Watching Our Water Ways

Bolstered by a low-pressure weather system, yesterday’s “King Tide” was felt throughout Puget Sound. At its extreme, the high tide came within 0.01 feet of breaking the all-time tidal record set for Seattle on Jan. 27, 1983.

Reporter Chris Henry wrote about some of the local problems in a story published in today’s Kitsap Sun. And the Sun’s editors put together a “photo gallery” of pictures taken by area residents. Pictures from other areas were posted on the Flickr website, where the Department of Ecology manages the “Washington King Tide Photo Initiative.”

I especially liked Jim Groh’s photos of the Poulsbo waterfront. Take a close look at the picture taken yesterday (below) and compare it to the one in Sunday’s Water Ways entry, which shows last year’s King Tide. If the word “Poulsbo” doesn’t look right in the picture below, it’s because the bottom half of the letters are under water.

This week’s King Tides are declining, but they are expected to be high again starting Jan. 14.

Poulsbo’s waterfront on Liberty Bay. / Photo by Jim Groh

Silverdale Waterfront Park on Dyes Inlet. / Photo by John Yates

The boat ramp at Fort Ward on Bainbridge Island was nearly covered by water. / Photo by Julie Leung

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We’ve been writing a lot lately about shoreline restoration projects. As with road construction, it seems that the heaviest lifting on restoration projects gets going as summer draws to a close.

About 1,500 feet of bulkhead on Port Madison is being removed by the Powel family with help from Puget Sound Partnership and Bainbridge Island Land Trust. / Photo by Tad Sooter

Notable projects on the Kitsap Peninsula:

• The dismantling of 1,500 feet of rock bulkhead from Bainbridge Island’s Port Madison, a project known as the Powel bulkhead removal.
• Removal of a 700-foot concrete bulkhead at Anna Smith Children’s Park in Central Kitsap.
• The first phase of a $1.8 million restoration of the Union River estuary, which will include breaching a dike next year to allow sea water to cover about 30 acres walled off for 80 years.

Judging from the comments on the stories, some people don’t believe the government should be spending money on environmental restoration when the state and nation are in an economic slump.

Two years ago, Gov. Chris Gregoire made it clear that she believed that the economic troubles did not outweigh the ongoing risks to Puget Sound. I quoted her in the Kitsap Sun Oct. 15, 2010:

Removing an aging bulkhead on Dyes Inlet is expected to improve nearshore habitat at Anna Smith Children’s Park.
Photo by Christina Kereki, Kitsap County

“We are in the hardest economic problem since the deep depression, but we cannot take a recess; we cannot take time out (from the Puget Sound cleanup).”

Investing in cleanup efforts to repair past problems is one thing, the governor said, but the solution is not just costly restoration projects:

“It comes down to individuals like us. We are all part of the problem and we can all be part of the solution.”

She was talking about reducing stormwater pollution by being careful with household and lawn chemicals, car washing, oil and oil leaks, pet waste and other things.

When it comes to restoration projects, it turns out that the recession was actually a good time to begin many of these costly projects. As I reported in “Water Ways” on Oct. 21, 2010, the economic stimulus package approved by Congress helped pay for more than 600 projects directed to Puget Sound problems. The projects carried a price tag of about $460 million and created nearly 16,000 jobs.

The economic downturn also turned out to be good timing in another way. Construction companies hungry for work offered much lower bids than they would have during economic boom times. In many cases, including the Union River estuary project, bids are still coming in at the low end of cost projections.

Property owners who wish to restore their streams and shorelines are getting help from the government and nonprofit groups. In most cases, these projects would not get done by the property owners alone.

The $460,000 Powel bulkhead removal, for example, became a partnership between the Powel family, the Bainbridge Island Land Trust and the Puget Sound Partnership. The partnership’s new executive director, Anthony Wright, stated in a news release:

“It’s exciting to see everyone coming together to do some good for Puget Sound. Puget Sound is going to be healthy again because of people like the Powel family, the land trust and regulatory entities all working together.”

Some people doubt that the restoration projects are doing much good. Some say they simply are not worth the cost. But experts who have studied nearshore ecosystems argue that the ecological connections along the shoreline have been so severely disrupted that restoration is the best hope of saving the Puget Sound ecosystem.

I’ve heard people say that science does not support these kinds of restoration efforts. That’s an opinion not held by most experts, but if you are willing to do some reading, you can come to your own conclusions.

Some of the leading experts in our region have been taking part in the Puget Sound Nearshore Ecosystem Restoration Project, which includes a website of technical reports and plans. If you’re a fan of science, like me, you may feel like a kid in a candy shop as you peruse the many reports.

I would recommend the following as a beginning:

• Implications of Observed Anthropogenic Changes in the Nearshore Ecosystems of Puget Sound (PDF 842 kb)
• Strategies for Nearshore Protection and Restoration in Puget Sound (PDF 11.3 mb)
• Puget Sound Shorelines and the Impacts of Armoring— Proceedings of a State of the Science Workshop, May 2009

The pair of explanatory drawings below is taken from a chapter of the “State of the Science” report mentioned above. See Fish and Invertebrate Response to Shoreline Armoring and Restoration in Puget Sound (PDF 440 KB) by Jason D. Toft, Jeffery R. Cordell, Sarah M. Heerhartz, Elizabeth A. Armbrust, and Charles A. Simenstad.

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Like a dark cloud, a fear of politics hangs over a program that allocates state money for projects that protect fish and wildlife habitat, build parks and trails and preserve farmland. Check out my story in yesterday’s Kitsap Sun, which relates methods of funding to a Bainbridge Island trails project.

A bit of history is needed to understand the controversy. In 1989, two prominent politicians, Republican Dan Evans and Democrat Mike Lowry, joined forces to create the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition. The idea was to attract both government and private money to the best projects of their kind in the state.

The following year, the Legislature created a funding structure called the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Program. The strength of the program, according to many supporters, is the enduring formula for allocating state dollars, first by category (PDF 12 kb), then by project through detailed evaluation criteria.

Because of the established criteria, the Legislature has avoided fights over whether to fund particular projects. Instead, the Legislature sets the statewide budget for the program, and expert committees score the projects based on established criteria.

On the 20th anniversary of the program in 2009, an editorial in the Seattle Times noted that some people doubted that the political marriage of this “odd couple” — Evans and Lowry — would last for the long run, but so far it has:

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When I wrote my recent progress report on the Puget Sound Partnership, my story included little more than brief quotes and snippits of information from a variety of informed people. It is somewhat rewarding to have a blog where I can bring you more complete impressions of the people I interviewed. Here is the fifth in a series of expanded reports from those interviews.

Puget Sound may be suffering ecologically at this point in history, but the Puget Sound Partnership would do best by explaining in a positive way how things can be improved, said state Rep. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island.

“Don’t spend your time trying to bum people out,” she told me when I asked her to offer some advice to the partnership. “Focus on bringing people together to make it better. We all want more fish, more birds, more parks. How do we engage people to make it happen? I would say to them, ‘stay creative, stay positive and think local.’”

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Two of our local killer whale pods, J and K, have been hanging around Central and South Puget Sound the past few days — something quite unusual for the month of February.

As I write this late Sunday afternoon, a large group of orcas has been reported in Seattle’s Elliott Bay. On Friday, the whales came into Bremerton’s Sinclair Inlet as far as Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

J pod is known to travel in and out of Puget Sound in the winter, but the total amount of time spent in Central and South Sound the past few days — along with the presence of K pod — points toward a pattern I cannot remember seeing before.

Are they finding an abundance of fish, perhaps blackmouth (immature resident chinook) or herring? We’re in the midst of herring-spawning season for much of Puget Sound. Or could the orcas be here to help a newborn calf get off to a good start? There are no confirmed photos of a new calf, but Orca Network is getting some significant reports of a very small orca.

Brad Hanson and Candi Emmons of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center observed foraging during the current visit and collected some fish scales, which should provide information about what they are eating. (UPDATE, 2-7: Brad told me that fecal or scale samples have never been taken from killer whales in Puget Sound during February, at least not until now. So it will be interesting to see what this one fish turns out to be. Brad said he didn’t get a good look at it, but it was a salmonid of some kind.)

The whales were pretty active in and out of the San Juan Islands the second half of January, before being spotted Wednesday near the Fauntleroy-Vashon ferry route. Here’s a summary of their activities since then via reports to Orca Network:
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The three pods of Southern Resident killer whales have been in and out of Puget Sound the past few weeks, according to reports from Orca Network and the Center for Whale Research.

Today, people began reporting sightings of the killer whales from the Bainbridge Island ferry before 9 a.m. Apparently, there were lots of orcas and spread out, as folks began seeing them about the same time in Seattle’s Elliott Bay, according to reports from Orca Network.

By 10:30 a.m.,they were between West Seattle and Vashon Island. They continued south and reached about the halfway point on Vashon Island about 12:30 p.m., when they turned around and headed back north, according to reports. Some whales may have continued south around the southern tip of Vashon Island and came back north through Colvos Passage, as five or six whales were spotted near the Southworth Ferry Terminal about 5 p.m.

Below are videos taken from news helicopters over Elliott Bay in the morning, top from KOMO-4 and bottom from KING-5.

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A Bainbridge Island resident, Izumi Stephens, will join Sea Shepherd in its upcoming campaign against the Japanese whaling fleet in the Antarctic, as I describe in a story in today’s Kitsap Sun.

Izumi Stephens

A native of Japan, Izumi will serve as an on-board interpreter for the anti-whaling group. While engaging whalers, Sea Shepherd has an occasional need to converse with Japanese ship captains as well as conveying information to Japanese news reporters.

If you’ve watched “Whale Wars” on television, you know about Sea Shepherd’s highly confrontational approach to the Japanese fleet, often maneuvering its vessels into dangerous positions in front, behind and alongside the massive whaling ships.

Capt. Paul Watson, who heads Sea Shepherd, broke away from Greenpeace in 1977 as he pushed for more severe actions against whaling operations throughout the world. In 1980, “operatives” from his three-year-old organization took credit for sinking the whaling ship Sierra in Lisbon, Portugal — the first of many similar attacks.

Sea Shepherd, which operates throughout the world, has an ongoing connection to the Northwest. Its international headquarters is located in Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands, and Watson frequently returns to this region.
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I love maps — especially the new-fangled, interactive, online ones based on geographic information systems. Click a box and roads appear. Click another box and you get city boundaries, and so on.

From Bainbridge Island's new mapping application. (Click to enlarge)

Bainbridge Island this week announced its new online mapping application, which allows anyone to build a map to his or her own specifications. For those focused on water issues, it’s an easy way to locate streams, wetlands and watersheds. I do wish, however, that the streams were named on the map.

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UPDATE: April 13, 2010

In a story in today’s Kitsap Sun, reporter Tristan Baurick says the mapping system will save city staff time and improve their efficiency.

He quoted Gretchen Robinson, a geographic information systems specialist, as saying, “A lot of people call just to find the elevation of their property. This mapping application will answer that.”
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I congratulate Bainbridge Island along with other local governments throughout Puget Sound who have developed this way of building maps without downloading special software.

Thurston County was one of the first and is still one of the best to build these maps and continue to upgrade its online mapping system.

Mason County uses the same mapping application, with plenty of information included.

King and Snohomish county maps work pretty well. I’m a little less impressed with Pierce County’s, possibly because I have not used it enough to understand its quirks.

I don’t believe Kitsap County has an interactive map of this kind, except for its parcel-search map, which works well for auditor, assessor and treasurer information but does not include natural resource data.

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Officials with the Washington Department of Ecology plan to step back from the Wyckoff-Eagle Harbor Superfund Site on Bainbridge Island, pull community members together and begin looking for a new way to clean up the underground mess.

The ground near the entrance to Eagle Harbor became saturated with toxic creosote from the Wyckoff wood-treatment plant, which operated there for 80 years. After working on the problem more than 20 years and spending close to $100 million, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a final solution.

The idea approved by the agency is to pump the waste out of the ground at a rate that will keep pollution from reaching Eagle Harbor, while leaving hundreds of thousands of gallons of waste buried for 100 years or more.

EPA has asked Ecology to sign off on the cleanup plan and take over operation of the pumping system. Check out the Kitsap Sun story by reporter Tristan Baurick.

Tim Nord, Ecology’s toxics cleanup manager, told me there are two reasons the state is unwilling to take over at this time. One is the uncertainty of leaving such a huge amount of waste in the ground. The second is that running the pumping system could cost between $700,000 and $1.5 million each year with no end in sight.

In his story, Tristan pointed out that the EPA may have lost $3 million by not getting a final agreement with the state, but that seems like peanuts compared to the ongoing costs that nobody wants to pay.

Nord has informed the EPA that the state cannot agree to the longterm remedy that agency staff proposed.

In the meantime, Nord will take an unprecedented step outside normal regulatory procedures by creating a panel of experts who might just come up with a new idea. It will be a wide-open discussion that will include the city of Bainbridge Island, the Suquamish Tribe and the Association of Bainbridge Communities — none of whom like the idea of leaving all that waste in the ground — as well as other interested people, he said.

“I am trying to look at this problem differently,” Nord told me. “Is there a way to get as much of that material out of the ground as possible?”

It isn’t so much about how long it will take to reach some numerical cleanup standard, Nord said. It is about the community, including people who would like to create a safe park on that site to be used for generations.

If the best minds in the business can come up with a plan for mass removal, then it will be laid out for a full discussion.

“The people need to be able to follow it, trust in it and believe in it,” Nord said.

Nord was not ready to talk about the step to follow, which will involve money. But if his group finds a viable solution, I would bet that state and federal elected officials could work together to get it done.

Given the ecological value of Eagle Harbor, I can understand why so many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of running pumps forever to hold back pollution from seeping into the bay.

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UPDATE, June 5, 2009:
A Victoria Times-Colonist editorial raises several key questions about the sewer plans and says the government should not rush into the project.

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The Bainbridge Island sewage spill, estimated at 140,000 gallons, was blamed on a break in a 32-year-old pipe buried in the beach and subject to saltwater corrosion.

Before final repairs, a temporary band slowed the flow of sewage
Kitsap Sun photo by Tristan Baurick

While Bainbridge Island cleaned up its sewage today, the city of Victoria — which has been dumping raw sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca for decades — took steps to clean up its mess as well. Regional officials took action on a plan to build a series of four sewage-treatment plants at a cost of $1.2 billion. Progress, yes, but work is still years away. More about that in a moment.

Damage to the environment in and around Bainbridge Island’s Eagle Harbor is expected to be temporary, according to Larry Altose, spokesman for the Washington Department of Ecology, who was quoted in a Kitsap Sun story by Tristan Baurick.

“As awful as a sewer release sounds, the impact of this size of spill is short-term,” Altose said, noting that sunlight and other organisms will quickly kill or eat most of the sewage contaminants within days.

Ecology could fine the city up to $10,000 a day for the spill. The city’s response and track record with maintenance can be considered.

“We can fine, but that’s not the point,” Altose said. “The point is to have lessons learned and have the proper steps for prevention.”

One lesson that everyone has been learning over the past few years is that sewer lines buried in the beach are trouble. We all know why they were installed there in the first place — because it is cheaper to build in the beach than to clear a route through trees and across ravines in the uplands.

Sewer lines in the beach are a problem that many cities must face, and they should be inspecting buried pipes on a regular schedule. We’ll see what Ecology’s investigation turns up with respect to Bainbridge Island’s maintenance.

Meanwhile, Bremerton and Poulsbo also face issues with worn-out pipes, and we don’t yet know what the solution will be. Bremerton, if you recall, has proposed a boardwalk that can support a vacuum truck to maintain the pipe after it is replaced in the beach (Water Ways, Sept. 22, 2008). That design is under scrutiny by the Army Corps of Engineers and other state and federal agencies.

As for Victoria, city officials maintained for years that they should be allowed to discharge raw sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, because the swift waters dilute the pollution. Three years ago, the Minister of Environment for British Columbia said that was no longer acceptable and that treatment systems would be required for the municipalities of Colwood, Esquimalt, Langford, Oak Bay, Saanich, Victoria and View Royal, all under the Capital Regional District.
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