The Lower White Salmon Coalition, formed in 2016, is releasing its Vision Plan for the approximately five hundred acres of land owned by PacifiCorp along the lower White Salmon River representing the former project lands for the Condit Hydroelectric Project. For whitewater boaters this includes the Lower Gorge from Buck Creek to the Columbia River.
You might want to tighten those nose clips and buy some earplugs: earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled on a long running legal dispute about which streams and wetlands the Clean Water Act actually protects from pollution – and it’s not good. Their decision, which ignored even the most basic science, stripped protections for an estimated 50% of streams and 70% of wetlands that had been protected since the 1970s.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) operates 22 hydropower projects on 500 river miles across California that American Whitewater has spent nearly 30 years of work to protect and restore. This includes whitewater reaches on the North Fork Feather, the Pit, the McCloud, Butte Creek, Fordyce, the South Yuba, the Bear, the Eel, the Mokelumne, the San Joaquin and the North Fork Kings. Now, in an application before the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), PG&E is proposing to transfer all non-nuclear assets including these 22 hydropower projects to a new and separate subsidiary, Pacific Generation LLC (PacGen).
Earlier this week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a new federal rule that eliminates protection for a majority of our nation’s wetlands and estimated totals of well over a million miles of streams. The rule aligns the law with a recent Supreme Court Case that limited the kinds of wetlands and streams that can be covered by the Clean Water Act, known as Waters of the United States, or WOTUS. American Whitewater joined an amicus brief in that pivotal court case, advocating for the science-based protection of these streams and wetlands, but the Supreme Court ruled against us.