Seattle's water is Bellingham's wishful drinking

Here's a tip for consumers who have doubts about the quality and security of Seattle's tap water: Think of Bellingham. It won't improve your drinking water, but you might feel better about it.

Here in Bellingham, we swim in our drinking water. So do our water-loving dogs. Boats are all over our drinking water, with all kinds of motors, except for the old fashioned two-stroke that lays an oil plume you can see, and those were banned only a couple of years ago.

The 75,000 citizens of this most congenial city drink from Lake Whatcom, as do another 20,000 or so in the suburban service areas. Bellingham controls land use in only a small portion of its water source; the rest lies in unincorporated Whatcom County. That's where large areas of undeveloped watershed offer potential riches to developers and potentially huge phosphorous loads for the drinking water.

Thirteen thousand already live near the edges of Lake Whatcom, on 3,600 acres. Some are still using septic tanks. Current zoning would permit 6,800 more acres to be developed, allowing the watershed population to grow to about 28,000. That would mean new land being cleared, thousands more lawns draining fertilizer, thousands more pets doing what pets do.

It's instructive to compare this with the way Seattle runs the Cedar and Tolt river drainages that supply water to the city and most of King County. Seattle's watersheds are fenced and locked. You may look at the Cedar River landscape from July 11 to Sept. 9, from a sightseeing bus that runs three days a week out of North Bend. (e-mail for reservations or call 206-233-1515.) But you can't hike in there, or camp or boat.

As the result of a lawsuit settled two years ago, Seattle allows the Muckleshoot tribe to hunt and fish on the Cedar, under a highly restrictive agreement. That's it for public access. The Tolt watershed, acquired much later than the Cedar, is less pristine but just as tightly locked.

Not that today's Bellingham officials wouldn't like that kind of protection for their water source. They're working on it. On May 19, the City Council imposed, at the urging of Mayor Dan Pike, an emergency moratorium on all subdivisions or development on Bellingham's portion of the lake. That stops 150, maybe 200 new dwelling units. The city has also spent $16 million to buy up 1,341 acres of undeveloped land to keep it undeveloped.

But today's green-minded Bellinghamsters came on the scene about 50 years late. When the city started pumping water from Lake Whatcom in the mid-20th century, it was already a nice recreation lake and a magnet for boaters and homebuilders. It has grown itself into a nice dilemma that will cost un-guessable millions to solve.

Recently the Washington Department of Ecology turned a high pressure hose on Bellingham and Whatcom County. Full in the face, no softening agents added. Ecology told city and county staff they must cut by 74 percent the effective acreage of development in the Lake Whatcom watershed. Seventy-four percent. That's like rolling back the history of this community to some point in the 1960s.

"No, we can't tell them to remove any homes from around the lake," says Katie Skipper, communications manager for Ecology in the Bellingham region. "But they will have to put the watershed in such a condition that the landscape acts as though 74 percent of the existing development wasn't there."

In a report, the department lays out, for the first time, a direct mathematical link between the acres of developed land in a watershed and the amount of phosphorous that flows downhill in storm water. The phosphorous feeds algae in the lake. The algae produce organic carbons that, treated with chlorine (used to disinfect water here, as everywhere else), form compounds that have the potential to cause cancer.

It's a vicious circle: As the algae die, they feed bacteria that rob the water of oxygen. The lower the oxygen content, the more phosphorous is released from bottom sediments in the lake, feeding still more algae. It's what scientists call a "positive feedback," and it adds to the devilish difficulty of reversing the growth of algae, according to Robin Matthews of Huxley College of the Environment in Bellingham. She directs an annual scientific state-of-the-lake study and for more than 18 years has been warning anyone who'll listen of the lake's worsening condition.

Bellingham's reservoir is still well within the safety level set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for drinking water, Matthews says, "But we're headed in the wrong direction." She predicts a long and very difficult turnaround. "It's taken 18 years to get to the point where almost everyone's convinced of the soundness of the data," she says. "It'll take decades more to solve the problem."