By Staff - EcoNews, September 1990
Although ongoing air and water quality violations continue to plague the two pulp mills on Humboldt Bay, local environmental enforcers backed off last month.
Acrid fumes prompted dozens of complaints from Eurekans when Simpson bypassed its main stack for a few hours one day last month with gases from a part of the mill, local air quality officials immediately moved to settle with Simpson for penalties without a hearing.
The air district’s response to a whistle-blowing Simpson employee’s revelation of several unreported air quality incidents led to a warning to Simpson—along with the employee’s name.
The company there upon sent a letter to its employees calling for a better environmental track record—and noting that “specific employees are acting as informants.”
After a hung jury let the 10 Redwood Summer “Lorax trial” defendants off on charges of blocking a logging truck’s entry to Louisiana-Pacific’s mill when they produced evidence of ongoing water-quality violations by the mill, District Attorney Terry Farmer announced he would prosecute “if they willfully violate the law and it’s not being addressed in any other forum.”
Farmer later said the Regional Water Quality Control Board’s job is to police water quality, and it has not brought him a case against the mills.
In fact, the mills have sued the water board over its use of sea urchin sperm to test the toxicity of their wastewater. They claim the test is too erratic, and want to use a much-harder-to-kill stickleback fish.
After more than two years of procedural hearings, Clean Water Act challenges by surfers and divers finally made it last month to evidentiary hearings before a federal administrative law judge in San Francisco.