Small-time miners walk pistons flecks of gold to find out salmon streams face stricter rules announced Tuesday by the Oregon environmental authorities. The new license is issued by the state Department of Environmental Quality comes as a mini-rush of prospectors arrive in California since been declared a moratorium on dredging until it can determine whether it harms salmon.
The new Oregon legislation reducing the size of the dredge salmon critical habitat, the great rivers and their tributaries in the most popular areas of gold mining in the southwest and northeast Oregon covers.
They also require miners to all streams to keep a logbook in which they control with a once a day when the muddy water coming out of their machines no further than 300 meters downstream or overlapping the plume of another dredge.
The $ 25 annual permit includes a longstanding prohibition against adverse effects on water quality in 12 federal wilderness areas were established before 1972, including the Kalmiopsis Wilderness on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, where a Washington real estate developer seeks a gold mining to resort.
The quality of the turbidity increase would not actually prohibit suck gold from mining dredges in the wilderness. Panning for gold is still allowed.
The revisions result from a court to challenge both miners and conservationists to the old rule, which ended in June. Neither group was happy with the result.
“They say they believe damage done to fisheries, and there’s never done a study has shown that is the reality,” said Mike Higbee Grants Pass miner.
The new rules cut the size dredge essential habitat to 16 hp engine and four-inch hose nozzles. They also prohibit bulldozers and diggers from going into the water, and do not allow the mining of the river, except along gravel bars with no vegetation.
“We have a season that keep the vessels from the water if the fish are,” said Higbee. Creation of a size limitation based on the salmon habitat really no sense, because it is not legal to dredge in the time you’d load of salmon. ”
Mining seasons are set to keep miners out of salmon streams in the fall, winter and spring months when salmon and steelhead are spawning and young fish migrating to the ocean. The seasons, the mining industry in the summer months when an adult fish swimming upstream, and when some young fish in the river still.
Pete Frost, an attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center in Eugene, said it would be simpler and clearer rules would prefer the protection of all streams, rather than just designed by the Department of State as essential for the survival Countries salmon.
“We need clear guidelines for DEQ to protect wild salmon issue,” he said. “What we have is a jumble of technical terms that are sometimes impractical.”
Rogue River Keeper Leslie Adams said DEQ enforcement on the left, the game police officers, who have little time for her, and was not required miners to submit their logs to the state each year.
Miners of old licenses until the end of August an application for a new. Recreational prospectors do not need a permit, but those with a manual transmission, such as a rocker box to do.
source:sfgate.com
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