Fly Fishing Forum banner

Weird happenings at the WA Dept of Ecology

2K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  BobK 
#1 ·
folks,

We have a bit of lunacy here in Washington State. The miller Brewing Company is closing it brewery at Tumwater on Washington's Deshutes River because it needed to build its own wter treatment facility. The local municipality (Olympia) will no longer allow it to send the water to its water treatment facility.

The lunacy is that if the company builds a water treatment pland (which it is very willing to do) the state Depatrment of Ecology will not give them a permit to discharge the treated water into the river, or Puget Sound (which is only about 2 miles away) because "just because water is safe for humans to drink, it doesn't mean that it is OK for fish.

Hold the horses! Fish can live in water that has nasty little organisms like giardia that humans cannot tolerate; but yet it is perfectly OK for the fish and giardia does not harm the fish either, unlike we humans. But denying a water discharge permit because the water is too clean is ludicrous. And that is exactly what the Washington Department of Ecology did to the Miller Brewing Company.

OH, I almost forgot. If the state would have built the hatchery across the street from the brewery that it was going to build and then decided to axe, the Department of Ecology would have given the brewery a water dischage permit as long as the water was discharged into the hatchery!

Let's see: the water is OK for humans to drink; but not OK for fish, unless of course the fish happen to be in a hatchery because neither the river nor Puget Sound need more pure water. Hmmmmmm.....
 
See less See more
#2 ·
Typical bureaucracy

I could go on and give many more examples from all over the country. Industry in general has been given a bad rap. Yes, there are exceptions, but overall, this is what is driving industry out of the U.S.

Unfortunately, you applied logical thought to this problem. You must think in terms of bureaucrats, "drunk with power", and meeting the whim of some official who got a contribution from some eco-terrorist organization.

BobK
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top