers are afraid to return, leaving cherry growers with a shortage of pickers.
From Wenatchee we follow state route 28 along the Columbia River, flowing at this point in a wide gorge with apple orchards and vineyards. We pass Rock Island Dam, near Malaga, where Helion is planning to build the world’s first fusion power plant to supply power for Microsoft’s data centers and AI computers. Malaga is just the latest of the temporary boom towns of Central Washington, where hordes of electricians descend to build data centers, leaving only a handful of fulltime jobs behind.
Route 28 takes us away from the river and up onto the Columbia Plateau at Quincy, home to Microsoft’s first data center complex, where, if you’re a Microsoft user, your OneDrive data lives. And yes, that includes these words as I’m typing them. Tucked away behind the front row of fruit warehouses, this half square mile complex has its own electricity substation and diesel backup generators that must be tested periodically, sending a cloud of exhaust across the plains. The State Department of Ecology now requires air quality monitoring, and Microsoft plans to switch these generators to hydrogen fuel cells.
Data centers use large amounts of water for cooling. The Microsoft data center was using potable water from the City of Quincy and returning used water to the city’s waste treatment plant. After the state Department of Ecology found the mineral content of the wastewater was too high, Microsoft built the city a wastewater reuse plant, topping up their needs with river water, and no longer using any potable water.
Heading south from Quincy, fence line labels identify the crops in the fields we pass. Beans, apples, some wheat, but more and more alfalfa. We see more of the same after we turn east onto I90. A satellite view shows the characteristic circles of center pivot irrigation, marching east into former dryland (unirrigated) wheat country.
An ever-increasing demand for cheese and a thriving export market is driving the displacement of dryland wheat by irrigated and heavily fertilized alfalfa to feed livestock. Much of the water comes from wells, and it’s starting to affect water supply for the cities and towns. The City of Moses Lake and the Town of Lind, for example, must now drill down 1000 feet to find water, where it contains high levels of fluoride and other salts, while the City of Warden’s shallower well is contaminated with nitrate from fertilizer and ethylene dibromide from a former pesticide factory, where the state Department of Ecology is requiring the owner to clean up the site.
These cities and other entities in the area are part of the Columbia Basin Sustainable Water Coalition, a group facilitated by the state Department of Commerce to protect and maintain water supplies in four Columbia Basin counties in the face of declining groundwater levels.
Further east, we finally leave center pivot irrigation behind and enter the dryland wheat area of the Palouse, made famous, for those of us old enough to remember, by this Windows 95 wallpaper.
Approaching Spokane, we pass the exit for Hayford Road which runs between Fairchild Airforce Base and Spokane International Airport, both major sources of groundwater, and therefore drinking water, contamination with PFAS from firefighting foam. As I wrote about just over a year ago, Spokane Airport initially denied responsibility and residents on the Wrong Side of the Road were getting no help.
Eventually, pressure from a local citizen’s group, the West Plains Water Coalition, and proactive Ecology and EPA staff resulted in a landmark joint effort to test private wells and, through the Department of Health, to offer free point-of-use filters to affected residences. This project paved the way for a broader PFAS Statewide Funding Strategy that I wrote about here in November.
After the triathlon, which deserves, and will get, its own post, we head back home, this time avoiding even more of the interstate by picking up Route 2 in Spokane.
The Palouse country here is even prettier than along I90.
At the last minute, we decide to take a detour to see the Grand Coulee Dam. Brenda’s family vacationed on Lake Roosevelt above the dam when she was a child, but she hasn’t been back in 50 years.
Grand Coulee Dam is the centerpiece of the Columbia Basin Project, irrigating over 1000 square miles of Central Washington, as well as still being the nation’s largest generator of hydroelectricity, including in its early days for Hanford Reactor B, the WWII plutonium factory.
The Grand Coulee was not the first dam built on the Columbia. That honor goes to the Bonneville Dam, further down between Washington and Oregon. While that dam blocks white sturgeon from moving up the river, a fish ladder helps salmon get through. The Grand Coulee Dam, however, lacks a fish ladder, and prevents migration of salmon to the Colville tribal reservation and beyond up into British Columbia. It was the beginning of the transformation of a wild salmon river into the machine it is today, as this excellent article and storymap from Seattle Times’ Lynda Mapes and Climate Lab illustrates. How we pushed the Columbia, the Northwest’s great river, to its limits | The Seattle Times.
It’s been less than two years since the Biden Administration, following a proposal from six Columbia Basin tribes and the States of Washington and Oregon, created the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, a $1 billion project to improve fish passage and build enough renewable energy on tribal land to eventually take down the four dams on the Lower Snake River, a significant tributary of the Columbia.
In the words of a friend who is a mediator on this project “Sad day for salmon and clean energy. The work will shift from solving problems to litigation and other legal processes. Less fun and the results will not be as comprehensive.”
It’s been almost forty years since Ronald Reagan, in a press conference on August 12, 1986, uttered the words “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”
Despite this administration’s best efforts to make it so, it remains, for the most part, stubbornly untrue. Federal, State, and local government staff continue to do all they can within the political and budgetary constraints under which they have to operate to solve problems for people.
To all my government readers, thank you. And please hang in there. We need you.
Thanks, as always, for reading or listening. The next post will cover the triathlon and some water issues that found me while we were in Coeur d’Alene. To make sure you don’t miss a post, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
John Lovie, I feel certain you don’t squander energy or potable water. No data centers required. Your mind, and files/records, and lots of noggin power are remarkable. My hat’s off to Washington state for actions to ameliorate past conditions for the good of her citizens. Cuts to much needed funding sources by the current administration constitute flagrant disregard of and lack of appreciation for our planet.
Many blessings to you and your triathlete wife!