Port rethinks dumping of PCBs in Elliott Bay

PCB-contaminated mud dredged from a Superfund site may be headed to a landfill rather than being dumped into the open waters of Elliott Bay as planned.

 

Port of Seattle commissioners unanimously directed their staff Tuesday to work with King County on a proposal to send the material from a dredging project in the Harbor Island Superfund site to a landfill.

The project had cleared the environmental hurdles set for it by federal and state agencies, but environmentalists -- with support from the state's newly formed Puget Sound Partnership, King County Executive Ron Sims and various scientists within the state's Department of Ecology and Department of Fish and Wildlife -- said the current momentum toward a cleaner Puget Sound calls for higher standards.

"We need to leave the waterways better than we found them," said commission President John Creighton, who as chairman of the five-member elected board set environmental stewardship as one of its top priorities.

PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are toxic chemicals used in flame retardants banned in the late 1970s. Because they do not readily dissolve in water, preferring instead to glom onto fat, PCBs left in the marine environment can be passed up the food chain until they reach humans and Puget Sound's resident orcas, which scientists and environmentalists say are the most polluted orcas in the world.

The port staff is studying whether taking the most contaminated part of the 60,000 cubic yards of mud to be dredged -- about a third of it, containing about 7 pounds of PCBs -- to a landfill would delay the dredging project, set to begin in late 2008. The staff is to report back to the commission by early December.

PCBs are so toxic that they are measured in parts per billion. While the concentration of PCBs within the mud to be dredged meets state standards for dumping in the open water, environmentalists say those standards need to be updated.

Scientists with Fish and Wildlife and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center said the effect of PCBs on Puget Sound salmon -- and the orcas and people who eat them -- shows that taking them out of the water is the better option.

PCBs cause behavioral and learning deficits in children exposed in the womb. The accumulation of PCBs in Puget Sound's 86 resident orcas is making it hard for the endangered species to reproduce and maybe even find food, they said.

"One of the things about PCBs is that it is a persistent bio-accumulative toxic -- I could find it in your body right now, as well as in fish and everything that eats them," said Rob Duff, manager of Ecology's environmental assessment program.

"While they are subtle changes -- you can't point at your child and say you've lost a few IQ points -- because they persist and bio-accumulate, even if the impact is very subtle ... everybody is exposed."

The debate about the port project, detailed in Monday's Seattle P-I, centers on the fact that the port is dredging in an area proposed for cleanup by the EPA's Superfund project beginning in 2010.

The plan is to deepen the trade lanes enough to fit container ships at Terminal 30, a cruise terminal that is being remade to accommodate trade beginning in 2009.

The $118 million project will also revamp Terminal 91 in Interbay to handle cruise ships.

"We do have significant progress in getting this area made available for an important customer, which will translate into $7 (million) to $8 million per year," said port Chief Executive Tay Yoshitani, who earlier this year said the port will be "the cleanest, greenest, most energy-efficient port in the U.S."

"We need to generate the money so we can be the cleanest and greenest port -- the issue is how we get there," Yoshitani said.

State and county officials said they would do everything possible to make sure the permits came in on time. Puget Sound Partnership Executive Director David Dicks said the state would throw its weight behind the effort.

The port's seaport finance director, Wayne Grotheer, said the port should be careful about spending money on cleaning up mud that is cleared for open water disposal by current state standards. He said the mud to be dredged from the Harbor Island Superfund site is far less polluted than what's nearby in the Lower Duwamish Superfund site, which also is to be cleaned up partly with port funds.

The port has estimated that it would cost $1.8 million to send the most polluted mud to a landfill.

It seems likely that the port will get help on that from King County, after Sims sent a letter to the commission on Tuesday formalizing the county's responsibility for some of the pollution there and offering to help find a way to pay for moving the contaminated materials.

The county operates the Lander combined sewage overflow, which pumps storm water and, sometimes, sewage, into the site to be dredged.

King County has allocated $2.28 million in its wastewater treatment division budget for the Harbor Island Superfund cleanup until 2008, said Department of Natural Resources spokesman Doug Williams.

Whether and how much of that will be used to defray the port's cost is still up in the air, but King County Councilman Larry Phillips -- the chairman of two committees responsible for oversight of projects like this -- also said the county would contribute to clean up its part of the pollution.

Across the state, port executives' biggest concern is that going above and beyond the environmental requirements will set a precedent that will increase costs for future dredging projects, said Eric Johnson, deputy director of the Washington Public Ports Association, formed by the Legislature in 1961 to lobby for the state ports.

Despite concerns about keeping the Terminal 30 project on track, Commissioner Alec Fisken said, "If we are going to err, we want to err on the side of a cleaner Puget Sound."