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A lone voice
story Libby Whittemore
photos Benjamin Brayfield
Four miles south of the Columbia River on Oregon’s northern coast, 55-year-old John Hoff stands next to me on a dune of ebony sand overlooking the shipwrecked Peter Iredale. Waves break gently around its gaping, rusted frame and barefoot youngsters in sweatshirts bounce nearby. In 1906, the 285-foot Peter Iredale was bound for Portland carrying 1,000 tons in its hold when the captain miscalculated his entry and struck sand just a few miles south of the river’s mouth in what is still known as the graveyard of the Pacific.
In May 2007, 10 feet of the ship’s skeleton emerged from the water each high tide and slept in sand each low tide. In April 2008 though, after an unusually intense winter, a corroded shell of toppled masts and molded wood greets beachgoers: the complete skeleton. Oregon’s coast has lost so much sand that a ship once completely buried has risen from its ocean grave.
Above the ship on a dune off Fort Stevens State Park, Hoff, a Vietnam veteran, father, and thirty-year resident of Seaside, Oregon whose “love affair with the ocean” began at age two on his father’s fishing boat, silently drags the toe of his boot across the black dune and asks me, “Do you know what causes black sand?” His thick salt-and-pepper hair ruffles in the salty breeze as he solemnly answers his own question: “Iron.”
Hoff’s handful of black sand carries more symbolism for me than he probably expects. After all, the same leathery man has been selling shrimp and crab legs to my father at the Bell Buoy, a landmark fresh seafood stop in Seaside where Hoff’s crab cakes inspire many a pit stop, for more than twenty years. My brother and I grew up spending our summers in Gearhart, a delightfully microscopic town barely five miles from Seaside’s promenade — bodysurfing until our lips turned blue, jumping dunes, and routinely gorging on bags of candy purchased with linty quarters at the town’s one and only grocery store. We could both give a guided tour of the town blindfolded and not miss a turn. But after spending this sunny May driving up and down this slice of the coast with Hoff, I realize I don’t know my coast as well as I thought I did.
I pack that fistful of black sand in a plastic thermos and later snatch a magnet from my refrigerator at home in Portland, testing it again and again. Each time, the sand jumps straight off my palm and latches to the magnet in ragged slices. Soon I would learn that this sand taken straight off the dune above the Peter Iredale is magnetic because of the huge amounts of iron in Pacific coastal waters — iron that Hoff says comes from the Columbia River. Hoff believes the iron from continuous dredging projects is killing wildlife, especially the crabs that sustain the fishing industry on Oregon’s coast.
While the media bandwagon has labeled global warming the root of Oregon’s much-publicized dead zone dilemma, Hoff, a sort of renaissance fisherman whom locals call “the clam guy” has emerged as a lone voice in a continuing debate about the environmental price tag of the Columbia River dredging project. And although I eventually come to believe Hoff may be right, I also realize he probably won’t be heard.
Back at the Bell Buoy after our trek to see the Peter Iredale, seven three-ring binders tumble out of a camping backpack Hoff pulls from behind the register. He opens one and flips it around to face me, then hops up to take an order while I read: a lawsuit by Northwest Environmental Advocates, Columbia River dredging schedules, a Department of Energy report on Dungeness Crab entrainment during a 2002 dredging project — all from just one binder. Even at work, the man is obsessed.
Hoff rides a bicycle, only purchased a cell phone this year, and abandoned a substantial salary as a commercial painter to work at the Bell Buoy, where his paycheck only earns him one-third of what painting did. “I’m not going to make a lot of money down here, but I consider myself a steward of the coast,” he says gently. “It’s not about me; it’s about my children’s children.”
As a veteran volunteer for the Oregon State Department of Agriculture since 2001, Hoff collects monthly water samples that measure fecal matter and demoic acid. Volunteering gave him a front-row seat to see other changes on the Oregon coast, and soon he was hooked. Seven years and seven binders of research later, his advocacy is intoxicating. After lunchtime traffic thins out at the Bell Buoy, he leads me enthusiastically to a cluttered office, pops a CD in a desktop computer and guides me through a series of time-elapsed aerial photographs depicting how much sand has receded from the Bell Buoy’s nearest bay. Over a mug of coffee and a steaming, homemade crab cake that could rival the best in Oregon, I start to really listen.
The dead zone phenomenon has threatened to devastate nearly every species on Oregon’s coast that relies on cold, nutrient-rich water and oxygen. That of course includes crab, so for Hoff, science translates directly to economics. And for the past six summers, the oxygen levels in Oregon’s seawaters have plummeted right along with the sand level and Hoff’s crab sales. “This time last year, we would have already done four times the amount of razor clams as we’ve done now,” he told me in May 2007.
When I ask Francis Chan, a biogeochemist at Oregon State University, about the dead zones, he corrects me and asks me to instead use the scientific name for lack of oxygen, hypoxia. Hypoxia occurs in several global regions of the ocean, he says, when algae bloom, die, and decompose; the decomposition process robs ocean water of oxygen, and without oxygen, many ocean species will suffocate. “There were a couple times in South Africa when a couple tons of lobsters actually climbed out of the water and onto the beach because they needed oxygen,” says Chan.
One of the most famous dead zones occurs annually at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico, where scientists claim that contaminated runoff streaming from fertilized farms along the river causes hypoxia. But hypoxia isn’t a one-size-fits-all issue, and the differences in dead zones around the globe lie in their diverse causes. For scientists, fishermen, and families who enjoy a seafood dinner and carefree days on the beach, saving Oregon’s coastal species means determining the cause of the algae blooms. So rather than sit back and let the phenomenon devastate his business, his beaches, and the lifestyle he loves, Hoff investigated; it didn’t take him long to connect the dots.
Since the first major dead zone in 2002, Hoff has watched as crabs die, lining Oregon’s beaches with thousands of belly-up bodies. Media have ticketed the phenomenon as a ripple effect of global climate change. But a team of oceanographers and marine ecologists, including Chan, performed experiments on Oregon’s ocean waters ten days of every month in 2007 and found no evidence that global warming can take the blame. Though they haven’t determined the root of the problem, Chan says, researchers have not ruled out climate change as a possible cause. Meanwhile Hoff, who has dedicated his life to solving the mystery, says it’s not climate change or wind patterns. It’s iron.
Hoff believes the iron causing massive hypoxia along Oregon’s coast arrives in annual correlation with each Columbia River dredging project. In fact, officials from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife have admitted to Hoff in person that the dredging is killing the ocean life; however, he doesn’t imagine they’ll go on record as an organization anytime soon.
The contentious Columbia River dredging project began in the early 2000s to allow the passing of vessels with drafts deeper than the channel. At the river’s previous depth of 40 feet, 70 percent of vessels attempting to pass through had to arrive “light loaded,” according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. At a depth of 45 feet, the Corps claims, only 30 percent would need to be light loaded. In other words, deepening the channel to 43 feet would allow a vessel to carry an additional 6,000 tons of grain.
In 2003, President Bush visited Portland to announce he would ask Congress to allocate $15 million to the Columbia River Channel Deepening Project. The Port of Portland is at a competitive disadvantage, he said at the time, and the project would protect and restore paying jobs. Furthermore, The Port of Portland’s website states that maritime activity on the river directly supports more than 40,000 local jobs and indirectly sustains another 56,000 jobs. The Columbia River Channel Coalition website says that “for every $1 invested in the project, the nation receives an economic benefit of $1.66 in return.”
An investigative reporting team from The Oregonian, however, found in 2002 that although the Corps was claiming a positive return for taxpayers, the real return on the project at the time was actually just $.88 to the dollar. The investigation also concluded that the Corps found that only export vessels would benefit from a deeper channel and that ships carrying imports navigate just fine at a depth of 40 feet. In the end, The Oregonian uncovered six instances in which the Corps made either outdated or inaccurate assumptions.
For many, the issue at hand resonates as a conflict between nature and paycheck. The damage river dredging brings is no secret: it robs animal species of fragile habitat and causes “impaired sediment circulation systems in nearshore ocean areas,” states a September 2006 report from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It’s no wonder then that the Peter Iredale has surfaced after so many years, and many of Oregon’s dunes have turned black with iron when 4.5 million cubic yards of sediment (equivalent to what would fill about 2,600 50-meter lap pools) come out of the river every year. In return, the same amount of sediment naturally begins to fill in the void from other locations, and Oregon’s beaches begin to recede. Making matters worse for the coast, sediment is disposed of onto fragile ocean habitat only a mile or two from the coastline. And not to mention there’s a whole lot of iron in 4.5 million cubic yards of sand.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council agrees. In 2004, the council reported that Columbia River dredging and the disposal of river sediment have devastated estuarine habitat over the past century and that “currently, three times more sand is dredged from the estuary that is replenished by upstream sources.”
“That much sediment’s just not practical,” Hoff says, back at the restaurant. Species live in those disposal sites. And fishermen depend on those species. “If you dump ten inches of sand on your lawn every couple of months for ten years, what would your lawn look like?” Hoff asks, frowning. “You wouldn’t have one.”
Research validates Hoff’s suspicion that iron from dredged sediment is causing the algae blooms and subsequent dead zones. In the 1930s, oceanographers first suspected that dust storms played a role in algae growth in certain areas of the ocean. Sixty years later, oceanographer John Martin proved that iron fertilizes algae in those areas. Expeditions in 1999 and 2002 verified this once more, as biologists like Chan sprinkled dissolved iron in the Southern Hemisphere and watched the algae proliferate excessively.
It wasn’t until April 2002, however, that scientists observed the process directly. A NASA satellite reported that storm winds passing over from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia were depositing large amounts of iron-rich dust in Pacific coastal waters as they passed. Sure enough, scientists reported a staggering algae bloom five days later. Today, dredging reproduces this rhythm annually: about a week after iron-rich sediment has been deposited off the coast, Oregon sees another dead zone. According to Hoff, the pattern is undeniable.
Some scientists, including Chan, favor the upwelling theory, which states that Northern winds drive coastal currents and essentially pull deep ocean water toward the surface. This water is cold and nutrient-rich but fatally low in oxygen for the species living near the surface, Chan says. But Hoff dismisses the theory as a scientific default, stating that his own figures are just too glaring to be a coincidence.
“It’s not a global warming issue, it’s an industrialization issue,” Hoff says, dipping behind the counter of the Bell Buoy to fetch tartar sauce for a customer. “To change the environment, to change the way we live, we’re going to have to have a transformation of thought, and the first step to solving a problem is recognizing it.”
He knows he can’t win the fight by himself, so Hoff desperately wants journalists, citizens, and activists like him to listen. Until they do, dredging may just end up another marker of changing times on the Oregon coast.