A recent Associated Press item managed to catch my attention and raise my blood pressure at the same time.

The brief article — a rewrite of a Public Broadcasting report — said Division of Natural Resources biologists would attempt to restore some life to Monongalia County’s Dunkard Creek by transplanting forage fish into several miles of the polluted stream.

I did a slow burn when I read the piece because I couldn’t see why it should fall to the DNR to fix an environmental disaster caused jointly by a coal company, Consol Energy, and the state Department of Environmental Protection.

After all, it was Consol that discharged zillions of gallons of chloride-polluted water from its Blacksville No. 2 Mine. The chlorides, in turn, created ideal growing conditions for toxic algae to grow. The algae, in turn, killed off the stream’s bass, muskies, forage fish, crustaceans and insects (see accompanying photo).

And it was DEP officials that allowed Consol to discharge those zillions of gallons’ worth of chlorides in the first place.

Yes, that’s right. When DEP officials wrote Consol’s pollution-discharge permit, the chloride levels they allowed were high enough to turn a fresh-water stream brackish and trigger a toxic ”red tide.”

In the midst of my slow burn, I contacted Frank Jernejcic, the biologist quoted in the AP story. Jernejcic said AP and Public Broadcasting apparently misunderstood what he said.

“I said that we’d be monitoring whether forage fish moved in from Dunkard Creek’s tributaries,” he said. “We’re not going to transplant anything into the stream until we’re sure that the water quality is good enough, and until we have assurances that [a pollution-caused fish kill] won’t happen again.”

Jernejcic added that the DNR might eventually help reintroduce smallmouth bass and muskies into Dunkard’s main stream, but only after a food chain has been reestablished.

“In fish kills like this one, all the species that were wiped out tend to return within two years,” he said. “Not in the abundance they were before, mind you. But the basic building blocks of the food chain will be there.”

Let’s say Dunkard Creek is ready for game fish by 2012 or 2013. Should it fall to the DNR to incur the expense of restocking the stream? I don’t think so.

When a Norfolk Southern train derailed and spilled fish-killing chemicals into Pennsylvania’s Portage Run and Sinnemahoning Creek, the railroad paid $7.35 million to restore the streams to their previous condition

Strictly from a moral standpoint, Consol and DEP should foot the bill for any fish restoration efforts in Dunkard Creek, not the DNR. But there’s a problem with that; neither of them did anything that violated the letter of the law. Who, then, could make them pay?

Keep in mind that the DNR gets almost all its operating money through sales of hunting and fishing licenses. Again, should Dunkard’s anglers, having had a treasured resource wiped out through the joint mindlessness of a coal company and a government watchdog agency, be required to pay to repair the damage?

I think not.

There’s an old poem that suits this situation perfectly, and it goes like this:

“The law doth punish man or woman/who steals the goose from off the common,/but lets the greater felon loose/who steals the common from the goose.”

(Note to readers: Just minutes before getting a phone call from Jernejcic explaining the AP and Public Broadcasting misunderstanding, I put up a post quite different from this one. It was a blogger’s equivalent of going off half-cocked. I took down the previous post and replaced it with this one. So if you saw the previous post, now you know why it disappeared.)