Over the summer, the Oregon State Productions team produced a short documentary on a collaborative project by OSU water resource engineer Desirée Tullos and Portland community members working to reduce toxic algal blooms around Ross Island in the Willamette River.
The video showcases Portland’s river swimming culture, resurgent in the past decade after nearly a century of nonexistence due to sewage flowing into the Willamette, but now threatened anew by summer blooms of deadly cyanobacteria due to warming river temperatures.
To capture the video, video team members visited the Willamette in Portland multiple times, taking their camera gear out on pontoon boats, paddle boards and drones to get a new perspective on the river.
Team members met with a river activist from the Human Access Project and then with Portland City Council and Oregon Humane Society staff to talk about how the algal blooms have affected various Portland communities. They also connected with Nez Perce tribal member Jeremy FiveCrows from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission to learn about Indigenous river restoration work and how Pacific Northwest tribes are impacted by the changing river climate.
The team got archival footage from Portland historian Doug Decker to show what river swimming culture looked like a hundred years ago. They joined Tullos and her grad student for two research trips and then did another three river-filming trips to get all the shots they needed, paddling three hours each time to get from the dock to the Ross Island Lagoon and back.
“We really wanted to show Portland from the river perspective, which a lot of people still don’t know about,” said media producer David Baker. “Most people will say, ‘What, you’re swimming in the Willamette?’ There’s still this skepticism, and I think that’s the battle — these toxic algae blooms are bringing back the specter of this polluted waterway.”
The algae started blooming early this year, in July, which pushed the team to publish the video a month earlier than they’d planned. Portland-based nonprofit Human Access Project also shared footage from an intense cyanobacteria outbreak in 2023, providing a dramatic view of the poisonously green river.
“We wanted to get it in the news when everyone had their eye on the problem,” Baker said. “I think it’s a great example of OSU addressing concerns — it’s a case study for what we’re dealing with in terms of climate change.”
While Ross Island algae blooms are a local problem, he said, urban water quality is challenging cities around the world, including the lead-up to the triathlon in the Paris Olympics this year.
Tullos and the river activists have now raised about $1 million to move forward with a solution for cleaning up the river, but will still need governmental buy-in to get the rest of the funding and make it happen.
“It’s this foundational research that really is driving local and federal interest in solving the problem,” Baker said. “Without the research, there’s no way to move forward on a solution. And I think our role as storytellers is to amplify the research and raise awareness in the community; I think all those things work together.”
