No Duwamish debacle in Elliott Bay

When scientists a few years ago discovered a female reproductive protein in male fish off Myrtle Edwards Park, well, let's just say that they didn't consider it a good sign. It's as if a male chicken produced egg yolk.

		PAUL JOSEPH BROWN / P-I
	About an acre of sediment is being dredged just off Myrtle Edwards Park as part of efforts to remove contamination from combined sewer outfalls.

It was happening right where hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage and polluted rainwater had gushed out of a massive pipe into Elliott Bay over the years. Scientists wondered: Could hormones in women's urine or birth control pills be at work?

No one really knows.

But now King County has launched a cleanup of toxic goop on the bay bottom. In contrast to a botched cleanup in the Duwamish River in 2003-04, the work in Elliott Bay is going well, county and state officials say.

The Duwamish dredging clouded the water when the contractor's crane scooped up too much toxic sludge too fast, repeatedly violating state standards and spreading around pollution.

King County officials gave American Civil Constructors, the contractor on the Elliott Bay job, strict instructions to keep from clouding the water, said John Phillips, project manager of the King County Wastewater Management Division.

"They've taken that to heart, and they're working hard to make sure they keep those (cloudiness) readings down," Phillips said. "They've been doing a good job."

Environmentalists expressed alarm when the Duwamish project started going awry. Follow-up inspections by the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed the problem.

Staffing difficulties prevented the county from keeping an inspector on site full time at first, said Jeff Stern, manager of the wastewater division's sediment program.

"Trying to dredge too fast caused that problem," Stern said.

In contrast, county inspectors are at the Elliott Bay site full time. They keep an eye on continuous readings from a buoy that measures cloudiness in the water 300 feet from the dredging. No violations of standards have been recorded, Stern said.

Grant Yang, who is keeping watch over the project for the state Ecology Department, said dredging had to be stopped temporarily because of cloudiness caused by last week's storm, when dirty water was filtering into the bay.

But overall, he said, "The situation is much different from the Duwamish. It's very successful."

The county's inspectors had to caution the crew operating the dredge to slow down at least once, Stern said.

Started Nov. 29, the dredging is expected to remove 41 pounds of PCBs. The sand and mud also contain, above state standards, mercury and a class of chemicals known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- a byproduct of combustion found in car exhaust and elsewhere.

Also in the bay bottom, at lower levels, are contaminants including lead, cadmium, silver, copper and phthalates.

The 1.2-acre area being dredged is right in front of and around where a big pipe used to empty rainwater runoff into the bay. In periods of heavy rain, when rainwater and raw sewage overwhelmed the pipes, the combination of the two spilled out together.

King County spent $139 million controlling the overflows from that pipe by building a 14-foot-wide tunnel under Queen Anne, where the extra water can be stored in times of heavy rain. Then, as rains ease, the polluted water is fed into a treatment plant at a rate the plant can handle.

Before that work was done, the only alternative to dumping into the bay was allowing sewage to back up into homes and through manholes. King County is working to correct the overflows elsewhere, but the final work isn't scheduled to be done until 2027.

The Elliott Bay dredging is expected to take 10 weeks and cost $3.6 million.