Healthy cooperation

In 1999, Mike LaScuola, environmental health specialist for the Spokane Regional Health District, rode his bike along the Centennial Trail and noted the many new immigrants fishing along the banks of the Spokane River. A fish advisory was already in effect along stretches of the river, warning of the contaminants in the river’s fish, including cancer-linked PCBs.

LaScuola worried, correctly as it turned out, that the warnings were not reaching the very people who needed them most – immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Thus began a unique civic collaboration of outreach and education. It culminated recently in the massive toxic chemical cleanup that has begun along the river in the Upriver Dam area.

LaScuola connected with Tatyana Bistrevsky, a Russian-speaking program coordinator for the Washington State University Extension Office. She advised the health district to keep the warnings brief and simple. LaScuola learned that the new immigrants were eating all types of fish that the river offered – not just trout but also large scale suckers, pike minnows and other fish LaScuola described as “heavy in flavor and bony.” He learned that the immigrants were so accustomed to polluted rivers that they assumed the Spokane River was clean, because it looks that way. They’d say, “How can you consider this polluted? It doesn’t even smell.”

The Department of Ecology awarded a grant to the Lands Council to do a survey among the new immigrant groups. Only 22 percent of those surveyed said they knew about any fishing regulations along the river.

Then, a collaborative group took on the task of outreach and education. They visited church leaders, posted information in ethnic grocery stores and organized fish-cleaning demonstrations in the community; more than 50 percent of the contaminants can be removed with proper cleaning.

One afternoon this past summer, LaScuola and Bistrevsky, along with Amber Waldref from the Lands Council and Carol Bergin from Department of Ecology, taped a fish cleaning demonstration and education program that ran on a cable-access channel popular with new immigrants.

Contact with the immigrant groups who fish the river made several agencies aware of the urgency in cleaning up the river’s PCBs. By early December, contamination in two of the worst PCB-laden areas will be mitigated.

The Spokane River has always been a place of welcome and gathering. Native Americans fished and camped and traded upon it. And when pioneers came to the area, they built a town around its falls.

Newcomers to the river have allowed those already here to see the river with new eyes. In this success story of collaboration and communication, the river legacy continues.