Commencement Bay Cleans Up
"Having passed round the point, we found the inlet to terminate here in an extensive, circular, compact bay whose waters washed the base of Mount Rainier . . . The forest trees, and the several shades of verdure that covered the hills gradually decreased in point of beauty until they became invisible . . . the whole producing a most grand, picturesque effect." - George Vancouver at Commencement Bay, May 16, 1792
To Vancouver and his crew of Englishmen, the sheer scale of Mount Rainier was beyond comprehension. The captain figured the base of the mountain was just beyond the "circular, compact bay" on which he floated. Archibald Menzies, the expedition's scientist, guessed it to be "10 to 12 leagues off" - about 30 miles.
In reality, it is 45 miles. Whatever the distance, they were captivated by what Menzies called the "most beautiful and majestic mountain of great elevation, whose line of ascent appeared equally smooth and gradual on every side, with a round obtuse summit covered with perpetual snow."
Two centuries later, we sail on an ebb tide from South Puget Sound through the Tacoma Narrows and around Point Defiance. To the southeast, the mountain is enveloped in meteorological concrete. Still, we drift for a while just off the point, comparing our view with Vancouver's engraving of Commencement Bay lapping at the base of Mount Rainier. No question: The scene was sketched from within a few feet of Point Defiance.
Today, however, the focus of the picture is not The Mountain. It is The Mill. For decades, the huge pulp mill at the mouth of the Puyallup River loomed over Commencement Bay like a grim, medieval castle, its towering smokestacks serving as symbols of a sick Puget Sound. The mill belched smoke and steam that produced the legendary "Aroma of Tacoma," and spewed a witch's brew of pollutants into the bay, helping put Commencement Bay at the top of the federal government's list of toxic-waste hot spots.
Today, as we tour the site, Commencement Bay is in the midst of a comeback. The arsenic plant across the bay has disappeared. Tacoma has renovated much of its waterfront. And this once-notorious mill, which produces 1,200 tons a day of pulp used mostly for packaging, is now deemed one of the heroes.
"It's a real success story," says Allison Hiltner, Superfund manager for the Environmental Protection Agency. "In fact, it is one of the first sites in the country to be partially deleted from the Superfund list."
How this occurred may hold some lessons for shaping the future of Puget Sound, says Dave McEntee, environmental manager at Simpson Tacoma Kraft. McEntee is a friendly, clean-cut biologist who looks like he should be teaching high-school biology and coaching the tennis team.
He cheerfully walks us through the sprawling 55-acre plant, which is not a pretty sight.
But that was never the point. Puget Sound's pulp mills are classic examples of what Capt. Vancouver foresaw as the "industry of man" that would tame this soggy Pacific Northwest wilderness. Waterfront sites made it easy to acquire the softwood logs, then to ship the product to markets. Early in this century, Puget Sound's shore was home to hundreds of pulp, paper and sawmills. Tacoma's mill was the largest, and one of the oldest.
But the mills were also prime targets of the popular uprising against water pollution in the 1970s and 1980s. Reducing logs to pulp and paper generates huge volumes of effluent - woody waste mixed with water and various chemicals. While that waste is mostly organic, feeding the microscopic plankton that live in sea water, it also tends to over-fertilize and throw the ecosystem out of balance. Worse still, when Seattle-based Simpson Timber bought the aging mill in 1985, it learned that the mill's effluent also included dangerous quantities of copper and phenols not usually found in pulp waste. "Big problems," says McEntee.
So Simpson met with its neighbors and critics, and went to work. The company attacked its air emissions by upgrading its gas-collection system throughout the mill, reducing emissions by more than 90 percent, McEntee says. Meanwhile, it agreed to cut production, if necessary, to achieve agreed-upon standards. Water pollution was curtailed by recycling the lignin, the natural "glue" in the raw wood; the stuff is now isolated and burned to generate 75 percent of the mill's power needs. And the mill's waste outfall, which had dumped millions of gallons of pollutants onto the beach, was extended 600 feet out into deep water, where it is not considered a problem.
Still, those things did nothing to address 80 years of putrid residue already lying on the bottom off the bay just offshore from the plant. After studying the alternatives, Simpson and environmental officials agreed on a novel strategy. They would not dredge and remove those poisoned sediments, for fear of disturbing the toxins and creating new problems. Instead they would cap them, dumping clean, new sediments on top of the old. Using clean mud from the nearby Puyallup River, they created a new bottom spanning 17 acres of the bay, the cap ranging from 6 to 40 feet deep. Of the 17 acres, seven are new "intertidal habitat" - mud flats, complete with rocks and contours that are dry at low tide and submerged at high tide, thereby recreating a "a nursery area," McEntee says, for juvenile salmon and other marine life.
That was in 1988. Ten years later, the company celebrated it success. . McEntee walked us down to the seawall to show off the results. Near low tide, it resembled what Vancouver might have seen two centuries ago. The imported rocks are encrusted with barnacles, the mud flats strewn with shiny orange bull kelp. A harbor seal patrols deeper water and a great blue heron struts across the flats, scouring the shallows for fish.
"We added contours and tide pools and texture," says McEntee. "The idea was basically, `Build it and they will come.' And they came! Our sampling shows a natural bottom-dwelling community that looks healthy. There are adult salmon feeding in the shallows. We find dungeness crab, shrimp, copepods . . ."
Simpson's success has been noted elsewhere. Several toxic sites in Seattle's Elliott Bay have been capped in recent years. Similar projects are under way as far away as New York City's harbor.
"Capping is pretty low-tech," says Hiltner of the EPA. "But Commencement Bay tells us that, in the right environment, it works. Marine organisms are happy to recolonize in new sediments."
The cleanup of Commencement Bay is far from finished, she adds. Work at nearby sites such as the Thea Foss Waterway and the Hylebos Waterway has barely begun. And most private companies are reluctant, or unable, to spend the $250 million Simpson says it has spent on new technology, cleanup and restoration.
McEntee points out that restoring the 17 acres of habitat was the cheapest item on the list - about $5 million. The other expenses made the operation more efficient as well as cleaner.
Most of Puget Sound's mills failed because they were inefficient, he says. "It had little or nothing to do with the environmental costs. The successful companies today are the ones that take a long-term view. And a lot of companies outside the Northwest haven't learned that."
As we resume Vancouver's route up Colvos Passage, I wonder what makes the difference on Commencement Bay. Is it a simple question of environmental virtue, of good guys and bad guys? Of long and short-term perspectives? Is it as simple as seeing the mountain on a cloudy day, or calculating its distance on a clear one? Maybe we'll find some clues in Elliott Bay, Seattle's front door and our next port of call.
