Tacoma bay's cleanup closer to conclusion

COMMENCEMENT BAY, Tacoma — Thirty years after Occidental Chemical stopped regularly discharging toxic solvents into a three-mile finger of this bay, poisoned sediment is being dredged and 30 pounds of pollution a day are being sucked from the ground water.

Restoration work is taking place on all of the nearly 40 sites across Tacoma's signature tideflats that were polluted by a century of steam heating, refineries, aluminum smelting, boat-building, log yards and concrete production.

"We are, as of last week, into the final phase of cleanup on all these waterways," said Lori Cohen, Environmental Protection Agency project manager for a collection of polluted areas that together make up Puget Sound's largest Superfund site.

For the first time since the 6,000-acre estuary was placed on the Superfund cleanup list in 1983, the end of restoration work is finally in sight. All significant cleanup work is scheduled to be completed in 2006, followed by years of environmental monitoring.

It hasn't come cheap. The price is approaching $300 million, though all but about 15 percent of it has been paid for by roughly 100 polluters, the Port of Tacoma and the city.

The remediation work now under way includes removal of enough sediment to fill 2-1/2 Tacoma Domes — sediment tainted by solvents, wood waste and heavy metals such as copper and mercury or, in some cases, by substances environmental regulators still haven't identified.

In some cases, the sediment will be shipped to Eastern Washington; in others, it will be cleaned up and capped on nearby ground that will be the future home of a shipping terminal.

Yesterday, officials from EPA, the state Department of Ecology, the city of Tacoma and other agencies toured the sites to showcase progress along the eastern edge of the bay.

There are new embankments and fresh rock poured under docks. Backhoes are digging up contaminated dirt on beaches, and cranes are removing bottom muck laced with creosote.

Old outbuildings from a plywood company have been removed to allow tidelands to re-establish.

Dozens of acres of fish habitat are being rejuvenated, and sunken log rafts that all but blocked fish passage to area rivers have been removed.

Along the Thea Foss waterway, near downtown Tacoma, a series of marinas will be moved to a temporary site next spring so the channel can be dredged.

Already, the city has purchased 27 acres that now house the Museum of Glass and has paved the way for new apartments and condominiums that actually cap sediments.

Deeper in the waterway, near its head, a beach has been freshly regraded, and a pair of workers were taking water samples from two storm drains tall enough to stand in. The city acknowledges that trace amounts of contaminants still work their way into Thea Foss but insists that regular monitoring allows pollutants to be tracked to their source, where the city can then make sure the discharge is halted.

"A lot of people are looking for the possibility of recontamination," said Mary Lynn Henley, project engineer for Tacoma. "There are huge efforts under way to make sure this doesn't happen again."

At the old Occidental plant in the heavily contaminated Hylebos Waterway, some 480,000 acres of polluted sediment are being removed. Some sediment already has been slurped up as slurry and piped to a treatment plant. Extraction wells are cleansing a poisonous underground water plume that seeps into the waterway.

And 2,000 feet of rocky bank are being capped to prevent further spread of the contamination.

Nearby, Weyerhaeuser and Louisiana Pacific are working to prevent wood debris from slipping into the marine waters, said Robert Clark with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Logs strung together like rafts with chains and binders can sink, smothering tiny marine life.

Shade from existing piers still creates confusion for juvenile salmon, which can have trouble adapting to dramatic changes in light, but Clark said "that's one of the compromises you make when you're doing cleanup and restoration in an area that's been historically industrial."

Despite the years of work ahead, EPA officials yesterday were proud of how far the area has come.

When considering that it took a century to create these problems, Cohen said, "I don't think 20 years (to clean it up) is a long time at all."

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com