Elliott Bay: What's Our Cleanup Strategy?
"The men remained in their canoes, bartering their bows and arrows, garments and a very few indifferent sea-otter skins. . . . These they exchanged in a very fair and honest manner for copper, hawk's bells and buttons. . . . Their merchandise would have been infinitely more valuable to us had it been comprised of edibles such as venison, wild fowl or fish, as our sportsmen and fishermen had little success in these pursuits." - Capt. George Vancouver, May 21, 1792, near West Seattle
Vancouver never found his way into Seattle's bay. Must have been the traffic. Instead, they anchored off the southern tip of Bainbridge Island, where the crew went to work. Some set off on small-boat explorations or felled trees to be fashioned into new spars for His Majesty's Ship Discovery. Still others engaged in friendly commerce with the natives, trading buttons and beads for bows and arrows and, if they were lucky, food.
Two centuries later, we sail the sloop Velella into an Elliott Bay ruled by a higher level of commerce - hundreds of human enterprises, large and small, ranging from world-class shipyards and cement plants to marinas and seafood restaurants. The effects on Puget Sound - docks, bulkheads, huge landfills, sewers, pollution and more - could hardly be more profound. Elliott Bay bears little resemblance to what Vancouver viewed from afar.
B.J. Cummings' job is to check that dramatic rate of change. As an environmental organizer who works for Seattle's nonprofit Puget Soundkeepers Alliance, she leads a team of volunteer kayakers, scuba divers, lawyers and other self-styled pollution vigilantes, tracking down polluters and blowing the whistle on them.
Cummings steps aboard the Velella carrying the tools of her trade - a plastic crate full of files and documents and a pair of binoculars. We have invited her aboard to guide us through the ecological inferno of Elliott Bay and the lower Duwamish River. For the next three hours, we cruise the industrial waterfront, Cummings pointing to the shipyards and cement plants and sewer outfalls that the Soundkeepers have caught dumping illegally.
"There are 24 Superfund sites here," she says as we enter the lower Duwamish River. "The Port of Seattle promises to clean them up, but we'll be watching that very closely."
Yet. in 1998, the alliance reported that half the Puget Sound companies that hold government permits to discharge pollutants exceeded their legal limits, that a third of those violators are repeat offenders and that fewer than 10 percent were fined for their violations.
In Seattle the risk is not just biological. A recent King County study shows that thousands of people fish in Elliott Bay for Dungeness crab and other bottom-dwelling seafood. Like other shellfish, crab tend to accumulate toxic chemicals in their tissues - a health risk to people. People will not put up with this, Cummings says. When companies resist, the alliance has been known to file lawsuits. More frequently, they rely on the threat of publicity and environmental outrage to enforce the laws. "Our greatest ally is public opinion," she says. "Public opinion will take us where we want to go."
Lincoln Loehr is a trained oceanographer who monitors Puget Sound from a very different perspective - high in the Columbia Tower, where he works as an environmental analyst for a local law firm. The Soundkeeper concept works by drawing attention to polluters, he says. But public opinion is a poor substitute for good science. In principle at least, nobody would argue with that. In practice, however, science sometimes collides head-on with popular wisdom, he says. And when that happens, science usually loses.
The best example, Loehr says, is Seattle's brand new, $500-million sewage-treatment plant at West Point, the northern tip of Elliott Bay. In the early 1980s, the federal government required most U.S. cities to upgrade their sewage plants from primary treatment, which mostly dilutes and removes solids, to far more costly secondary treatment, which removes most of the organic material. Seattle, however, asked for and was given an exemption, or "waiver," from that requirement. Scientists and engineers at Metro, the regional sewer agency, cited evidence that sewage was quickly diluted and flushed away by Puget Sound's powerful tides. Secondary treatment, they said, would be a waste of tax dollars.
Instead, Loehr and others argued that the region should focus its efforts and money on controlling sewer overflows. Like most cities, Seattle's rainwater drains in its sewer system. During heavy rains, the sewers tend to overload, dumping huge amounts of raw sewage into overflow pipes that spill into local waters - especially Puget Sound. Even one such overflow probably pollutes the sound more than a consistent stream of primary-treated sewage, Loehr argues. So he and many other marine scientists suggested that, for the same amount of money, Puget Sound would derive far greater benefits by redesigning its sewer system.
Seattle and other Puget Sound cities debated the issue in the early 1980s, and public opinion shifted in favor of secondary treatment - despite the costs. In the end, the issue was swayed largely by politics 3,000 miles away in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. In 1984, congressmen from New Jersey wanted the federal government to force New York City to install secondary sewage treatment. To make their pressure appear even-handed, they needed another region to help force the issue. Seattle fit the bill, and the law was amended to take away Seattle's waiver, along with New York's.
The next problem was the Magnolia neighborhood, which supported secondary treatment - but not at its front door at West Point. Neighbors relented only when local government sweetened the pot with promises of a beachfront park.
"Ultimately, science was irrelevant to the decision," Loehr says. "So what do we get for $500 million? A state-of-the-art treatment plant that was not necessary and a $100 million beach for the people in Magnolia."
This, he adds, is the price of public outrage.
Fourteen years later, few complain about the treatment plant, the beach or even the price tag. But is secondary treatment making a difference to the ecology of Puget Sound?
Probably not, says Alan Mearns, a fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. The main ingredients in sewage are nitrates and phosphates that actually fertilize the sea, feeding the microscopic plankton that are, in turn, fed upon by fish. Mearns wonders aloud if the new plant actually diminishes the food supply for salmon and other wildlife.
But there is no hard evidence one way or the other. The science of Puget Sound is laced with uncertainty. For every Mearns who argues that West Point was a waste of money, there is another who will argue that it was a wise, long-term investment. Among these is Keith Benson, skipper and scientific adviser to our Puget Sound voyage. In Asia, Benson says, rice farmers dump their sewage into the rice paddies to fertilize the fields and feed the carp. "That works fine in a rural village, but in Seattle?" He shudders.
"Maybe we overshoot the mark on some environmental projects, but I'd rather err on the side of caution."
Cummings guides us into the shallows of Kellogg Island, the last remnant of the original, twisting Duwamish River. Once scheduled for development of yet another seaport terminal, the tiny island has instead been preserved in something resembling its natural state. Great blue herons nest in the trees and stalk proudly along its muddy banks, all in the shadow of giant container ships and loading equipment.
"So much of Puget Sound is so beautiful, it's hard to convince people that we have real problems out there," says Cummings. "That's frustrating, but it's also encouraging. I don't think I'd want to do this job in a place where there was no hope."
With this thought, we sail north, tracing Capt. Vancouver's incomplete map, fueled by a gentle summer wind and prospects of finding a smarter balance between science and popular wisdom.
