State Rejects Protests of Plan to Poison Pike

State fish and game officials intend to proceed next month with a plan to poison pike-infested Lake Davis in northeastern California, saying they can meet waste discharge requirements adopted Friday by a regional water board.

More than 50 Plumas County residents showed up at the meeting of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Board, wearing “Save Lake Davis” T-shirts and expressing fears that the plan will cause long-term contamination of their drinking water and imperil their health.

The board said it had no authority to prohibit a plan by the Department of Fish and Game to treat Lake Davis on Oct. 15 with 33,000 gallons of chemicals, including the insecticide rotenone and Nusyn-Noxfish, a petroleum product containing the known carcinogen trichloroethylene (TCE).

But after some board members expressed serious concerns about possible health effects of the chemicals, the four members of the nine-member board who were present Friday voted 3-1 to impose requirements on the plan affecting discharges of treated water into the lake’s tributaries.

Opponents said they will appeal to the state water board and will try to stop the plan under the federal Clean Water Act. Several told the board they believe that it will eventually be determined that TCE--like Agent Orange and DDT--is unsafe at any level.

Fish and game officials chalked up health fears to “misinformation.”

Brian Finlayson, chief of the department’s Pesticide Investigation Unit, told the board the amount of TCE in the poisoning plan is “small and inconsequential”--equivalent to about half a shot glass dumped into a 5,000-gallon swimming pool.

“All chemical residues will be within drinking water tolerances immediately after application,” Finlayson said in a prepared statement, “and the lake will not be allowed for use as a potable water supply until all chemical residues have completely dissipated.”

Fish and game officials, backed by anglers’ organizations, say that unless the nonnative northern pike are wiped out soon, they will wind up downstream and become out-of-control predators in the state’s valuable trout and salmon fisheries.

“I don’t know what these [plan opponents] are so upset about,” said Ron LaForce, an outdoor magazine editor who said he represented United Anglers and several other outdoor groups. “If you let these pike survive, you can kiss the state’s anadromous fishery goodbye.”

The lake provides about 50% of the drinking water for 2,200 residents of the town of Portola, and 2,000 area residents rely on the lake or its ground water basin for some or all their water supplies.

The board required the department to provide alternative water supplies for residents until the treatment chemicals have dissipated to non-detectable levels.