Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was sued for the first time on Thursday by environmentalists in Oregon who want him to take immediate action to protect salmon from the high temperatures of the Columbia River.
The salmon suit is the first litigation with Pruitt’s name on it since he began his role as EPA administrator on Tuesday. But it raises a basic question: Can EPA regulate temperature as a pollutant?
Columbia Riverkeeper, the group suing the former Oklahoma attorney general, wants the EPA to use its Clean Water Act authority to step in and protect the salmon from the high summertime temperatures of the Columbia and Snake rivers.
The group’s director, Brett VandenHeuvel, argues that temperature should be regulated like a pollutant. “Temperature pollution killed those fish,” he said in an interview with the Portland Busniess Journal. “If [it] had been mercury or PCB poisoning, or an oil spill, everybody would have been up in arms and there would have been immediate action. But because it’s high temperatures, it’s ignored.”
The lawsuit says EPA ignored the temperature concerns in the past, although the agency blamed dams on the river for making parts of river shallower and more prone to high temperatures.
The higher temperatures when combined with lower water levels can remove the oxygen from the water and kill thousands of salmon. As many as 250,000 sockeye salmon died in Oregon waterways in summer 2015, according to the lawsuit.
The suit was filed in federal court in Seattle. EPA had no immediate comment on the litigation.
