Sewage spilled into Portage Bay is traced to UW

Taking advantage of a bright April day, Tom Sackett traded his desk at a Fremont office for a kayak and paddled west to spend his lunch break in the sun.

After passing under University Bridge, Sackett landed at Agua Verde -- a University District cafe popular with kayakers -- and started his lunch. But it wasn't long after that he noticed something nasty in the usually crystalline water.

"It looked like a cloud in the water, spreading out from the rocks," said Sackett, who was one of the first people to contact authorities about the pollution. "It might have been 40 or 50 feet across."

That "cloud" -- a recurring feature on Portage Bay's north shore for months -- would turn out to be paint waste inadvertently released by a nearby University of Washington maintenance shop. Less noticeable was the raw sewage that had also been pouring into the city stormwater system because of a plumbing mistake made by the university about a year ago.

Through a four-month investigation, Seattle Public Utilities inspectors were able to trace the source of pollution to a connection at the maintenance shop, blocks north of Portage Bay at 3902 Cowlitz Road N.E., said Eric Autry, the inspector who led the search for the pollution source.

Investigators also found that a contractor hired by the UW had connected the sewage system of a smaller building nearby into the city storm drain.

Autry and his colleagues located the source of the pollution Aug. 14, prompting the UW to close restrooms and sinks at the maintenance shop.

While no one knows how many gallons of waste were released, the state Department of Ecology estimates that, on average, a worker creates about 30 gallons of wastewater in an eight-hour shift. For the UW shop and its 25 employees, that equates to roughly 750 gallons of contaminated water a day.

In both cases, UW maintenance and alterations director Rick Cheney said, workers renovating older buildings owned by the university were relying on out-of-date schematics. Cheney said the drawings mistakenly labeled the stormwater pipe -- which carries untreated rainwater into Portage Bay -- as a city sewer line.

Autry said he and others thought they solved the mystery just weeks after getting the initial reports from Sackett and another person.

On April 26, inspectors using a robotic camera found a sewer tied into the stormwater system at the UW Academic Computing Center on Brooklyn Avenue Northeast. Told of the problem, the university closed two restrooms there.

"They stopped using the bathrooms right away, they corrected the problem -- and we still got complaints," Autry said. "That, frankly, broke my heart."

In the four months that followed, Autry and most of the rest of Seattle Public Utilities' 12-person water quality team were called to the site at least a dozen times when the cloud returned.

"It was just a thick gray matter, heavy enough so that it didn't rise to the surface," said Travis English, who works Agua Verde's kayak rental desk and often saw the pollution. "It was just this huge cloud hovering in the bay there."

Inspectors took water samples and sketched out a response plan, sending investigators to manholes all over the University District when a spill was reported to see if paint was visible. They even set up a machine that sent a text message to Autry's cell phone any time the water volume in the pipe increased substantially.

"They'd sit there for hours and hours, just sending their camera up there," English said.

The UW was billed $9,000 to cover the city investigators' expenses, a sum it has paid. A Department of Ecology spokesman said his agency has been told of the problem and will not fine the university.

Cheney said the university has hired a contractor to draw up new, correct schematics for both buildings. The offending bathrooms and paint sink at the maintenance shop have been closed since city inspectors discovered the problem.