Detoxifying the Duwamish
The Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)
March 19, 2006 Sunday
Sunrise Edition
KAYLA WEBLEY
The Oregonian
SEATTLE –Huge puffs of steam rise from the Lafarge North America cement plant. A barge at a nearby shipping yard gets packed with building supplies, food and cars bound for Alaska. Trucks rumble by on muddy roads hauling wares in and out of the working waterfront on Seattle’ extreme south end.
Just a few blocks away, the small South Park neighborhood –one of the city’s poorest areas –holds its own in what has become an industrial wasteland on the bank of the lower Duwamish River.
Some houses are just feet from the river’s edge. When the weather gets warmer, children play in the dirty sand or pile in inner tubes and head to the water.
This is the kind of place that Gov. Chris Gregoire is targeting in a wide-ranging plan to clean up Puget Sound, the 90-mile inner arm of the Pacific that encompasses four of Washington state’s largest cities.
Work on the Duwamish –in the heart of Seattle’s industrial core –is under way and serves as an example of what state leaders hope will happen elsewhere around the Sound.
The Legislature just approved $52.4 million for more than 20 additional cleanup projects from Commencement Bay in Tacoma to Bellingham Bay –$10 million more than Gregoire requested.
The Duwamish highlights the urgency of the overall initiative to scrape up or cap toxic sediments throughout the region. The federal government put the river’s lower reaches on its Superfund list of the nation’s most contaminated sites in 2001. The sediment is laden with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, mercury and other deposits from the city’s historic heavy industries.
“The area is clearly a threat to the environment and human health,” said Rick Huey, the state Department of Ecology’s project manager for the Duwamish cleanup.
“The fact that people fish in the river, the nearby tribes use the river and the residents in the area raised our concern on the human health side more than an area farther away from human life would.”
Public warnings
In South Park, every public access point to the waterway has warnings about contaminated fish and other marine life written in multiple languages, including Spanish for the mostly Latino residents.
The Department of Ecology holds an annual community gathering to warn people about the danger in their backyard. About 5,000 people live in the neighborhood of apartment buildings and houses lining one side of the Duwamish as it empties into the Sound.
The Duwamish looks nothing like it used to. Wetlands once lined the free-flowing river on either side. But by the early 1920s, it was confined into a straight channel, with excess mud from digging the 50-foot-deep waterway dumped on either side, creating uplands and islands.
Industry thrived then on the Duwamish: chemical plants, slaughterhouses, steel mills, food processing plants, asphalt facilities, and log and rail yards are among the obvious contributors to some of the contamination in years past.
The area is still home to shipyards, Boeing manufacturing plants and cement plants, but they must follow strict environmental regulations that have helped curb pollution.
Today, the upper five-mile stretch of the Duwamish shows no signs of significant contamination. The problem is the last 5.5 miles before it reaches the Sound.
The worst deposits are PCBs, commonly used years ago as coolants and lubricants in transformers, capacitors and other electrical equipment. They break down extremely slowly, said Allison Hiltner, the Environmental Protection Agency’s project manager for the Duwamish cleanup. PCBs have been linked to cancer and other health problems, and their use has been banned in the United States since 1977.
The Duwamish also has other toxins, including mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, commonly found in coal, tar, crude oil and creosote, and phthalates, substances used to make vinyl and plastic flexible.
Overflow from sewage pipes and more than 100 storm drains also often runs directly into the Duwamish during heavy rains.
Targeting hot spots
Government agencies have been well aware of the Duwamish pollution since the 1970s. The Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Ecology, the Port of Seattle and Boeing are working together on the Superfund cleanup.
The Department of Ecology identified seven known hot spots on the river, or as Huey put it –no brainers for cleanup. The agencies also are doing a study to pinpoint other contamination in the lower Duwamish and determine how extensive it is.
So far, Seattle and King County have paid $8 million to dredge up contaminated sediment at one of the seven sites, and two more are set for similar dredging within the next two years. Once the study is complete, dredging will begin at the rest of the sites. Some contaminated sediment isn’t in danger of shifting, so it will be covered with clean soil and left as-is.
Six-year South Park resident Bill Pease said he’s glad the neighborhood is finally getting some serious attention, but he’s gotten used to taking precautions.
“Most of us would like to see the river cleaned up, of course, but it’s not like we live in fear,” Pease said. “So long as we’re not swimming or walking in the river or eating things that are walking around the bottom of the river, it is not an immediate threat to our health.”
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