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Saturday, October 14, 2006
Puget Sound is in trouble, but many still don't get it
Proposed $12 billion cleanup plan needs public support
The call to action is emphatic:
"Citizens must do more than accept the plan; they must become knowledgeable, enthusiastic advocates for Puget Sound and be willing to practice what the plan preaches. The future of the Sound depends upon a massive effort to change the attitudes and habits of everyone who lives in the Puget Sound basin."
The plan in question is not the highly anticipated strategy unveiled Friday by Gov. Chris Gregoire's blue-ribbon coalition, the Puget Sound Partnership. It's not even the plan that Gov. Gary Locke called for during his administration.
It's a Puget Sound recovery plan presented 20 years ago this December.
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 | Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Anacortes is home to the Shell and Tesoro oil refineries. The threat of a major oil spill is the single greatest near-term risk for the extinction of Puget Sound's orcas. | ||
The state had approved an 8-cent- a-pack cigarette tax to fund water-quality improvements. A government body called the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority was laying out the strategy for saving our state's unique inland sea. Former Seattle P-I editorial writer Nancy Hevly in 1986 urged residents to action.
Fast-forward to 2006.
The Sound is still in trouble. The Water Quality Authority has morphed into a toothless advisory committee. People still aren't getting it. Restoration advocates continue to decry the Sound's "death by a thousand cuts," emphasizing the need for everyone to be mindful of how they live, work and play in the Puget Sound basin.
Just weeks ago, scientists documented the fourth Hood Canal fish kill in five years. It wiped out countless shrimp, crab, lingcod, flounder and other fish. The incident was linked at least in part to man-made pollution.
Other signs of the Sound's decline could hardly be more clear: Local orcas have joined local chinook salmon in earning Endangered Species Act protections. Department of Health officials are mulling how to craft public warnings about eating polluted Puget Sound salmon. And the list goes on.
Yet nearly three-quarters of local residents polled in April on behalf of the Puget Sound Partnership say the Sound is in good health.
"We aren't scared to death and ought to be," said Tom Holz, an Olympia-based stormwater expert and private consultant.
$12 billion-plus cleanup plan
Government, business and environmental leaders aren't giving up.
The Puget Sound Partnership this week proposed more than $12 billion in fixes to save the Sound. They include restoring shorelines, cleaning up pollution, safeguarding salmon and boosting the cleanliness of the storm water that streams off pavement.
The plan is set to be finalized next month and the recommendations passed on to state lawmakers.
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| Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| On the south end of Vashon Island, landowner Pat Collier removed the bulkhead from her beach to restore native seashore. Extensive armoring of shorelines throughout the Sound ruined areas that serve as incubators for many small fish. | ||
But before this effort can take off, public passion must be ignited and more funding earmarked for the Sound. In a state where people cleaned up sewage-choked Lake Washington years before the Clean Water Act, restoration advocates wonder if this generation is up to the new challenge.
So far, many aren't even aware there is a challenge.
"We have to explain to the people of this state that we've got problems, just like we did with Lake Washington, that are going to demand dramatic action," said Rep. Norm Dicks, "You have to educate people that there is truly a problem and it's crucial that we start before it's too late."
As the public gets up to speed, elected officials have started funneling dollars toward the recovery.
Dicks secured $2 million for an Environmental Protection Agency effort to coordinate the government's approach to the Sound's restoration. Sen. Maria Cantwell has helped channel more than $5 million to orca-related projects. Money for research and restoration projects for Hood Canal has totaled more than $12 million since 2004.
And in recent years, about $60 million in local, state and federal funds have been spent on salmon recovery.
But the numbers needed to get the job done will keep climbing, and already the campaign is lagging in places. A federal-state effort to orchestrate the restoration of shorelines is has been continuously underfunded, receiving $743,000 this year when staffers requested $1.9 million.
To make a bulletproof case for public funding, Gregoire set up the Puget Sound Partnership, which professes to be keeping itself accountable and efficient by learning from others' mistakes.
One of those is the restoration of Chesapeake Bay -- a project launched more than two decades ago that reaped $5.6 billion between 1995 and 2004.
The Bay's project is complicated by the multitude of state governments involved, while the Sound's restoration primarily concerns state and local governments.
But similar problems plague the Sound and Bay. The latter's restoration has focused on reducing polluting runoff from farms and urban areas, modernizing sewage treatment plants and more compact "smart" growth.
A recovery plan called Chesapeake 2000 predicted major progress in those areas within a decade.
That hasn't happened.
The Bay's health "actually declined since our elected officials committed to a 10-year restoration plan five years ago," noted scientists with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in 2005.
Ensuring accountability
Earlier this year, congressional auditors familiar with multibillion-dollar, large-scale restorations -- the Chesapeake, Everglades and Great Lakes -- came to Seattle to address the Puget Sound Partnership and deliver a grim warning: You have to do better.
It's imperative to have clear goals and objectives -- and ways to tell if they aren't being met, the federal auditors said. And when that happens, someone has to get in trouble.
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| Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife crews used helicopters to remove hundreds of tons of creosote-soaked logs from a beach on the west coast of Whidbey Island. | ||
There has to be independent oversight, said Anu Mittal, an auditor with the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Credibility suffers if the same people managing a restoration also evaluate its progress. And someone has to be in charge. Having a body to "coordinate" without giving it power is counterproductive, Mittal said, because "when you have conflict, and there are conflicts all the time ... there's nobody to make that decision."
Puget Sound once had such a body -- the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority. The Legislature created it in 1985, promising to clean up the Sound.
That promise went by the wayside in 1990. The Boeing Co. and other business interests lobbied the Legislature, which took away the authority's power and later transformed it into the Puget Sound Action Team, which is merely a coordinating group.
The partnership's proposed plan tries to solve the leadership and accountability problems with the creation of the Puget Sound Ecosystem Partnership, a group "will hold others accountable for progress, and will itself be held accountable to the public, through performance audits. ..."
But the group's authority and funding remain unclear.
After so many years of floundering efforts to save the Sound, Billy Frank Jr., the Nisqually tribal leader who co-chairs the partnership, demands more.
"I can't understand why people aren't up in arms. The water is dying out in front of their houses. Everything under the water, the forest under the water, is dead," he said.
"It seems to me that somebody has to be responsible for all this."
WHAT IS NEEDED?
Public support for saving Puget Sound, an awareness of the problems and a willingness to make sure everyday activities protect marine waters
WHAT'S BEEN DONE?
A survey to gauge public concern about the Sound
WHAT ARE THE ROADBLOCKS?
Money to pay for a widespread public education campaign
What are your thoughts on promises to clean up Puget Sound and save local orcas?
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Part One:
Over some 90 years, Granny has dodged bullets, escaped captors' nets. Can she survive the contamination of her home -- and her body?
Part Two:
A young Granny grows from infant to mature female in a sea increasingly dirtied with human waste and poisoned with chemicals. To humans, she's a monster, a curse -- and, soon enough, a swimming target.
Part Three:
Granny has escaped the bullets of fishermen and the military, but she and her family aren't so lucky when the nets of fortune-hunters close around them.
Part Four:
Granny escapes the nets of captors, but she can't escape a world in change. Her seas grow noisy, crowded with boats -- and young relatives are dying.
Part Five:
Granny must adapt to a world that's noisy and crowded, an underwater New York City where orca mothers pass along human poisons to "crack babies." The world up top is as strange. The same humans who once feared her now revere her.
Part Six:
Granny is tough. She has dodged nets and bullets. She has swum in our garbage and pollutants for nine decades and survived. What she can't survive is a sea without prey.
All about orcas
A primer.
Part One:
Marine life is disappearing from Puget Sound, and fast
The causes are many: Politicians' broken promises, industries' resistance and the inability to convince people to live and work more gently on the shores of the Sound.
Although some species thrive, the feast is actually a famine
Shrimp and spot prawn appear to be thriving -- which may represent a serious imbalance in the Puget Sound ecosystem.
Some businesses find flouting laws is cost-effective
Environmental agencies are hamstrung by businesses that repeatedly fail to follow the rules.
In the battle between fish and farmers, orcas are the losers
The Skagit River is the classic example of how much people resist changes that are necessary to rescue the sound's sea life.
Part Two:
A rising tide of chemicals and sewage
Despite years of cleanups, bans on certain chemicals and increasingly stringent regulations, pollution in Puget Sound remains pervasive. Fish are bathing in microscopic bits of plastic, toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and caffeine.
The message in the (plastic) bottle is dire
A lot of the plastics -- bottles, bags, toys, packaging, etc. -- that we use are winding up in marine waters. It's a newly emerging threat to sea life as the items break down and make their way into the food chain.
Septic tanks suspected in threat to nation's manila clam harvest
Leaky septic systems are oozing sewage into marine waters and making shellfish unsafe for eating. But in many cases health inspectors can't get onto private property to pinpoint the culprits.
Part Three:
Toxic stormwater is one of the Sound's biggest threats
For years, government officials and scientists have known that polluted stormwater poses one of the greatest threats to the Sound. And they know how to fix it. But so far, no one has had the political nerve or money to match the threat.
Low-impact methods have high impact on ecosystems
Grassy ditches, rain barrels and green roofs are all innovations to close the tap on stormwater and can help save salmon and orcas.
Part Four:
Major oil spill presents greatest short-term threat to orcas' survival
Government scientists say a major oil spill is the biggest extinction threat for Puget Sound orcas over the next half-century. Even smaller spills irritate orcas' eyes and skin, and contaminate their prey.
An ounce of prevention won't clean up even a gallon of oil, activist warns
A gadfly has a warning about the preparedness for cleaning up a massive oil spill in Puget Sound.
Part Five:
Slaughtered orcas' DNA a chance to save the species
Odds are good that your grandkids -- or maybe even your kids -- could see the Sound's orca population shrink perilously low in their lifetime. The government has launched protections to save the orcas, declaring most of the Sound protected.
Saving Puget Sound could cost $12 billion
The cost of saving Puget Sound could exceed $12 billion and will require a holistic strategy that tackles the problems plaguing the entire marine ecosystem, according to an all-star advisory panel appointed by the governor.
Part Six:
Puget Sound is in trouble, but many still don't get it
The Sound is still in trouble and people still aren't getting it. Restoration advocates agree that getting the public onboard is key for raising needed funding and stanching the flow from the "death by a thousand cuts" sickening the Sound.
What the readers are saying ...
"The Sound of Broken Promises" readers were troubled to learn about the plight of Puget Sound and conflicted over who's to blame and what to do next, according to the dozens of comments logged on the P-I Web site.
Track the latest environmental news on Lisa Stiffler and Robert McClure's Dateline Earth.
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