Lorraine Loomis: Eating fish shouldn't be risky for Washington

Gov. Jay Inslee wants to change the cancer risk rate used to set state water quality standards from 1 in 1 million to 1 in 100,000. That is unacceptable to the Treaty Tribes in western Washington. We refuse to accept this tenfold increase in the risk of getting cancer from known cancer-causing toxins — and you should too.

The cancer risk rate and the fish consumption rate are key factors in determining how clean our waters must be to protect our health. The more fish we eat, the cleaner the waters must be.

Water quality standards are supposed to protect those who need protection the most: children, women of childbearing age, Native Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, sport fishermen, and anyone else who eats local fish and shellfish. When the most vulnerable among us is protected, so is everyone else.

The federal Clean Water Act requires that states develop water quality standards to ensure our waters are clean enough to provide healthy fish that are safe for us to eat. But the state has been operating under outdated and inadequate water quality standards developed more than 20 years ago, and has missed every deadline since then for updating the standards as required by federal law. The state admits that its current water quality standards don’t adequately protect any of us.