Posted by L White, a resident of the San Anselmo neighborhood, on Dec 23, 2009 at 8:29 am

How did it kill the trout?

Posted by Charducci, a resident of the Muir Beach neighborhood, on Dec 23, 2009 at 8:57 am

Probably the same way it would kill humans if they drank poison chemicals.

Posted by L White, a resident of the San Anselmo neighborhood, on Dec 23, 2009 at 10:04 pm

Web Link

It looks like they can:

Accept the fine

Donate the fine to a wildlife project

or ask to see the state's data and analyze the data.

I'd venture to say that Conoco Phillips knows exactly how much they out flowed and pretty much exactly what the concentrations were. - I used to work at that refinery. In fact, I'll wager that CP gave them the outflow amounts.

As far as toxicity, the state doesn't allow anything acutely toxic to enter the bay - that outflow is potentially drinkable - Not that I'd drink it for no reason, but, in an emergency, I would.

copper, selenium and chlorine and the water is probably warm.

We use copper pipe for water supply, copper is a natural germicide - brass doorknobs disinfect themselves in 8 hours according to wikipedia. We do (or did) use copper paint for anti barnacle action - which may have an effect on young trout fry.

Selenium - at high levels, causes toxicity, but it IS a required element for our life. And levels in outflow aren't acutely toxic.

Chlorine - now there's a kicker - you want to hurt a young fish? Dump it in your fresh, chlorinated tap water. I'll bet that the elevated chlorine levels did the most damage to the fry.

Mortality rates:

They reported survival rates of 0 to 85%. I've done some natural biology and other sciences, too. If 85% of fry survived, that's pretty awesome, usually survival rates are lower than that. Zero isn't so good but maybe a herd of young stripers just passed by - I guess if they pulled up 50 dead fry instead of 85 live ones, that would be pretty determinate.... but..... I don't think they did, When someone's trying to bust somebody, sometimes that data is presented in a tweaked way.

That article says "1000's" died -

let's take 5,000. 5 mos/30 days per month - only 33.33 fish died per day.

Say it's 10,000 - that's 66.67 dead per day.

Lets say 100,000 - that's 666.67 per day.

A rainbow trout lays up to 4,000 eggs.

It's important to put things in scale to prevent hysteria -

Remember the researcher that got busted seeding endangered spotted salamanders in fields in Santa Rosa to prevent building?

I'd like to see the real data before I jumped on any bandwagons.

Come to think about what they actually inferred - "bad weather" - I think that means rain in the bay area.

So - they produce "x" amount of "waste" every day. It's diluted to the level specified by their state agreement. It's out flowed.

Now, here comes the rain. The rain fills the containment pond and the same "x" gets diluted by 100% (or whatever) amount of extra water and outflowed. It's 2x the volume, but 1/2 the concentration.

I'm not saying that's exactly what happened, but, I don't see anybody else here, yet, with any real info.

I'm not a fan of the silly Marin desal plant, either.

We need less people.

Merry Christmas!

LW