Most of Seattle’s water comes from the 90,000-acre Cedar River watershed, with 30 to 40 percent supplied by the South Fork Tolt River. Do you live in Broadview, Bitter Lake, Crown Hill, Northgate, Haller Lake, Pinehurst? You’ve likely got some Tolt River in your veins. Parts of Maple Leaf, Wedgewood, Greenwood, View Ridge, and Roosevelt get a little Tolt from tap, too.
Drinking water is tested daily for hundreds of contaminants, and filtered and treated, as necessary, with ozonation (a disinfectant method that cuts down on the need for chlorine) and ultraviolet light (which sterilizes any “bugs”). The watersheds are protected — no one lives there, and agricultural, industrial, and recreational activities are forbidden.
But nature puts plenty of things in: organic carbon, for one, and through erosion, barium, cadmium, chromium, and nitrate. The gastrointestinal parasite cryptosporidium can show up in small amounts. All of the compounds have a set Maximum Contaminant Level Goal set by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Board of Health, and through testing and filtering, they are kept from exceeding it. That’s important with arsenic. Out of the tap, your water will have a tiny amount of added fluoride and chlorine, and (depending on the condition of your plumbing) possibly some lead and copper.
Elsewhere, surface water has much more than naturally occurring contaminants in it. The Duwamish River, for instance, long bordered by industry, is an EPA Superfund site, as we described earlier:
For decades, the effects of industrial pollution accumulated, visibly and invisibly. There was a time when people were not aware of the harmful effects of PCBs, for instance. And there was a time when it must have seemed that no one would know if a tank leaked a bit. Soil was contaminated with arsenic, dioxins, and multisyllabic constructions (e.g., polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), and all of it washed (or was dumped) into the Duwamish, where it settled into sedimentary layers.
You can tour it, but you’re not advised to eat the marine life that lives there. But the people who retain moral ownership of the Duwamish area have a culture that is based on living off the river. A hot spot for pollution, the Duwamish is also a political hot spot, as the state’s Department of Ecology updates its rules on water quality to protect people whose diets rely heavily on fish and shellfish. (Another public water policy forum is coming up this May.)
Ecology is acting under guidance from the EPA — in Washington, the EPA delegates regulation and enforcement of the Clean Water Act to Ecology. The state had been relying on the federal 1992 National Toxics Rule, but the EPA declared the rule’s criteria out of date, and asked Ecology to “use new science and information to adopt updated human health criteria.” One key criterion that the state is looking at is the fish consumption rate, which could dramatically change the way water quality is assessed. (They’re also assessing each contaminant’s risk, and the duration of exposure.)
It comes back to a conflict at the heart of the Duwamish clean-up — could the river ever be made safe enough for residents to eat the fish and shellfish that lived in it, or was it enough to approximate the urban contamination we live with in Elliott Bay, Lake Union, and Lake Washington? (Given the state of the Duwamish, even that could be considered a stretch goal.) Clean-up costs in situations like this aren’t linear; they increase incredibly as you achieve smaller and smaller gains.
Neither governmental entities nor existing business concerns want to be obligated to purify the Duwamish’s past completely. For one thing, no one really knows what’s in the ground still — many of the businesses that operated there no longer exist.
But Boeing has undertaken a massive habitat restoration project at its former Plant 2 location (heavily used in WWII). With the plant now demolished (and largely recycled), the company is scraping out more than 200,000 cubic yards of polluted sediment from the riverbed, to be replaced with clean materials.
In the process, they’ll restore and add five acres of intertidal wetlands and more than 3,000 feet of shoreline riprap. A new stormwater treatment system will collect run-off before it hits the Duwamish.
Boeing’s own engineers have been the brains behind its efforts at source control, experimenting with biofilters and solar- and wind-powered pumps. “We don’t sell [that technology],” said one of Boeing’s environmental leaders, Terry Mutter, when asked about it in a phone interview. “We share it.” But the company remains cautious about the prospect of Ecology taking up a game-changing position based on an assumption that all fish should be safe to eat in large quantities.
“What we’re asking for is something environmentally beneficial, technically feasible, and economically viable,” said Mutter, noting that a huge problem with urban waters is stormwater run-off from a multitude of sources. Because Boeing’s property is close to freeways, it collects stormwater containing toxic brake dust. Who’s responsible for that? (Copper from brake pads affect a salmon’s ability to smell, leaving them disoriented.)
These are problems Ecology is all too aware of. At their Policy Forum Delegate’s Table, they have a Nisqually Tribe representative, but many other tribes, for whom these issues touch upon the sacred, are boycotting the process. The president of the Association of Washington Business, on the other hand, suspects compliance efforts could cost one billion dollars a year, without much results. The DOE’s Sandy Howard admits it’s not easy. Unlike other states, Washington has 29 tribes who are vitally interested in fishable waters. But she did want to shift the emphasis from compliance — assuming pollution — to Ecology’s work on reducing toxics use in the first place.
UPDATE: Howard tells me that the Nisqually Tribe has decided not to participate at the Delegate’s Table, and that “boycott” is too strong a word (it was hers): “tribes have chosen not to accept our invitation to participate in this public rulemaking process and have asked for their own government-to-government talks with us, which we are accommodating.”
Noting that the Association of Washington Business sits at their Delegate’s Table, she mentioned that Ecology is also looking at an “implementation tools” rule that would give everyone more “runway” toward compliance, in the event much stiffer standards do end up put in place.
Ecology, she said, was hoping for even more input from Boeing than they had had so far. When I asked Chris Villiers, a Boeing communications director on environmental issues, about that, he responded by email:
Boeing is seeking a balanced approach to storm water that benefits fish, local residents and taxpayers, and our operations in the state of Washington. We have repeatedly told the state Department of Ecology and the Governor’s office that we are willing to work with them to develop a balanced solution. To date, there has been no opportunity to do so. However, we are encouraged that the Department of Ecology appears to have indicated a willingness to work with interested parties to explore a balanced approach that benefits residents and the state’s economy.
