Story and Photo by Elliot Owen
Little to Celebrate Cantara Loop Reborn with Silver Lining
T
he pulse of life on the upper Sacramento River just north of Dunsmuir in Siskiyou County feels palpable. After the healthiest snowpack in half a decade, the river rolls through its course at a robust speed on its way to meet the McCloud and Pit rivers before they all flow into Lake Shasta, the state’s largest drinking and irrigation water reservoir. Where tall canyon walls don’t curtail the steady flow, silty banks are lined with alders, cottonwoods, willows and an occasional oak or manzanita. Songbirds in these Trinity Mountains raise a chorus as anglers cast their lines into water worthy of poetry. Butterflies and dragonflies flit from leaf to flower to rock. An osprey patrols the winding canal by air. It would be difficult to know that almost 25 years ago this picturesque landscape nearly ceased to exist—but it did. Back on July 14, 1991 at 9:40 p.m., a 97-car Southern Pacific Railroad freight train chugged along tracks suspended 150 feet above the upper Sacramento River and approached a horseshoe curve known as the Cantara Loop. Weighty locomotives powered the train’s front end while heavy loaded boxcars brought up the rear. The mid-section’s cars rolled along mostly empty. All seemed well until, as the train rounded the curve and straightened, a connector snapped like a thread pulled too tight at both ends and launched a handful of loaded tankers off the tracks, plunging them into the river below. One of those cars carried 19,000 gallons of the poisonous herbicide, metam sodium. By the next morning, the entire load of deadly liquid had leaked into the river causing the worst inland ecological disaster in California history. “Metam sodium is supposed to kill everything,” said Mark Stopher, senior policy advisor for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “And that’s exactly what it did.”
The toxic chemical—used on soil infested with nematodes, fungi, weeds and insects— flowed downstream and sterilized 42 miles of the pristine river. Virtually everything it touched met its demise. Stopher came to CDFW nine months after the spill to lead the analysis of resources harmed by the Cantara Loop spill. He remembers cataloging the ecological damage. “This toxic plume floated downstream in the middle of the night killing mollusks, insects, amphibians, crustaceans, crayfish, giant salamanders and more than a million fish,” Stopher said. “It even volatilized out of the water so you had a toxic gas cloud floating over the river. In many places, riparian vegetation, willows, alders and cottonwoods died.” First responders to the scene reported countless fish squirming at the shorelines preferring to suffocate outside the water than be poisoned in it. Those already dead littered across the breadth of the river. Dale Stultz, senior environmental scientist for CDFW’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response, worked for the Shasta County Environmental Health Department at the time. Stationed at the incident command center in Redding, Stultz remembered hearing descriptions of the mind-blowing scene. “I think it was day-two that responders knew where the plume was and they dyed it so they could follow it with a helicopter,” Stultz recalled. “You could actually see schools of fish running, essentially, all the way to Lake Shasta.” More than 300,000 of the fish killed were rainbow trout—a significant blow to the upper Sacramento’s reputation for its world renowned wild trout fishing. The local economy of this small recreational fishing town—known as “Home of the Best Water on Earth”—faltered following the spill. Tourist traffic declined,
drastically, businesses closed, real estate prices fell and a three-year fishing ban was imposed on the river. Throughout this part of the county, people and business weren’t the only things that suffered. Although more difficult to quantify, terrestrial wildlife was affected as well. Birds, bats, otters and other fish and insect-dependent animals starved or were displaced after their food sources disappeared. Largely unfamiliar with the scorchedearth devastation left behind by metam sodium combined with the extent of the spill, responders’ initial effort was a bit chaotic. It was only a year
34 JANUARY—FEBRUARY 2017
Jan2017.indd 34
2/21/2017 11:31:28 AM