Tar bubbling up at Gas Works

In 2001, newspaper headlines cheered "Gas Works Park is Scrubbed Shiny Green" as decades worth of toxic pollution from gas production finally was getting cleaned up.

So how is it that next week workers in protective moon suits will be drilling into the park for still another cleanup project?

It turns out that since the nearly $4 million scrubbing finished up, pockets of tar keep burping up from the park's depths, periodically creating puddles of black goo.

		Andy Rogers / P-I
	Visitors enjoy Gas Works Park, where tar has been rising from the depths of the former plant.

And so the saga of cleanup continues.

Men in moon suits first combed the park 23 years ago, turning up alarming levels of cancer-causing chemicals. Gas Works was suddenly and temporarily closed until hot spots were fenced off. Over the years -- hindered by politics and a lack of money -- the cleanup had continued in a piecemeal fashion until the widespread effort that ended six years ago.

But even that turns out to have been incomplete. Parkgoers beginning Monday will be confronted by machines drilling 20 feet into the park searching for the source of the tar.

Why wasn't it cleaned up before?

"You probably would have had to dig up the entire park," said Colleen Browne, special projects manager for Seattle Parks and Recreation. Previous estimates put the cost of that job at $80 million; it would cost more today.

Instead of a massive excavation that would have closed the popular park for possibly years, 3,000 pounds of tar found in a vein at the park's northwestern end was dug out. Benzene was bubbled out, captured and burned. Clean fill capped the pollution that remained.

And some of the tar was left to percolate to the surface along the park's eastern shoreline.

The blobs ooze up about four to six times a year, particularly in warm weather. The seeps are mostly small, ranging from a teaspoonful to softball-sized.

A Parks Department employee is responsible for walking the grounds on a weekly basis to watch for patches of tar that are then cordoned off, dug up and refilled with dirt or gravel.

"This is not the ideal situation," said Department of Ecology spokesman Larry Altose.

This spring a blob a couple of feet square surfaced in a trail near the shore.

"That's the point at which we said we need to get some additional information," said Sarah McKearnan, strategic adviser for Seattle Public Utilities.

From 1906 until 1956, Gas Works Park was home to a plant that turned coal and then oil into gas for heating Seattle's homes and businesses. The land and mud sponged up pollution, becoming contaminated with benzene, mercury, lead, arsenic and other dangerous chemicals created in the burning of fossil fuels.

In the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency discovered troubling levels of pollution at the park. Then-Mayor Charles Royer blasted the federal agency for sending in workers in full-face respirators and protective overalls, saying it was "unnecessarily scary." The state and EPA considered declaring the park a Superfund site -- a politically unsavory move that was abandoned when it appeared not contaminated enough to make the cut.

The work beginning next week will include drilling holes and sampling the dirt at 17 spots in the meadow north of the play barn near the eastern shore. The area will be fenced off to keep the public away from the equipment and protect them from potential tar fumes.

On Thursday, technology workers from Safeco were at the barn setting up for a luau. They had mixed reactions to the legacy of pollution at the perimeter of their party.

		Andy Rogers / P-I
	An example of the hardened tar, which is being secreted from the soil in parts of Gas Works Park. It is not believed to pose any major health risks.

"I'm not afraid of it," said Tim Chovanak. "Just don't eat the grass, just don't eat the dirt."

"I wasn't aware of it, to be honest," said Carrie Ogden. The news made her a little worried. "People play here all the time -- kids play here, dogs play here."

The tar poses little health risk, state and city officials agreed. People are advised not to touch the tar if they find it. There is some risk from getting very close to the sticky stuff and breathing the fumes over an extended period of time.

"That's not something that's likely to happen with most park visitors," Altose said.

In addition to preventing tar from fouling trails and the shoreline, a prime motivation behind the testing is making sure it's not getting into the mud at the bottom of Lake Union. The investigation is expected to cost about $50,000.

More than a decade ago, an Ecology study concluded that dredging or capping the lake bottom fronting the park was needed to protect aquatic animals.

Finally in 2005 the city and Puget Sound Energy -- the two parties responsible for the majority of the cleanup -- agreed to investigate the extent of pollution in the mud and to come up with a proposal for cleaning it. It's unclear how much it could cost to dredge and cap the historic mess.

"It's safe to say any cleanup of the sediments offshore of Gas Works Park will be in the tens of millions (of dollars)," McKearnan said.

The city and energy company want to learn more about how much tar is buried in the park, where it is and if there's any risk of it moving into the sediment where it could foul up their cleanup. The hope is that the drilling project also could provide information for better controlling the tar rising up.

Results from the drilling should be available in one to two months; an excavation of the tar might be required.

A proposal for cleaning the sediment could be released for public comment in about a year. The earliest that the mud cleanup could begin is from October 2008 until March 2009, a window of time when salmon are not in the area.

MORE CLEANUP AT GAS WORKS