Portland, Deadly 6PPD-q And Coho: Reasons For Hope

The mystery of why urban coho are dying before they can spawn is most strongly associated with Seattle.

It’s where the condition was first seen (Longfellow Creek above the lower Duwamish) and where the cause of the mortality (6PPD-quinone, a tire preservative that reacts with ozone and gets washed into streams) was first identified by scientists from Washington State University and the University of Washington.

Exposed to the chemical during fall rains, coho quickly die.

But an Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission workshop last week showed that Portlanders and Oregonians are well aware of the problem, including junior US Senator Jeff Merkley (D), who has called for tire companies to replace the preservative, and, what’s more, they appear to have doable near-term solutions in mind.

Along with Washington’s response, it left me a lot more optimistic about a depressing problem I’ve been following for years. A decade ago, my family and I even did our tiny little miniscule share by having a bioswale installed to filter street runoff that otherwise dumped straight into a pipe to a Lake Washington tributary.

Bioswales’ simple soil mix of bark, compost and other materials is remarkably good at capturing 6PPD-q and rendering stormwater far safer for the salmon.

But the scope of the problem has always daunted me. I mean, have you ever looked at Google Maps with Street View on and seen the dense blue tangle of roads in metro areas like Greater Pugetropolis and Metro Portlandia? Many of those highways, avenues, boulevards and whatnot cross streams that host or were once home to coho.

THE WORKSHOP WAS held last Thursday, February 13, following on requests last fall from several commissioners who wanted to learn more about 6PPD-q and its impact on aquatic systems.

“I kind of got this idea as we kept talking about ‘landscape level’ and what that means and that it means also the cities,” said Commissioner Dr. Leslie King of Portland. “Thinking about the Willamette Basin and how every fish in the Willamette Basin swims under our 12 bridges, they are affected by 6PPD-q in ways that we’re still grappling with and trying to understand, so this I think is a step in the right direction.”

Organized by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the workshop was attended by representatives of several state, city and federal agencies, and they learned that tire companies, well aware of the problem, are actively looking into different chemical formulations.

“Unfortunately, thus far, all of the alternatives that they’ve found still behave similarly to 6PPD-quinone,” reported Katie Holzer, a senior environmental specialist with the city of Gresham. “Right now, the leading contender is 7PPD-quinone, (but) often it still has just as bad effects on the aquatic life.”

What’s more, even if a wonder solution popped up tomorrow in Goodyear and Michelin’s labs, she said it would take decades for tires made with 6PPD to reach the end of their useful life.

It means the problem is here to stay for awhile. But Holzer’s main takeaway during the presentation was that, compared to other chemicals in the environment, tackling 6PPD-q is actually “completely manageable.”

“I also work on PFAS … the forever chemical, and there are so many of them and so many sources and it’s so hard to treat that it feels overwhelming. But 6PPD has a known source. It’s pretty much just high-traffic roads that drain to streams. There are a few other sources as well, but that’s the primary (one) and there are known treatments,” she said.

Those include structures already in place – bioretention swales, proprietary filters and porous pavements. Initially meant to filter heavy metals, pesticides and other chemicals out of runoff, it turns out they are also helpful in dealing with 6PPD-q.

LET’S PAUSE HERE a minute and talk about why 6PPD-q is so deadly for coho.

“It increases the permeability of the blood-brain barrier in the fish, so it basically puts holes in the blood vessels so all of these other toxins in the stream are getting into the fish’s brain,” Holzer said. “And so, in addition to removing this chemical, continuing to put this stuff [treatment infrastructure] in will help with all of those other pollutants and all of the other stream species that are harmed.”

She said that out of thousands of known chemicals, 6PPD-q is the second most toxic even at really low levels.

But if the problem is prioritized, Holzer believes it would be possible to deal with it within the careers and lifetime of those at the workshop.

While scientists are still dialing in the best treatment media – sand doesn’t work so well, but biochar does, testing shows – the goal now should be to secure funding and prioritize areas for treatment, she said.

Holzer pointed to Beaver Creek, a coho stream that flows through Gresham and Troutdale into the lower Sandy River and experiences “high prespawn mortality” of coho. Recent measurements she took near Stark Street found 6PPD-q at levels 50 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidance, essentially creating a chemical dam.

But with only a few other outfalls to deal with, just 15 miles of major roads in the system and some effective treatment structures already in place, Holzer appeared positive that results there might not be that far away.

“It’s totally doable to retrofit the few (outfalls) and then Beaver Creek might be able to sustain all the coho that are coming up without poisoning them,” she said.

It’s important to point out that it’s not just Toyos turning on thoroughfares that are sloughing off the particles that become 6PPD-q. It comes from anything rubberized, per Pablo Martos of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Think the artificial turf of sports fields, school running tracks, kiddie playground cushioning, bicycle tires, soft rubber mats, the soles of your own boots and shoes.

Martos said that DEQ is figuring out how to integrate new findings around the problem into the agency’s workload as well as work with partner departments to evaluate the findings and figure out next steps.

“Addressing 6PPD-quinone will definitely help with coho immensely, but also entire biological communities,” he said.

That’s because it’s not just adult coho that die. If their run timing gets missed by fall storms and they are able to spawn, their progeny are susceptible during inevitable future gullywashers. So are the organisms that the young fish feed on during their extended stream rearing phase.

I’LL ADMIT, I’VE seriously wavered in the past about whether cities are really the best place to spend any money to save salmon, given how ubiquitous 6PPD-q is. Wouldn’t it be better to use funding instead on, say, fish passage improvements so coho can access areas of good to high-quality habitat where high-volume traffic isn’t just going to make roadkill of that work?

But for the Portland area, it’s not just coho in Johnson, Tryon, Kellogg, Beaver, Abernethy and other local creeks. Six salmon species from 15 different Endangered Species Act-listed populations also rear and/or swim through Rose City-region waters.

“Data collected three times a year by our city biological team find all salmonid life stages here in Portland streams, including distinct population segments and ecologically significant units from out of basin,” said Jennifer Karps at the city’s Environmental Services bureau.

A map she shared showed hatchery and unclipped kings and steelhead from the Mid-Columbia, Snake and Yakima basins turning up in local backwaters, side sloughs and creeks.

While coho are most acutely affected by what is also known as urban runoff mortality syndrome, or URMS, steelies and Chinook are too to degrees. Sockeye and chums aren’t.

“So these data tell us that how Portland manages stormwater can affect both resident and transitory listed salmonids,” Karps said.

Ben Walczak, ODFW fish biologist for the North Willamette District, underlined that point.

“Beaver Creek in particular is very important for Upper Columbia steelhead and other stocks – they duck in there. The effect is actually probably greater in a system like Beaver Creek than what we’re even detecting on those juveniles,” he said.

The number and ratio of steelhead returning to the Upper Columbia directly determines whether fisheries are held on the Methow, where nearly 1,000 hatchery summer-runs were just harvested in the first season in nine years, and elsewhere in Northcentral Washington.

In terms of next steps, it’s not just finding money to install lots more bioswales. Karps said there’s also room for better outreach to the public about becoming more protective of waterways as well as government working with industry to incentivize creation of green infrastructure to capture the pollutant.

“And finally on the municipal side, an excellent example is street sweeping as an opportunity for improvement,” Karps said. “Preliminary studies suggest that street sweeping could remove tire wear particles and thereby reduce the amount of 6PPD-quinone available to wash into surface waters. We know in Portland where stormwater drains to surface waters. We know where our high-volume roadways are and we know where our salmon are, so we could evolve our street sweeping program to strategically remove the pollutant before it could migrate to the river.”

AS MEMBERS OF the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission digested what they were hearing, Commissioner Mark Labhart of Sisters, who also sits on the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, pointed out that OWEB annually grants on the order of $100 million for primarily fishery projects and he speculated that “this seems like it’s right down the alley of OWEB funding.”

He also asked what ODFW and the commission could be doing.

Neil Schulman of the North Clackamas Watershed Council said there were three critical areas, including starting “to think of areas of 6PPD-q concentration as a fish passage barrier in the same way we might think of an impassable culvert.”

“The fish can’t get by it not because they can’t jump high enough, but because they just don’t survive,” he said.

That’s an argument that will resonate with treaty tribes who have made hay in Washington with the Culvert Case and who’ve also termed 6PPD-q “the DDT of our generation.”

Schulman also called for more data and better sharing from and with ODFW.

But as for Labhart’s idea of tapping into OWEB funding, Schulman said that stormwater and 6PPD-q projects “have not competed well” for grants because “it’s a little foreign and it’s a little diffuse and they’re costly compared to, say, putting in a large wood project. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility, but it also is I think not right in the wheelhouse. That hasn’t stopped us from trying and we will continue to do so.”

In answer to a request by Commission Chair Mary Wahl of Langlois for a synopsis of available solutions for coho, Holzer, the Gresham city environmental specialist, pointed to Washington research with hatchery coho that showed complete mortality of fish put in untreated water, “whereas if they filter that water through the various technologies, 0 percent mortality, so it’s entirely possible, it happens already, it’s completely feasible that if all of the stormwater runoff could be filtered in one of these ways or infiltrated [into groundwater], coho mortality would go to zero.”

In bringing the workshop to a close, Dr. King touched on something Holzer had also brought up – that witnessing the decline of raptors last century, the country had prioritized tackling DDT and as a result, the big birds came back, and how.

“We’ve had a huge victory with DDT. That’s the same sort of thing we could achieve with 6PPD-q,” King said. “We need to stop saying that we don’t have it here. As a doctor, I always say that recognition is the step to cure. We need to understand what this is, get ahold of the problem, figure out how we can do that, and if it’s as simple as a bioswale, then let’s do it.”

Crediting the “passion” of the gathered presenters and others at the workshop, King also spoke to the need for improved communication to the public about 6PPD-q.

“Call it something like ‘Salmonicide’ or something. Give it a name, give it some catchy thing like the Salmon SuperHwy did and then we can move on this in a whole other way because I think right now you’ve got so many people just kind of scratching their head and don’t know what it is. So I think we’ve got to get over that hump to getting people to understand what it is and specific to the collaboration, what we can do,” she said.

IN THE END, it all gave me renewed hope.

Between King’s interest in the issue, the multiple agencies already thinking about and tracking it, Holzer’s idea to prioritize retrofitting key outfalls and Karps’ for strategic street sweeping, it appears we can make the waters less deadly for coho in the near term, it may not cost an arm and a leg, and there are coinciding benefits in terms of dealing with other pollutants too, which I hadn’t realized.

I love coho. Love their habitat, love how widespread and adaptable they are, love their journey, love their fidelity to place, love their grab, love their scales that get all over the place in my kayak, love how they taste.

I even love how they make me crazy like no other fish does when they don’t bite.

I know cleaning up PDX streams to make them more productive for coho may not translate into more fish on me and other anglers’ grills, given their intact adipose fin and ODFW rules prohibiting retention of most wild silvers.

But I want to solve the problem of 6PPD-q for my fellow PNW natives anyway. 

It’s the right thing to do, and it has so many compounding benefits for other salmon species and bugs and stream health and us as well.