Once upon a time, Klamath Falls was a bustling logging town. Nestling down at the south end of Klamath Lake, the city also benefited tremendously from its position next to the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It even operated a profitable sideline to its main sawmill business: The town is dotted with huge cold-storage facilities originally intended to warehouse produce brought up by train from California's immense Central Valley.
Indeed, Cell Tech's headquarters, freshly painted and well-maintained, occupy pride of place in the center of town. An oddly ornate building festooned with faux-Egyptian detailing that once served as a Ford dealership, the headquarters is only one of 14 Cell Tech buildings in Klamath Falls. Cell Tech is one of Klamath Falls' largest employers, with 600 staffers and considerable civic clout. Evidence of the clout is clear just north of the city center, overlooking the lake. There, a low hill is being cleared for a new consolidated center for Cell Tech operations. Construction of the buildings hasn't yet begun, but a brand new paved road winds up into the empty hill. The road is named Dan O'Brien Way, in honor of the Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete. O'Brien, Cell Tech president Marta Kollman tells me, is a major league algae eater. As is Kollman, who keeps a stash of Cell Tech products in her desk drawer and misses no chance to sing their praises. Blond, middle-aged, charismatic and effervescent, Kollman struck me at first glance as a typical super-salesperson, adeptly sliding away from the tough questions, but able to talk at length and with enthusiasm about most aspects of Super Blue Green Algae production. It wasn't until about a quarter of the way through a two-hour tour of Cell Tech's facilities that I realized she was wearing blue-green eye shadow like a badge of honor. Even later, the full truth of Kollman's algal sincerity was made even clearer when we entered a room adjoining one of Cell Tech's laboratories, and she pounced upon a plastic canister of algae powder that had been left sitting on a table. While telling me that this was a test sample of a new algae-production process, she quickly unscrewed the canister and took a deep whiff, then handed it to me, eyes glinting with obvious delight. The smell of freeze-dried algae, as Kollman herself admitted, is "an acquired taste" -- a harsh aroma more redolent of a stagnant pond than the health-giving bounty of nature. But the odor is anything but harsh to Kollman -- she could hardly restrain a bodily shiver of joy as she put the canister back down. Until I visited Klamath Falls, Cell Tech had remained an amorphous abstraction to me. The grandiose claims of Cell Tech distributors struck me as distinctly penny ante -- a traveling salesman's snake-oil rhetoric. But after zipping across the full gamut of Cell Tech operations, chauffeured in Kollman's ultra-comfortable Mercedes, I began to see the company in a new light. Super Blue Green Algae is big business on an industrial scale. While Cell Tech's much smaller competitors harvest the algae from the open waters of the lake using specially designed barges and small boats, Cell Tech sprawls along a canal that drains the lake and channels its water into irrigation systems feeding southern Oregon and portions of Northern California. The algae is harvested directly from the canal. On the day I visited, Cell Tech filtered some 200,000 pounds of green goo from the canal, using large, mechanized rectangular racks that scooped out the algae and channeled it into a massive system of pipes, centrifuges, freezers and assorted other industrial machinery. Cell Tech is a magnet for all things phycological. In fact, both Wayne Carmichael and Don Anderson -- the algae experts I had tracked down on the Net -- were on site in Klamath Falls during my visit, working for Cell Tech. Anderson, the director of the National Office for Marine Biotoxins and Harmful Algal Blooms at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was testing the algae for neurotoxins, while Carmichael searched for traces of another strain of algae -- the dreaded microcystis. I had seen references to microcystis in my online research, but buried among thousands of other facts, they hardly stood out. After talking with the people who actually get their hands wet in Klamath Lake, I realized that microcystis is the paramount safety concern in the world of commercial blue-green algae. Microcystis is a potentially lethal strain of algae -- and from time to time, it appears in Klamath Lake. In the summer of 1996, right at the peak of the harvest season, Jacob Kann, an aquatic ecologist employed by the Klamath Indian Tribes, discovered a "toxic bloom" of microcystis algae in the lake. For reasons that phycologists don't completely understand, strains of algae can suddenly explode into high-speed growth, or "bloom." In some cases, especially with microcystis algae, the resulting flood of algae is toxic to animals and humans. Kann alerted the Oregon Health Board. The algae harvesters halted their operations, even though the open-water harvesters claimed that they could steer away from the danger areas -- not an option for Cell Tech, which has to take whatever comes down the canal. Canada, Great Britain and Australia all require that drinking water contain no more than one part per million of microcystis. The U.S. has no such regulation, but the Oregon Health Board is currently advocating a similar standard. Duncan Gilroy, a toxicologist for the health board, stated that he had discovered levels of microcystis in excess of one part per million in "finished product from all the algae harvesters." Marta Kollman was reluctant to discuss microcystis. Representatives of some of the other harvesting companies have declared that the proposed standard is too strict, but Kollman declined to comment on it. "That's the big controversy right now," said Kollman. "I don't really want to say anything about it." Kollman did note that Cell Tech is conducting "three separate tests" aimed at discovering successful screening methods for separating microcystis from Aphanizomenon flos-aquae. And she pooh-poohed the idea that the open-water harvesters could steer away from problem areas. "That's a nice theory," she said. Kollman did not even want to admit that the microcystis issue was the sorest point in the blue-green algae business. Reciting the standard Cell Tech line that "there is no medical evidence that anyone has been harmed by Super Blue Green Algae," she repeatedly declared her confidence that Cell Tech products are "absolutely safe." Carmichael's role testing Super Blue Green Algae reassures Kann and Gilroy; he's a respected figure in the world of algae. But questions remain. When 200,000 pounds of algae are removed from the lake, what percentage of that algae is tested? And what of the other harvesters -- how much testing are they doing? "We have questions about whether the testing is adequate," said Gilroy. "And we're concerned about how straightforward the entire industry has been on this problem."
|
Today, Cell Tech owns all the cold storage in Klamath Falls, and the warehouses are filled with freeze-dried algae instead of corn and cucumbers. And today, Klamath Falls is just a shadow of its former self. Most of the sawmills are closed, and the city has been hurt badly by the construction of Interstate 5, some 70 miles to the west. Downtown Klamath Falls is filled with boarded up shops and crumbling old hotels. At 8 o'clock on a weeknight, the city is a ghost town, a likely location for a nefarious cult operation -- as some Cell Tech detractors (including some of Cell Tech's competitors) have been known to call Cell Tech.
