It isn't as though the 'government of the people' are preventing these facilities from using the water. The prevention of such 'fish die off' is easy to do. There is no reason for any industry to believe they have the right to adversely effect another. These fish and shellfish are frequently the life blood of family fishing operations. It is about time the US EPA stood up and made sure these fishing enterprises were protected.
Thousands of industrial facilities (click here) use large volumes of cooling water from lakes, rivers, estuaries or oceans to cool their plants. Cooling water intake structures cause adverse environmental impact by pulling large numbers of fish and shellfish or their eggs into a power plant's or factory's cooling system. There, the organisms may be killed or injured by heat, physical stress, or by chemicals used to clean the cooling system. Larger organisms may be killed or injured when they are trapped against screens at the front of an intake structure.
Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act requires EPA to issue regulations on the design and operation of intake structures, in order to minimize adverse environmental impacts. EPA promulgated regulations in 2001, 2003, 2006 and 2014. The requirements are included in the NPDES permit regulations, 40 CFR Parts 122 and 125 (Subparts I, J, and N)....
When one industry is oblivious to the rights and needs of another that is just pure laziness. Sometimes it takes so little in prevention to be a good neighbor. Then they wonder why they have bad reputations and others don't want them around.
Frank Reynolds, a commercial fisherman, sees thousands of dead fish near the intake of FirstEnergy Corp.'s Bay Shore power plant in Oregon. The fish are sucked into intake screens and succumb to injury, fatigue, and starvation. Smaller ones are pulled inside.
Published: Thursday, July 29, 2004
By Tom Henry
Blade Staff Writer
When one industry is oblivious to the rights and needs of another that is just pure laziness. Sometimes it takes so little in prevention to be a good neighbor. Then they wonder why they have bad reputations and others don't want them around.
Frank Reynolds, a commercial fisherman, sees thousands of dead fish near the intake of FirstEnergy Corp.'s Bay Shore power plant in Oregon. The fish are sucked into intake screens and succumb to injury, fatigue, and starvation. Smaller ones are pulled inside.Published: Thursday, July 29, 2004
By Tom Henry
Blade Staff Writer
To the naked eye, (click here) it looks like an ecological disaster: Thousands of dead fish near the shoreline of Lake Erie's Maumee Bay east of Toledo.
Much to the chagrin of commercial fisherman Frank Reynolds, though, it's a sight that occurs far too often - almost daily, he says, near the intake of FirstEnergy Corp.'s coal-fired Bay Shore power plant in Oregon.
Sadly, Bay Shore is not alone.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 550 large power plants across the country - those with cooling-water capacities of 50 million gallons a day or more - are needlessly killing off fish.
Fish die because they get caught up in the powerful intake currents. Larger fish bang against grated screens hard and succumb to injury, fatigue, or starvation. Smaller fish and minnows elude the screens and pass through the plant. A few survive the trauma, but most die, officials said.
The problem - long presumed to be one of the unfortunate trade-offs of generating electricity - may be older than the 32-year history of the nation's Clean Water Act itself.
But the U.S. EPA, in responding to a court order brought on by those hoping to minimize losses, announced Feb. 16, that it will use the Clean Water Act as its legal muscle for protecting fish....
It actually takes litigation to do the right thing? Really?
