An effort to fight bacteria blooms in the Willamette River by restoring Ross Island closer to its pre-industrialization form made a splash late last month.
About 100 people gathered in Northeast Portland on June 25 to hear the results of a long-running research partnership between Oregon State University and the Human Access Project, a Portland nonprofit that aims to make the city more livable and lovely by expanding recreational access to the Willamette River.
The researchers presented their findings: adding a channel to return the lagoon to its natural, free-flowing state would address the cyanobacteria problem. The bacteria is often called blue-green algae.
“We invested a billion dollars plus in The Big Pipe project to clean up the river,” Scott Fogarty, Human Access Project’s new executive director, told attendees. “So, why would we go backwards and allow something like a harmful algae bloom to contaminate the river again? It makes no sense.”
Man-made problem
The man-made lagoon at the center of Ross Island has drawn the Human Access Project’s focus because the lagoon’s warm, stagnant, nutrient-rich water consistently causes the cyanobacteria blooms that shut down access to the river at large.
Four out of the past five years have seen significant blooms in the Willamette. Exposure to cyanobacteria can cause headaches, numbness, fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bloody diarrhea and bloody urine.
The problem’s roots date back to 1926, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers transformed what was a chain of natural islands in the river into the present lagoon by building an artificial embankment on the southeast side of the cluster of islands.
Between 1926 and 2001, Ross Island Sand and Gravel Co. mined gravel from the lagoon to the depth of about 120 feet.
Earlier this year, Robert Pamplin Jr., who owns the company, was hit with a $14 million fine from the Oregon Department of State Lands for his failure to make progress on a 2023 agreement he signed to mitigate damage from the mining, Willamette Week reported.
Pamplin was once on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. Since then however, his businesses cratered and he admitted in court documents that he raided his employees’ pension funds. Tax records show his foundation still has $53 million in assets.
Late last month, lead researcher Desirée Tullos told event attendees at Alberta Abbey that her research group found two possible ways to address the resulting cyanobacteria blooms:
Restore flow to the lagoon by removing its southwest wall, returning Ross Island to its former state and destroying the warm, stagnant water conditions that keep creating cyanobacteria blooms.
Building that first channel as well as a second one on the lagoon’s northwest side to further increase flow and flush out the water, along with any bacteria growing in it.
“What we’ve done in this design essentially is taken what we know about them and used it against them,” Tullos said about the cyanobacteria. “So we know the things they need to grow and to reproduce, and we’re going to try to knock those back.”
Both versions boil down to one thing: returning flow to the islands to let the river flush out the area faster than water warms and bacteria breed. The project is expected to cost roughly $17 million or $27 million, depending on the option. The full, 73-page report can be found at bit.ly/4aG0p4T.
(Riverfront parks attract 1.2 million visits each year, and recreation along the Willamette generates about $120 million in spending annually.)
In a separate proposal, unnamed investors looking to buy Ross Island have released a plan to dump contaminated Superfund sediment from the Willamette downstream of Ross Island into the pit.
Tullos told event attendees her team also created models to see how the two Ross Island proposals would interact. They found filling the crater with sediment from the river through Portland wouldn’t impact the potential channel restoration project.
“It wouldn’t have any effect essentially on the ability of the flushing channels to still flush the surface,” she said, “and it wouldn’t negate the need to still flush the surface.”
Chance encounter gives river a chance
The whole project started nearly a decade ago by happenstance.
“I was a distance runner for a long time,” Tullos said, “and then my hips didn’t want to do that anymore, so I started swimming.”
That was back in 2016. After about a year swimming in pools, Tullos was coworking at a shared office space when she overheard people talking about a Human Access Project Willamette River swim in the shared lunchroom.
They got to talking and before she knew it she was at the Eastbank Esplanade for her first swim.
“It was summer weather,” she said, “and I remember the first time I jumped in — this is really the first open water swim that I had done — and I thought, ‘Oh my god, it is so cold,’ and I’m watching all these other people just dive right in. I’m like, ‘What is wrong with these people?’ And then, of course, as soon as you start moving, it feels wonderful.”
Flying high after the swim, the water resources engineering professor approached Willie Levenson, the access project’s founder, to offer her help. She figured she might lend a hand with access to the water for people with disabilities or by designing a boat ramp.
“What I did not know that day,” Levenson said to event attendees, “was that Desirée would become one of the most important partners the Human Access Project has ever had, and also one of my closest friends.”
After crossing paths, neither thought much of the interaction until months later, when Levenson sent a message to Tullos. By then, he had fixed his attention to taking on the harmful cyanobacteria problem that had nearly cancelled The Big Float about two years earlier.
“He’s like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this problem with cyanobacteria. Do you think you can help?’” Tullos recalled. “I’m like, ‘Well, we can try.’”
“There’s a real freedom in ignorance,” said Levenson, who handed over the reins of the group to Fogarty at the end of June. “If we had known how hard this would be, we might never have started. What followed was nearly a decade of working together, battling long odds, and refusing to accept that this problem was too hard to solve.”
Simple problem, complex policy, growing coalition
Tullos said her team’s extensive research over the last decade has found the harmful bacterial bloom problem itself isn’t complex — it’s getting people on board to solve it that’s tricky.
“The reality is, this is such an obvious and easy engineering problem. To excavate these channels it probably would take like a week,” she said. “It is really everything that leads up to that moment. That is what drags these projects out.”
But after nearly a decade of research on her part and advocacy on Levenson’s, the pair have put in the time to make it to the milestone.
At the June event, Levenson described the arduous process of getting buy-in, meeting-by-meeting. He said Tullos’ commitment to the project was transformative for the effort.
“Up to that point, I had been part of softer collaborations with different people,” he recalled. “But this was different. This work will undoubtedly be the most meaningful professional collaboration of my life.”
“And,” he added, “the lesson I learned is this: When one committed person goes after a task with heart, hard work and ambition, magic can happen. But when two committed people work together with heart, hard work, ambition and alignment, miracles can happen — and when other like-minded people join the team, the momentum becomes exponential.”
That work appears to be paying off. The presentation thanked dozens of partners, funders and supporters including the U.S. Geological Survey, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, Travel Oregon, Portland Parks and Recreation, Metro and Multnomah County.
The director of the county’s Office of Sustainability, John Wasiutynski, emceed the event wearing Birkenstocks to honor Levenson. JR Lilly, director of the county’s Office of Community Involvement, and Commissioner Shannon Singleton also spoke.
The commissioner said the importance of the group’s work is growing as climate change worsens the blue-green algae problem and also reinforces the need for all Portlanders to have a free, safe and accessible place to cool off.
“Dr. Tullos shows us that science can and should guide our solutions we pursue on the river,” Singleton said. “Restoring the Willamette has never been more important.”
People-driven solution
After a decade scraping together funding to continue the Oregon State University lab’s work, the team is no stranger to finagling. But they still have work ahead of them.
“The next step, in terms of fundraising, is to find out who’s going to pay for this,” Tullos told attendees last month.
She said it will take about half a million dollars of additional funding to finish the design phase, though much of that is permitting. After that, the final steps are finalizing design and digging out the channel or channels. But to her and Levenson, the project cannot continue to sit on the backburner.
“The state of Oregon has a moral obligation to lead a fix,” Levenson said about Ross Island to the Oregon Capital Chronicle last month. “The governor’s office should designate a lead, set a timeline, identify a funding path and make restoration of flow the state’s organizing objective for Ross Island.”
For Tullos, the issue she has dedicated the last nine years of her life to comes down to stepping up to help fix problems that need to be fixed.
“There’s a very clear problem that is not going to go away, but there is a very clear solution, and to me, I feel this obligation to future generations,” she said. “Ultimately, what drives me on this is I’m not okay with us handing off this broken world to our future generations, and I can’t solve a lot, the vast majority of them, but I can be a small cog in a wheel that solves maybe one of them, one of these small problems.”
This article appears in July 8, 2026.
