NO ONE CARES ABOUT POLLUTED STORMWATER !!!! Just ask Norm Rice, Gary Locke, Christine Gregoire , Greg Nickels, Larry Phillips etc., they are all for process, not progress.

If our government did, they would have used my enviro-drain stormwater filters to prevent pollution from entering catch basins and required businesses to use them as well, instead they charge homeowners and businesses Fees, while allowing pollution to go unchecked.

For 2 decades I have pleaded with our government officials to stop the flow of contaminants entering catch basins. Every city in Western Washington HAS tried the enviro-drain stormwater filters.

Here are a couple examples of the State and Cities being in denial. First is the Department of Transportation(WADOT) where the author of the article Mr MacDonald worked. DOT purchased 25 of our filters to install along Chinook Hwy. to protect salmon spawning habitat. These filters retrofit the catch basins that allow water to enter through the catch basin grate and flow through a series of filters to remove petroleum products and sediments. The oily runoff attaches itself to sediments and heavy metals while flowing toward the catch basin. Catch the oil, you catch the other pollutants, seems simple.

DOT installs our filters along the Highway in Chinook after the completion of the road improvement, its October during a rain event. I get a call from the Head Hancho at DOT telling me my filters are clogged. Knowing that my filters have a built in overflow in case my filters clogged with pollutants I mentioned to WADOT that can't be, but I will be right there to check it out. After a 4 hour drive down to Chinook I meet with 4 WADOT workers. They are standing over a catch basin with a pool of water ponding around the catch basin. I asked the Supervisor what the problem was? He says your filter is clogged! I used my boots to brush away the leaves surrounding the catch basin and the water goes down the drain and is filtered through my filter system. In that 4 hour commute to go meet with WADOT they had already called the Head Office and spread false information about our filters being clogged. Trying to stop the rumor was impossible, needless to say it was the perfect storm for WADOT to look the other way.

Next example was with the City of Kirkland. We installed an enviro-drain filter in a parking lot catch basin approximately 100 yards from Lake Washington. This parking lot holds at the most 50 cars. With the City of Kirkland's permission we installed the filter for one year and to be maintained every 30 days to give the City to examine the effectiveness of the filter. My one request with every municipality is they pay for the testing of the spent filter medium so we know how to dispose of the contaminated filter material. We test for oil and heavy metal content.
After 30 days I removed the filter while the City observed, collected a sample and sent it to a lab. The filter material was tested at 8,000 parts per million(PPM).

After the samples were tested I went to the City of Kirkland's Public Works Director with the findings. His response was "we don't have a problem".

I mentioned to him that 8,000 PPM is so toxic it can't go in a landfill, it has to be incinerated. I mentioned, how can you say you don't have a problem when the tests show it contained over 8,000 PPM of petroleum especially since this oil drains straight to Lake Washington?

Needless to say, I notified Department of Ecology and their response was the same,,,,THEY DON'T CARE! Yet, government keeps adding Fees to deal with their monopolistic mentality.

So Mr. MacDonald,,,, is your point to jab us taxpayers for more bureaucracy and fees with your scare tactics?

Just imagine if our State had implemented filters for storm drains 20 years ago? Clean lakes, streams, rivers and Puget Sound, not to mention sustainable jobs in the private sector to manufacture and maintain the filters.

Instead we are stuck with a bloated stormwater management government fiasco that has hundreds of worthless bureaucrats pointing fingers at taxpayers that they need more money to study stormwater to the death of Puget Sound. We won't have progress in cleaning up stormwater pollution because no one has the spine to address the real issue.

One more thing Mr. MacDonald, the plume of brown in Puget Sound is exerbated by the oil going down a storm drain and sticking to the banks of rivers, creeks, and streams making the soil erode, because oil floats it sticks to the surface contacts along the creeks, streams and rivers and carries dirt with it.

One more point to add to Salmon Jim's comments.

Storm water runoff is not an average flow rate problem. When summer & early fall rains after a period of dry conditions bring down pollutants, they bring down highly concentrated stuff. Then can impact juvenile salmon which have recently hatched. It's a doubling of the impact.

And I care. I ride a bike to work, and after a ride in the rain, my gear is coated in a fine black sludge which appears to come from the road and not the sky. This is even in the winter when it rains daily and the pollutants should be at their least ppm.

Also there have been years of studies of the bottom fish at the mouth of the Duwamish. Many of them have lesions and should not be eaten. AFAIK, the rate of diseased fish has not gotten better over the years even with the cleanup.

Here's the link to the enviro-drain system.

http://www.enviro-drain.com/

"His product does remove a lot of contaminants that go into a catch basin extremely well. We were interested in seeing how well these would work. Seattle, Bellevue and other cities sponsored two different research studies on these and other [filters], and found that they work really well for a week or two or up to a month. Then they have to be maintained -- to remove the filter media and the dirt they contained. "With 32,000 in the city, that would be an awesome task." "

I love this complaint! The filters catch so much stuff, we have to go out and change the filters! Can you imagine that? Having to clean a filter because it caught the stuff it intended to catch?

I might as well take my furnace filter out, because it catches so much dirt I have to replace it every month or so. If I didn't have that filter, I wouldn't have to do that much work.

No problem, Norm. The ends justify the means when it comes to environmental advocacy. So long as the... uh... exaggeration passed a fews regs and tax increases (and helped local lock-steppers do the same) it served its purpose. Hyperbole is modus operandi.

How many "green" jobs have the people been promised over the past several years?

Very interesting article!

I think there is an interesting lesson here though. The reporter who used the 'Exxon Valdez' as a measurement did understand something crucially important - it is the need to use image, metaphor and even symbol to communicate the challenges faced by the environment and engage the public imagination. This has to be done responsibly and without dumbing the topic down.

Yet, much environmental writing does suffer from an overly Cartesion, juiceless factuality that fails to provide an overall gestalt for the public especially when information is so often fragmentary and disconnected. The facts are important but must be provided in a more generous overall context.

And so a former Wsdot director who abusively mismanaged a ruinously controversial highway replacement project in Seattle and left his post like a rat deserting a sinking ship, is demoted to the Department of Greenwash.

"Thank you, waiter. I'd love a dollop of petroleum byproduct in my glass of water. Delightful and refreshing! And you say this lovely Duwamish salmon steak tested positive for nutritious toxins? Delicious!"

Doug -- Very interesting piece. I think everyone would agree that having better information is always a benefit when making decisions. The framing of the problem seems to fall victim to human nature. It's harder to get people to do something about long term chronic issues than it is a sudden catastrophic event. Framing storm water runoff as an Exxon Valdez spill was, in part, a way to get people to notice what was happening. Even now, there is more energy in the legislature devoted to BP Gulf type oil spills in Puget Sound then the constant, chronic, and damaging issue you describe so thoughtfully. Why?

SalmonJim proves his point: Crosscut neglects to give SalmonJim's comment a "shout out."

Cars have gotten far cleaner in the past decade, or two. And not just because they keep getting more and more miles per gallon of gasoline.

Cars now leak very little motor oil onto streets, compared to in the past. My ten-year-old 2001 Ford does not leak oil at all. I never have to add oil between oil changes, and I have the oil changed every 5,000 miles. In every other car I have driven before this one, I had to add at least one or more quarts of oil between oil changes because they leaked oil.

Also, most modern cars no longer need to be lubricated. You used to always get a "lube, oil, filter" when your car needed an oil change. There were lube fittings on all the bearings and joints under the cars, which needed to have grease added at every oil change. And this heavy lubricating grease would also leak out of the fittings and onto the streets. New cars no longer have grease fittings, and no longer need to be "lubed." They are just sealed extremely well, so the grease never leaks out.

So, I would be curious to know how much oil and grease leaks out of new cars every 10,000 miles compared to cars built 10, 20, or 30 years ago. I expect that the amount of oil and grease being leaked onto streets now is much less than a couple of decades ago, and will continue to decline as older cars are scrapped and replaced with new, cleaner cars.

Also, I'm pretty sure brake pads no longer include asbestos, which they contained a couple decades ago.

So what exactly is the story here? The best that I can tell is that the story is that the scientific process seems to work and that media specialists have a really difficult time communicating that to the public.

There really is no surprise to that. The scientific process is nuanced and not easily compressed into soundbites. And unless the issue has a serious impact to people's lives, they are not willing to put the time and effort into understanding or communicating those nuances.

The unfortunate state of Washington state politics these days is that the catchy soundbite is the only way to obtain funding for important science-based policy actions. We all know that the increased population in the Puget Sound area and the increased development have put pressures on water quality. It may not be directly due to pollution from automobiles but it is due to the sprawl and development that the automobile culture enables. I can't fault Ecology for using the catchy soundbite to raise awareness to the issue if it is the only way to fund the necessary mitigation. It certainly seems that our broken ideological political process does not have the capability to understand the complexities of scientific problems.

So how are we going to pay for the needed mitigation of polluted waterways? MacDonald doesn't provide an answer; he seems more willing to point out faults than offer solutions. But given that growth and sprawl are the cause, it seems perfectly reasonable to use revenue from the sale of gasoline and pesticides would be appropriate to fund such projects.

"We all know that the increased population in the Puget Sound area and the increased development have put pressures on water quality."

Do we? Researchers at Oregon State University have reported the NUMBER ONE THREAT to PNW salmon and their habitats is immigration into the region; the vast majority of which comes from outside the U.S. and Canada. Our ruling Democratic Party; however, holds immigrants (including illegals) as a valued constituency and; therefore, disallows conversations about their ecologic impacts. The Puget Sound Partnership, which functions as a Political Action Committee for The Party does not even mention immigration in their Action Agenda.

The simple fact is that we - as a society - cannot have our cake and eat it, too. So, shackled by political-correctness (and political alliance) it "seems perfectly reasonable" to tax gasoline, pesticides and other symptoms of a bigger cause. Until we address the issue of growth - beyond attempts to geographically condense it (irrespective of where one lives; one still eats, drinks, pees, poops, etc.) - we will continue to see higher costs for disingenuous failing policies.

BlueLight has finally hit upon something! We need to impose passport restrictions on migrant Salmon! Yes those pesky Canadian Salmon from the Fraiser River valley that get lost and head up to Baker Lake or Lake Washington or up the Columbia must be stopped!

The simple fact is that population increases in the PNW are mostly due to those of us who are here, having children. So funding for Planned Parenthood should be increased not decreased.

Washington State's Office of Financial Management estimates that between 2010 and 2030 "natural increase" (births-deaths) will add 754,301 to the state's population. Over that same time, they estimate "migration" will add 979,199 to the state's population.

http://www.ofm.wa.gov/pop/race/projections/

As a reporter based in the state Legislature, I want to say that McDonald is on to something here -- perhaps one of the most disturbing stories to come out of state politics in recent years. I started to catch on a couple of months ago, and all I can say is that I wish McDonald hadn't beaten me to the writing. But what happened is more dramatic than I think his story conveys.

Fundamentally flawed Department of Ecology studies were used to justify one of the biggest environmental crusades Olympia has seen. The math mistakes should have been obvious -- and actually, they were caught relatively quickly and corrected. Yet for the last three years, these discredited claims were used by the environmental community and state officials to justify a whopping tax on oil refiners. Anyone at the state Capitol over the last three years can testify to the fact that the "stormwater tax" has been one of the biggest issues before the Legislature. And if the whole thing seems a bit arcane, you have to remember that it would have boosted gasoline prices for everyone in the state.

This is an issue that has been debated in the "pages" of Crosscut many, many times.

This is the point I find startling. The Department of Ecology issued its "addendums" to its reports in April 2009 and January 2010. This is where the massive back-tracking occurred. Yet somehow the "scientific world" never communicated with the "political world," and so the Legislature continued to debate the issue all last session in complete ignorance of the facts. If there had been one more vote for the stormwater bill in the Senate, it would be law by now.

I became aware of this issue in February of this year, because of an oblique comment during a legislative hearing. Josh Baldi, special assistant to the director of the Department of Ecology, warned legislators not to base policy decisions regarding taxation on the Ecology studies. And I had to wonder -- after all the debate of the last couple of years, why on earth would he say that?

I began to poke around, found out the truth. Meanwhile the stormwater bill this year fizzled and died for murky reasons that were distantly related -- and well, in a year like this one, there are a thousand other more immediate things to write about. The problems with the Ecology studies got their only real public airing at the Capitol at a public forum March 23 that, alas, was not taped by TVW.

Like any well-meaning reporter I meant to write something about it when I had the time -- a big, complicated story that doesn't fit into the routine of daily newsbeats. That's why I kicked myself when I saw this piece a couple of days ago. There's a heckuva lot more to the story, about the way false "scientific" claims somehow became fact when policy people got their hands on them.

Anyway, kudos to McDonald for getting the story first. Meanwhile, here's my take -- my punchline is a bit different. If anything I think he's too genteel. The blunder here was pretty unbelievable.

http://www.washingtonstatewire.com/home/9063-the_‘big_oil’_problem_that_wasn’t_–_mistaken_department_of_ecology_study_was_basis_for_three_year_stormwater_crusade.htm

Erik Smith
Washington State Wire