Recently in Downstream Category

I'm a bit obsessive about stormwater and what it washes off of our city streets into the Bay. It's a recognized problem. SPU (Seattle Public Utilities) wrote a new stormwater manual to comply with EPA and Ecology rulings. New projects, including new road projects, above a certain square footage size limit are required to infiltrate or manage stormwater to the "maximum extent practicable" - or "feasible", I think is the term in Seattle. So far nothing seems to be feasible for our urban city streets, and it's very discouraging. SDOT is a perennially underfunded agency - I really don't know how they can get anything done - and there has been no enthusiasm shown on their part for trying to figure out the problem of urban (as in downtown) stormwater. Nothing has been designed for our situation of urban streets, there aren't any off the shelf solutions, and I can't really imagine what such solutions might look like, myself. I don't have to imagine the consequences, though. Stormwater from roadways carries enough pollution from auto fluid leaks into the Sound to equal the Exxon Valdez spill, every two years.



We've had to waste a lot of recent opportunities to do something about the polluted water coming off of our streets. All of the repaving that was being done for the Bridging the Gap work was designed before the new stormwater rules were in effect. That work will last for 50 years, without any added stormwater treatment. There is a big new plan for Denny Way that includes lots of "green" but no stormwater treatment. I haven't gotten a satisfactory explanation why. I had thought the work for the new RapidRide bus bulbs on 3rd Avenue would have stormwater filtration designed in. The draft version of the stormwater manual required added filtration anytime there were significant curb changes. It proved to be too hard, or too expensive. Then there is the coordination between SDOT, SPU, and adjacent property owners; no one ever really owns the problem and nothing gets done. I think we can do better, and really, we have to, somehow - but as I said, SDOT is an unloved and starved agency. It's up to us in the end, isn't it?



Cross-posted to Inside Belltown

*This is the title of a poem by Graham McGarva in Vancouver B.C. It speaks of the life and industry of the Duwamish River and the Seattle waterfront, especially as expressed through tidal mudflats. That mud, as was noted by esteemed Vancouverite Gordon Price in the recent Great Urban Debate: Seattle vs. Vancouver, was carried to Seattle from Vancouver by the glaciers, which came this far south and then receded. We are indeed one region. (Disclaimer: The firm I work for sponsored the debate, and Graham is one of the partners in the firm.)

Graham was reminded of the Turning Fish by a photo I took of Turning Basin, a salmon habitat restoration site at the upriver end of the channelized Duwamish Waterway. I have sort of adopted this site as a volunteer for People for Puget Sound, who manages the restoration and maintenance of this and other sites on the Duwamish. What does this have to do with citywalking, you might ask? A lot of dirty stormwater washes off of the pavements that I walk daily, for one thing. I advocate for better stormwater infrastructure (and fewer cars on roads) but it will takes time for that to happen. In the meantime I do my small part for mitigation by planting native plants at restoration sites and removing invasives. I get up close and personal with some of the creatures that share this region with us; salmon jumping, ospreys nesting, bald eagles, seals and sea lions, otters and beavers. And lots of birds of all kinds. I get to play in the mud, and at the same time worry about what toxins it contains.

Another tie to citywalking is that we will be making a new Central Waterfront soon, with a new seawall at minimum, and possibly many other changes besides, such as recreating more near-shore habitat for salmon and other creatures in our bay. This new waterfront design should take a fresh look at how we and our city interact with the resources we treasure. Think about how stormwater from the city reaches the bay, about creeks that disappeared so long ago that no one remembers where they were. How might those be reimagined and given a functional life in mitigating our stormwater flows? How would our waterfront look if it were penetrated by the flowing mouths of creeks? What if there were new places where people could touch the water, and would want to? Where the native life of the bay would appear close at hand because it was invited and made welcome and comfortable? Where the kinetic sculpture of cargo, cruise ships and ferries continued to delight the eye and the imagination and feed the economy? What if the salmon were to again return in such numbers that a person could walk across the mouth of the Duwamish on their backs, and the orcas were fat and happy and increasing in number?

This is what I think about when I go to pull weeds at the river, and relax into the meditative mindless rythms of work. It's what I think about when I draw maps of the waterfront, studying where things might change, and imagining what it might be like. I walk, in the city, on the waterfront, on the river, enjoying what's there, hoping for and dreaming of how it can be better. The Turning Fish is that dream of what could be.

The Duwamish Waterway is the last few (four) miles of what was once the Duwamish river and estuary. It was dredged, straightened, channelized and filled early in the last century to support an economic juggernaut of water-dependent industry. The Duwamish was once fed by several rivers; The White and the Black have been diverted and only a reduced Green river still exits to the Sound via the Waterway. It is still an important salmon river; it is also a Superfund site.

The Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition and the local chapter of the Sierra Club organized a Rock the Boat river cruise to help educate people about the history of the industrial Duwamish, cleanup plans, and the vision for the river in the future. The sediments of the waterway carry a variety of toxic substances, PCB usually being at the top of the list. The toxins get into the food stream, making resident sealife unsafe to eat. It also contaminates migrating salmon, which are eaten by orcas, and by people. The toxins accumulate at the top of the food chain, making our resident orcas the most toxic animals on earth. People are affected too.

The EPA and the various entities involved in the river cleanup identified seven early action sites, which were part of the tour. Because of recontamination issues the cleanup efforts are on hold.




At Harbor Island Marina, where the East and West Waterways split off to Elliott Bay, by the Ash Grove cement plant. The Port of Seattle owns, operates and maintains the waterway and manages a multi-billion dollar economy.




Industry and recreation on the Duwamish waterway.




Boarding the Admiral Pete, a restored Mosquito Fleet passenger boat, for an educational and recreational cruise of the Duwamish.




Unloading a gravel barge at the Ash Grove cement plant on the Duwamish.




This is the site of the first attempted cleanup of an Early Action site, at the Diagonal CSO outfall pipe, which is barely visible above the high tide, just to the left of the white pipeline warning sign, right of the electric tower. The cleanup was done with inefficient open bucket dredging, which set loose several pounds of PCBs to float free and contaminate other areas. The dredge site was capped with clean sand but has been recontaminated by PCBs, phthalates and other toxics that are still coming in with stormwater. Because of what was learned here about recontamination, the rest of the cleanup is on hold.




This green treed inlet is Diagonal Marsh, a salmon habitat restoration site managed by People for Puget Sound.




The trees here are at a tide flat by the GSA facility, another restoration site which is reached from Diagonal Marsh. The Port owns narrow strips of land along all along the waterway and has been designing different types of salmon habitat that might fit in the different narrow strips, to try and get connective habitat throughout the waterway.




Here by the doomed South Park bridge is Boeing Plant 2, location of another PCB hotspot and early action site. No longer in use, this plant built planes for WWII. Pipes under the floors were leaking PCBs for years. Across and a little upriver is Terminal 117, site of the former Malarkey Asphalt plant, another PCB hotspot and designated early action site. The community got involved and convinced the Port to test and mitigate the upland soils, not just the river sediments, because the toxic soils were affecting the neighborhood.




Fishing on the industrial Duwamish. It's advised not to eat resident sealife at all; migratory salmon are caught and eaten here but people are recommended to limit their intake. It's the same salmon that make the orcas so toxic. This is Slip 4, another PCB hotspot and early action site. This site can't be cleaned because PCBs are still leaching in from an upland source at the north end of Boeing Field (King County Airport). The salmon were jumping in the river, but we were all hoping these people weren't going to eat any fish.




The LaFarge cement plant at night. The waterside industries are vital to the economy, and have become an intrinsic part of the local landscape. Our working waterfront is part of the Seattle identity and is akin to art or kinetic sculpture. It's even integrated into the Sculpture Park design. The trick now is integrating it all in a sustainable way.




The lime kiln at the LaFarge cement plant. The burning of the kiln emits mercury into the air. The neighboring community complains of bad smells that cause headaches and other side effects. This is an old plant that is not covered by new regulations.



These silos at the LaFarge plant are at the south end of Kellogg Island, a natural preserve at the last remnant meander in the lower Duwamish. There are salmon habitat sites along the meander, at Puget Creek (near LaFarge), T-107 and Herrings House.




Bridges across Harbor Island. Once this was tidal estuary and mudflats that could be walked across at low tide.




The Ash Grove cement plant at night. This is the Duwamish waterway today, and is also part of the vision for the foreseeable future.

I recently had the great pleasure, for the second year in a row, of sitting in on a presentation on the history of the Duwamish waterway, given by George Blomberg of the Port of Seattle. He uses a lot of images that I haven't seen elsewhere, such as the photo of the current BNSF rail line and Western Avenue, in the same locations which now run over apparently solid ground, but which first ran over water, on pilings out in the bay. It gives a special insight into walks along the waterfront, sort of walking on water, as it were. The mouth of the Duwamish at Elliott Bay was once one of the largest tidal estuaries in the nation, a rich ecosystem of mud flats and dendritic channels. It was dredged and filled to create industrial lands and waterway. Harbor Island at the mouth was for a long time the largest manmade island in the world. The river itself will never be restored, for a variety of reasons. Most of the rivers that fed into it were long ago diverted elsewhere.

The Port is often the subject of controversy, but that might be expected of any entity that manages a multi-billion dollar annual economy. George is an environmental scientist (his title is Senior Environmental Program Manager) who works with People for Puget Sound and other stakeholder groups to manage many of the habitat restoration projects along the river. He was more careful this year in pitching the economic mission and mandate of the Port, it seemed. I think they're doing great work, so it's all fine by me. George had some new images this year, illustrative plans and sections of proposed habitat typologies, such as marsh push-backs and mud benches that can be connected with larger sites, pockets and hubs, into a sort of Green Corridor along the river. I was telling Dhira Brown of People for Puget Sound that I wished George would publish his presentation. As it turns out, much of it has been published, as of January 13, in the Lower Duwamish River Habitat Restoration Plan.

This coincides neatly with the release by the Duwamish River Cleanup Coaliton this month of the Duwamish Valley Visioning Project report. The maps from the Plan and the Vision even seem to mesh pretty well, at first glance. This is very encouraging and means more restoration sites, and more need for volunteers to weed, plant, and maintain the sites. It's not just the Port getting involved, although they own the actual waterway and several sites along it. King County, City of Seattle, other municipalities, agencies and private land owners are also contributing restoration sites. It's great to see it all come together. I still wish George or someone would publish the history of the waterway, though, it's quite fascinating.

 

 

Maps can be a touchy subject. I recently attended a much anticipated presentation on a topic which greatly interests me, that being the Seattle stormwater code revision. The presenter was eminently knowledgeable (I suppose I can say, since I have high regard for him, that it was Robert Chandler, largely responsible for the code revision) and skilled, keeping focus and flow in a lightly amusing and informative manner, even while being peppered with questions. The information was of great interest and entails widespread, and I believe positive, impacts.Yet I found myself in a state of unreasoning irritation through much of this invaluable information feed, having been distracted by a simple map on the wall of the room when I entered. It was just a map labeling the creeks in Seattle. Why was this such an annoyance?

As we heard at the recent Streets for People campaign kickoff (and witnessed in recent history), community organizing can be politically powerful. Some of that power resides with those who draw the community boundaries. I was once involved in the Bioregional Congress, until I decided that we were in many ways promoting sprawl, switched directions, and ran for the city as fast as I could. That group organized around Bioregions, which often meant local creek watersheds. This is a good thing, if you live in an easily definable watershed. There are long-established, well organized creek watershed communities here in Seattle. They have done, and continue to do, a tremendous amount of important work that benefits not only their creek and community, but the receiving bodies and the organisms that inhabit them, such as salmon. Yet as much as any of us they recognize, as was pointed out at the watersheds forum last fall, that we all live on a watershed, even if we don't live on a creek.

Those of us living responsibly in the concrete jungle are sometimes given the impression that water quality is not our concern. Our creeks are in our streets and embedded beneath our sidewalks in combined sewer systems, invisible. During the autumn rains, I watch the first flush of oily residues washing into the gutter, unmitigated, and wonder where they go, if or how they are treated before they get to Elliott Bay. How do you organize a community around this system of pipes? How do we take ownership of our streets the way the watershed organizers do with their creeks? I know that some of them understand the dilemma. Robert did not want to go into it in depth, but he said there have been many arguments about how to define water boundaries, whether "basin" or "watershed" or some other designation. I wish the people who make the maps could give me something better to work with, or that I could figure out where the lines should be drawn.

   

Yesterday was the first central People for Puget Sound work party of the year, at Hamm Creek on the Duwamish. We had a great group of about 70 people from Boeing, which was very heartening, as Boeing is laying off thousands, times are hard and the future is frightening, yet people still volunteer to spend a Saturday clearing blackberry in cold, dark misty weather. I was feeling under the weather, myself, and was therefore a terrible slacker, restricting myself to gatekeeping, registering new arrivals and getting all the necessary signatures for liability waivers, photo releases, and everything else that our litigious society requires. When the workers returned for lunch, I made the rounds of the site, doing a photo inventory to follow up on a site inventory from August. In the summer the site was a terrible mess, overrun with blackberry, scotch broom and other invasives. After several work parties of large volunteer groups it is once again looking beautiful. It just amazes and thrills me what willing hands can accomplish.



Hamm Creek is one of the earlier attempts at habitat restoration on the Duwamish, begun in 1999. The creek was put into a culvert as it came down from the ridge, under a highway and under riverfront property until released in the river. John Beal, a Vietnam veteran, led an effort to daylight and restore the creek. The culvert passed under property belonging to the public electric utility, who wished to preserve land use, so the daylighted creek was diverted around the extreme edge of the property on its way to the river. The site still shows wetland characteristics (wetland is a forbidden term and the utility is a client of my firm, so I hope I haven't already said too much). Contemporary, enlightened regulations would not have allowed such treatment of the creek, but as is the case all along this industrial river, time cannot be turned back. Habitat restoration is confined to very small defined areas, with the intent to make shoreline habitat for salmon. We apply legal definitions and boundaries - native habitat can be planted up to this line but across that line is developable property; the water can go over here but it must never go over there. Nature sometimes has other ideas.



When a restored creek increases freshwater flow into the river, the beavers find it and inhabit it. They don't understand legal boundaries, or that this is not really a naturally functioning ecosystem but just a small simulacrum, limited in scope. They cut down carefully planted and tended trees with their amazing chisel teeth, not realizing that there isn't a large self-replenishing supply of extended grove or forest attached, only that they want predator-free open space along their pond, food and building supplies for their dam. Their reality doesn't mesh with ours, that being one of only a few feet, a narrow band, of native plantings allowed along the creek. In some of the newer, larger restoration sites there is more room for plantings in all zones, from intertidal to riparian. They are still just tiny isolated specks. There are no groves for the beaver to clear spaces for grassy meadows, which then attract browsers and other creatures. They are strangers, interlopers, and many people have mixed feelings about them. They carry on in the way of their kind, regardless.

 

On Saturday I was at Hamm Creek on the Duwamish, for the last People for Puget Sound habitat restoration work party of the year. At lunch I was sitting with Bruce Clifton, a long-time Sound Steward, talking about this and that, but mostly about people driving cars, and what cars deposit on the streets that is then washed into the Sound. I had to keep qualifying my marks disparaging car usage with "and she says, after she drove here". Driving to work parties at the restoration sites are some of the rare occasions that I use my car. Bruce doesn't drive and doesn't have a car. He provides instructions for people to get to the restoration sites by bus, but there is usually a pretty good hike involved. We lost a volunteer Saturday who was trying to get there by bus and couldn't find the way.

We discussed the Puget Sound Partnership Action Agenda that was just approved by the legislature. The studies done as background for the Agenda confirmed that stormwater runoff, much of it carried by roads, is the largest source of pollutants to the Sound, contributing the lion's share of the 52 million pounds of pollutants going into the Sound each year. Not all of that is from cars, but a huge portion is, including some of the most potent toxics. Hybrid and electric cars are a better choice than standard combustion engines, but they are not a solution. A set of car tires will deposit 7 or 8 pounds of hydrocarbons on roadways in their normal span of use. Leaking lubricants are a big source of hydrocarbons. Copper is one of the pollutants that causes the most harm to salmon, even in small amounts, and most of it comes from brake linings. One of the recommendations, besides reducing driving, is to use brake pads made of hemp instead of copper. David Dicks, Puget Sound Partnership executive director, had a good laugh over that one at a presentation last Thursday, saying that college students would be fully supporting that measure.

 

I drive my hybrid car rarely, but have not completely given it up yet. Better cars will help, but will never be a solution. That's why I favor, in bailout plans for the Big Three, having them retool to produce mass transit vehicles, not just better cars. Streetcars and railcars are not produced in this country any longer and have to be shipped from overseas. 

Many other toxics in the Sound are generated by individuals in daily practices involving pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Phthalates, a potential endocrine disruptor, are a cheap, convenient plasticizer found in a multitude of products, even though it is not listed on any label. Personal choices are important and can make a big impact; the sources of toxics are so widespread, endemic, and non self-evident, however, that regulation will probably be required to prevent the contaminants from being included in products in the first place.

I volunteer for habitat restoration on the Duwamish because, in the larger sense, that is my watershed. I actually live on Elliott Bay, on a "combined system" of pipes that drain into the sanitary system for treatment under normal circumstances, but cause untreated sewage overflow directly into the bay after major rain events. It's hard to think of this invisible system of pipes as a "watershed", which makes it hard for individuals to envision how their actions impact the local and greater watersheds. As an old-time Bioregional Congress participant, accustomed to actual, visible, watersheds that residents can identify with on an up close and personal level, I find it hard to identify with pipes in the street. I would like to understand the system better, however - to have maps of how my streets are draining, and where the end-of-pipe is out in the bay. I imagine taking a kayak out there in the rain to take water samples, to know exactly what my streets are contributing. I would like to engage community involvement, as is done around creek watersheds, but it is difficult to imagine a community organizing around these invisible pipes. What would community involvement look like? We might encourage better control of pet waste, get more of the locals to drive less - but in our urban neighborhood most of the people in cars are driving through, and don't actually live here - like the people who love the elevated viaduct. Perhaps we could raise enough interest to convince SDOT to install true Green Street stormwater infrastructure, instead of the current improvements that, although lovely, don't mitigate any of the stormwater in the street. Perhaps we could interest more urban property owners in contributing to improvements such as the Swale on Yale.