Duwamish River: Should the cleanup make fish safe to eat regularly?
Officials are looking for public advice this week on how clean the water should be in the Seattle Superfund site, and at what price.
Paul Joseph Brown for InvestigateWest
Paul Joseph Brown for InvestigateWest
Picture 12,000 dump-truck loads of dirt, enough to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools. This dirt contains some pollution — but no one is really sure how much.
Swept downstream each year into Seattle’s biggest toxic-waste site, the Duwamish River, this mountain of dirt looms large as the public gets a chance this week to weigh in on how to clean up the part of the river set to be rehabilitated under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program.
Seattle, King County, The Boeing Co., and the Port of Seattle, all major polluters of the Duwamish over the years, have laid out 11 plans that aim to clean up decades of accumulated toxic goop in the river. To scoop out some of the mess and bury at least some of the rest beneath clean sand, gravel, and rock, the pricetags range from spending $230 million over 24 years to expending $1.3 billion over 43 years.
The most controversial issues are related: Does the river need to be so clean that people can eat seafood from it regularly? And if so, does that mean polluted rainwater runoff flowing off a massive area of south King County (and bringing with it at least some of those 12,000 truckloads of dirt) must be cleaned up at an even higher price?
All the plans on the table today would, eventually, make it safe for people to play on the banks of the Duwamish; for wild creatures to eat fish from it; and for clams and worms to live in the mud at the bottom without contamination. But none of the plans would make the river’s fish and crabs clean enough for people who live along its banks to eat on a regular basis. These people live in some of Seattle’s poorest neighborhoods.
“It’s the folks who are trying to put dinner on the table tonight who are most exposed and at risk,” said BJ Cummings, coordinator of the non-profit Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition. “It’s overwhelmingly low-income, tribal and immigrant and refugee fishing families.”
The local governments, Boeing, and the state and federal officials say they’re aiming to get the Duwamish as clean as other local waterways, such as Elliott Bay and Lake Washington — but nobody should be eating many fish out of those water bodies, either. The local governments and Boeing argue that the lower Duwamish River shouldn’t be held to a higher standard just because it was designated a Superfund site.
“We want to bring the risks down as low as we feasibly can,” said Dave Schuchardt, strategic advisor at Seattle Public Utilities. “There’s a feasible level of what you can get to.”
The five miles of the Duwamish at issue runs through the heart of Seattle’s largest concentration of industry. And many small and medium-sized businesses there, particularly those close to the water, wait anxiously to find out what the cleanup plan will mean for their bottom line, since many may be on the hook for past pollution.
In an unusual move, the EPA is asking the public for its opinion before the agency makes a tentative choice of a cleanup plan. On Tuesday (Dec. 7) and Thursday (Dec. 9) nights, EPA and the state Ecology Department are holding meetings where members of the public can have their say about how much cleanup is needed and at what cost. It will be a little over a year before the agencies tentatively pick a cleanup plan and again ask the public for its ideas.
Some of the Duwamish’s polluted dirt — or sediment, as it’s called under water — is thought to settle along the river’s final five miles above the West Seattle Bridge, the part of the river already classified as a Superfund site because it numbers among the nastiest pollution messes in the country. The rest is presumed to flow out to already-polluted Elliott Bay.
Where exactly the 12,000 truckloads of dirt — and the pollution it contains — is coming from each year is a bit of a mystery. The state Ecology Department tested the sediments in the bottom of the river for two miles upstream of the Superfund site and, with one exception, found them to be pretty darn clean, certainly no more polluted than river and bay bottoms elsewhere in cities around state.
However, when technicians tested the dirt actually floating in the river water, it proved to have considerably elevated pollution levels. Where is it coming from? That hasn’t yet been determined conclusively.
To Cummings, whose cleanup coalition of neighborhood groups, environmentalists, and representatives of local businesses and the Duwamish Indian Tribe was designated by EPA to represent community interests in the cleanup process, the fact that the pollution is in the water suggests it’s flowing in from areas upstream through stormwater — the nasty mix washed off streets and other hard surfaces by the rain.
The coalition is calling for cleaning up the stormwater upriver of the Superfund site so that poor people and tribal members can eat Duwamish seafood regularly. EPA officials say it’s unlikely people will be ever able to consume a lot of Duwamish seafood, even though that’s officially still their goal.
“We don’t see that in any urban area of Puget Sound,” said Allison Hiltner, the EPA’s point person on the cleanup. “That’s kind of the sad reality.”
The focus of the cleanup plans produced so far are four contaminants, all thought to promote cancer: PCBs, arsenic, dioxin, and a class of chemicals known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. Under the federal EPA’s rules, those could be left in place at levels that would be expected to produce an extra case of cancer for every 10,000 residents exposed over a lifetime.
But state law has a higher standard. It says toxic waste sites must be cleaned up 10 times as much, so that only one person in 100,000 exposed over a lifetime would contract cancer.
The plans on the table now would meet the federal requirements, but, significantly, the proposals would not meet the state’s mandates. That’s because of those 12,000 truckloads of dirt coming down the river each year, said officials at the city and the port.
And that’s means the current cleanup alternatives don’t satisfy the law, says Cummings of the Cleanup Coalition.“Suggesting that we’re going to do something less here is offering the fishermen in the Duwamish less than the protection under Washington state law,” she said.
Currently officials advise residents against eating any Duwamish seafood except salmon, which live in the river only briefly. Local governments and Boeing envision eventually allowing consumption of some of the fish, crabs, and other creatures in the river. They are promising that government would undertake significant efforts to warn residents about exactly how much is safe to eat. That could be problematic, though. Recent interviews by King County officials with people fishing along the river showed some mistakenly thought that cooking seafood would eliminate the pollution in it.
However, even under the 11 cleanup plans offered so far, the cancer risk to humans from eating Duwamish seafood is expected to be reduced by 90 percent, say Boeing and local, state, and federal officials. Most people, who might eat Duwamish seafood once in a while — if at all — would be protected. But tribal members and others in the community, particularly immigrants from Asian and the Pacific Islands, already eat seafood from the river even though they’re not supposed to. If the river is “cleaned up,” would they eat more?
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 9:25 a.m. Inappropriate
If the state doesn't fix the upstream contaminated dirt/water problem, there is very little point in fixing the downstream sediments, as new contaminates will just overlay the cleaned up river.
I also suspect that if the EPA bothered to look, it would find that runoff from streets from cars & trucks leaking oil & gas and road sealants in addition to "non point source pollution", ie pet fecal matter is also an issue. And the mis-use of lawn pesticides & herbicides are major contributors.
It's easy to point at industries like Boeing which dumped it's waste into the river but cleaning up all the other smaller sources is a major cultural change. That is to get homeowners to pull weeds instead of using herbicides, to not use pesticides and just live with some level of infestations where it's reasonable.
Putting storm drains into the sewer system to capture road wastes is going to be expensive, both because we'll have to upgrade the waste treatment plants, possibly building a new one, and dig everything up to connect it all.
In the very long run it will be worth it. Cities may end up being the new centers of political power, and may have to supply their own food as energy gets more expensive. A city like Seattle which could have a ready source of fish for eating will be successful if we can keep from poisoning that habitat.
And in the long run capturing these toxins before they become part of our food chain may give all of us a more cancer free life. I'd vote for that.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 10:30 a.m. Inappropriate
It is ridiculous to entertain the notion of Seattle producing its own food, Gary. If this is the mindset of the people in charge, we need to change the people in charge. Get folks a little more grounded in reality. Fact is, it is in the financial interests of the current players to set these ridiculous (unachievable) benchmarks; the problem is much more profitable than the solution! The broader community should take back the reins from the extremists who are currently driving us toward the cliff.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 1:21 p.m. Inappropriate
"It is ridiculous to entertain the notion of Seattle producing its own food"
If you pave over the most productive soil in the nation to build warehouses (Kent Green River Valley), poison the rivers (Duwamish), over fish the sound, cut all the timber on the slopes of the cascades, block all the streams with road culverts, it's ridiculous to think that this city has any long term future.
However it's not ridiculous to ask why do these self destructive things. Just where do you think your food is going to come from? The midwest is rapidly draining the Ogallala aquifer, depleting the soil with short term crop management.
What's ridiculous is to give away to private interests what is the public's assets. Short term thinking got us into this mess, some long term thinking might get us out.
Folks might remember that a large number of native people manged to live here for thousands of years without having to work 50hrs a week to do so. The motto here was once "When the tide's out, the table is set."
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 1:44 p.m. Inappropriate
So, one group of urban planners wants everyone living cheek-to-jowl in high-rise flats. Another group wants us to eat locally, hunting and gathering the beach and the berries. Is it any wonder social "planners" are losing credibility?
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 1:54 p.m. Inappropriate
Nope, no food here... just keep driving to your local grocery store where the magic food fairy drives up a truck load of stuff for you to buy.
http://juneautek.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/puget-sound-chum-fishery/
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 1:57 p.m. Inappropriate
Actually dense housing allows for local food production because all the land isn't in use for roads to drive from your living space to your work place and back. Walking & bicycling, the new healthier transit mode. These new urban planners are actually thinking alike.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 2:05 p.m. Inappropriate
Yes, Gary, they all do think alike.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 2:15 p.m. Inappropriate
Rather than have these planners "ideas" perpetrated on everyone (walking is the new healthy transportation mode!) maybe we ought to set aside a New Eden for these folks to live as lightly as they see fit. We could set aside a couple thousand acres. Everyone who volunteers for this utopia can live, unencumbered with the technological advances that burden the rest of us. No factory-farmed food: only what you can raise or strangle with your own two hands. No petroleum-based angst: walk from the cave to the beach to the privy-pit. It'll be great. Except you'll see 50% of your children die before they reach puberty. And you, yourself, will enjoy the life-expectancy of the good old days: you'll be dead by fifty (but, hey! that's GREEN!).
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 3:20 p.m. Inappropriate
Sorry, but in the city I want to live in, I would like to be able to eat the fish I catch. The Duwamish needs to be cleaned up, but as I mentioned in the first posting, there is no point in cleaning up the lower section if we don't capture the toxins being dumped in from the upper sections.
If folks like BlueLight like poisoned rivers, Ohio has plenty of places to live on industrial waste sites.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 3:42 p.m. Inappropriate
As for living the good life, some folks just don't get the chance. Who knows if the industrial pollutants in the Duwamish contributed to their shortend life but cancer took them early.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/seattletimes/obituary.aspx?n=cindy-lee-brovald&pid;=146915049
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/seattletimes/obituary.aspx?n=karen-frances-lilly&pid;=146915090
gotta love that factory farm food. yum yum.
http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2009/07/pig-shit-threatens-environment.html
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 3:51 p.m. Inappropriate
So do you practice what you preach, Gary? Or do you just preach? No factory farmed food for you
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 4:20 p.m. Inappropriate
BlueLight and GaryP,
Wow! Three deep breaths and time out in the corner for both of you ...
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 4:48 p.m. Inappropriate
Re: Food:
I'm not a radical about it but when I can tell where the food comes from, and am not being scammed, I buy non-factory farmed stuff. I can vote with my pocketbook and I do. I just don't understand why anyone would want to eat fish that is contaminated with industrial pollutants.
That said, it's not smart to clean up the lower Duwamish and not intercept the new pollution stream entering it. It's a waste of money.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 5:10 p.m. Inappropriate
Oh, and "factory farmed" there's factory farmed and then there's factory farmed. Farming is hard work that no one really wants to do. A factory allows folks to share in the labor, scale the problem so that things are efficient. The problem is when you get an accountant running a farm. Then you get a cost/benefit ratio for numbers of dead animals vs how much space each occupies, the number of anti-biotics injected in them to keep them alive.
Since corporations listen to one thing, money, I use mine to vote. It's not perfect but if enough people choose to reward companies that do it right, then the others will follow. Coupled with regulation to keep them from lying and foisting their pollution onto tax payers.
It's really not that hard once you decide to take charge of your life instead of whining that everybody else is forcing you to do something you don't want to do.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 8:03 p.m. Inappropriate
No one wants to eat fish contaminated with industrial waste, Gary.
No one wants anyone else to eat fish contaminated with industrial waste.
The proposed standard requires ensuringg an open-ended subsistence lifestyle (or payments, in lieu dontcha know!) to local indian tribes.
The issue is setting realistic environmental goals. And recognizing the environmental effects we ALL (yes, Virginia, even tribes) have on the land.
Pretending we can maintain a hunter/gatherer society alongside an industrialized society is not one.
Rather, it is a disingenuous skewing of the process to ensure:
1. Winners and losers. (Or payers and payees.) and
2. the perpetuation of the problem (thereby continuing the arrangements worked out in #1 above).
The current system is populated with extremist idealogues. I don't know whether you are one or just one of their dupes (there's a lot of those). Whatever, it is high time the middle of society (and there's a lot of them, too) woke up and wrestled governance and goal-setting back to a more realistic footing.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 9:03 p.m. Inappropriate
I fear that someday, perhaps not long off, the paving over of the best soils near Seattle will look like a very bad decision. The "food fairy trucks" not only depend on cheap oil themselves, but so does the whole infrastructure of converting calories of fossil fuel into calories of food - very inefficiently at that.
People will look back on our failure to plan and act for the end of cheap oil as possibly the most monumental folly of all time. We've printed countless dollars to "pay" for wars. Don't expect the rest of the world, which is where the oil comes from, to trade oil for them much longer.
It will likely be one helluvan unpleasant awakening. I rather doubt that we will have the resources to really clean up a place like the Duwamish, though we should definitely do what we can. Thank God the Snoqualmie and Skagit valleys haven't yet been entirely paved over. Expect to see people growing much more food there in future, along with many other less well suited upland areas as well. Let's hope there is still fuel enough to run some tractors.
Posted Tue, Dec 7, 9:27 p.m. Inappropriate
There are higher levels of contaminants in the Duwamish that we can and should address. About 90% of the human health risk can be addressed by cleaning up contaminated sediments and reducing pollution sources that contribute directly to the site. The level of pollution coming in from the Green River is small by comparison. The entire Puget Sound has low levels of contamination. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Tackle the worst problems first. Then we can argue about how sustainable our lifestyle is or ought to be and what changes we can choose to make.
Posted Wed, Dec 8, 9:15 a.m. Inappropriate
Kitsap county has a web page about non-point source pollution.
http://www.naturallandscapes.org/content/protecting_water/protectingwater.htm
Pouring clean dirt and gravel on top of the mud in the Duwamish without addressing the upstream sources of pollution is a waste of money. The PCP's are embedded in the mud and should be left there. Digging them up will spread them further out into the sound. And the science to show that they are dangerous to our health is not there. (The research was done on the PCP's dumped by GE into the Hudson.) It's better to let them lie under the mud.
We would clean this river up better if we spent the money on trapping the storm drain runnoff and cleaning that before dumping it back into the river.
Posted Wed, Dec 8, 10:55 a.m. Inappropriate
GaryP
Oh, and "factory farmed" there's factory farmed and then there's factory farmed. Farming is hard work that no one really wants to do.
Not so, lots of people love to farm.
They do it good, and they provide food cheap to help support your life style.
and sustainable
Posted Wed, Dec 8, 11 a.m. Inappropriate
"Kitsap county has a web page about non-point source pollution."
Kitsap County also has $42 million in bad debt for speculating on high-end condominiums. I know Kitsap is a member-in-good-standing with the regional Democratic Party lockstep, but I don't know that citizens should look to them as experts on anything.
Posted Wed, Dec 8, 2:31 p.m. Inappropriate
GaryP, let me help you with some facts:
1) Pentachlorophenol (PCP) is not the major contaminant of concern. I expect you meant polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. And let's not forget that there are other contaminants driving risks to people and wildlife at the site, including arsenic and dioxins.
2) The literature on health and environmental effects of PCBs is extensive and is not limited to the Hudson River. The Hudson is much much more contaminated than the Duwamish, fortunately for all of us living here.
3) The substantial amount of data collected at the site and upstream show that there are high concentrations from historical discharges within the site and that ongoing stormwater contributions and input from the Green River are much smaller. Work on both of these types of sources is ongoing. The final cleanup plan will address both types of sources.
4) Leaving contaminants in the mud is a viable strategy only if exposures can be controlled; it is not viable for the hot areas in the Duwamish.
5) Dredging can result in mobilizing some contamination, but these effects can be minimized and are temporary. Leaving hot sediment in place results in greater risk.
6) Focusing on low levels in stormwater rather than the high levels in the sediments is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing because the higher sediment contamination continues to have significant effects on the food chain.
Posted Wed, Dec 8, 3:37 p.m. Inappropriate
The risks of leaving the toxins in the mud are mainly to the bottom dwelling fish, English Sole, Sand Dabs and immobile bi-valves like clams. Crabs can leave, and it's not clear there have been any studies showing concentrations in crabs caught near the mouth of the river. Salmon migrate and don't spend much time there. Gray whales which would eat the bottom fish and clams don't live there because there is too much human activity.
Sorry, yes I did mean PCB's. Dredging is not temporary, because it moves the concentrations out into the greater Puget Sound where they will be nearly impossible to recover. The old navy slogan, "The solution to pollution is dilution" does not apply well here. No one is talking about temporary dams to divert the river while we remove the hot dirt.
Low levels of toxins in storm water over long periods of time, do build up in the sediments. And not all toxins are created equal, ie some are much more lethal in small quantities than others.
From a paper published in 2009 in Environmental Toxicology:
"The data indicate that dietary PCB exposure, even at relatively high levels, did not have a significant effect on growth, innate disease resistance, or acquired immunity to L. anguillarum. The controlled laboratory experiments in this study suggest that the immune system of Chinook salmon is not sensitive to orally delivered PCBs at environmentally relevant concentrations."
vs
http://ca.water.usgs.gov/sanj/pub/usgs/wrir98-4017/wrir98-4017.pdf
Posted Wed, Dec 8, 3:54 p.m. Inappropriate
Given the process that's taken place out there, I would've guessed the contaminant was, in fact, PCP.
Posted Thu, Dec 9, 6:06 p.m. Inappropriate
Setting aside all the "I know more than you," a mere innocent slogging there way through this has to wonder if you'd back off from assuming criticism emanating from the extreme you love to hate, you'd see that one "side" is talking about valid stuff that only organized efforts can manage and the other "side" is talking about valid individual activities that if, yes, both "sides" backed off from their own intolerances, they could dialogue for the commonalities that inform and spark the coming to public judgment required to moderate harmful activities in the long term (Gary started off with a few) and make genuinely positive activities second nature.
Speaking of out pollution relative to that of the land of the Hudson and its mid and highrise apartments where farming the air is the boxed-in option now championed with the cry "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"—give me a break, at least the hippies had the good sense to farm the good earth. This too will pass. What endures is nature getting the last laugh.
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