5
River Revival
An Environmental and Cultural Renaissance
2000 TO THE PRESENT
For two full days since the terror attacks of 9/11, the skies over Boeing Field had been eerily silent. No planes flew in or out of the area that was normally inundated with the noise of jets taking off and landing at the King County Airport or passing over the river on their approach to Sea-Tac International Airport, about ten miles to the south. All flights nationwide had been grounded, and normal government services were effectively shut down. The country was in shock, and federal agencies were focused on ensuring that another attack was not imminent. Yet in the midst of this simultaneously frantic and frozen state of affairs, the gears of government ground on. On September 13, 2001, a notice appeared in the Federal Register announcing that the Lower Duwamish Waterway had been added to the National Priorities List, ranking as one of the nation’s most hazardous waste sites. The Duwamish River was now on the Superfund list, and plans for a full river cleanup would begin immediately.1
Despite the events of 9/11, the Superfund listing was headline news in Seattle. The front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer bore the headline “Duwamish Now on Cleanup List” on September 14, 2001, a century and a half, to the day, after the first white pioneers arrived to settle on the river. The Superfund site of 2001 was almost unidentifiable as the river where the Collins, Maple and Van Asselt families had first landed.
Volunteers plant native shrubs along the Duwamish River in South Park during a “Duwamish Alive!” work party—a habitat-restoration event held at multiple sites along the river each spring and fall. Courtesy of Paul Joseph Brown.
Dr. Usha Varanasi’s findings of liver lesions in Duwamish sole, Jim Meador’s research at NOAA on toxins in endangered Chinook salmon, and Don Malins’s documentation of widespread fish contamination and disease in Puget Sound’s urban estuaries had provided much of the evidence that led EPA to list the Duwamish River as a Superfund site.2 By the time of the announcement, Meador’s research was focused on PCBs—among the most toxic and ubiquitous pollutants in the Duwamish. Studies revealed that PCBs were present in all of the Duwamish River’s resident fish and wildlife, despite a ban on their manufacture in the United States in 1979. These chemicals resist decomposition, so they persist in the environment for many decades. Alarmingly, and contrary to earlier assumptions, PCBs were even present in migratory salmon traveling through the Duwamish, including the small, silvery juveniles that passed through the estuary for just a few days or weeks on their journey to the sea.3
In 1999, EPA had directed a survey of bottom sediments along the five miles of the straightened Duwamish Waterway to determine the levels of contamination. PCBs were found in over 90 percent of the three hundred sediment samples—more than enough to warrant the Superfund listing. Local governments and businesses, however, wanted to keep the river off the Superfund list. They were worried about the stigma it would cast on the city, and some believed that they could clean the river up faster and better without EPA dogging their efforts.4
At the urging of state governor Gary Locke, EPA tried to negotiate a cleanup agreement with four of the largest “responsible parties”—those who caused and were liable for cleaning up the river’s legacy of pollution. The four—Seattle and King County utilities, the Port of Seattle, and the Boeing Company—formed a partnership called the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group to formulate a plan that they hoped would keep EPA from designating the river as a Superfund site. EPA sought an agreement that would stipulate the same cleanup and restoration requirements as the Superfund law, without imposing all the federal red tape that would come with the listing. But Boeing refused to accept conditions related to paying for their historical damages to natural resources—the same part of the Superfund law that NOAA had used to require Seattle and King County to clean up and restore parts of the river years before.5
“The agencies wanted the right to claim payment for damage up to three years after completion of the cleanup, the same terms as allowed under the Superfund listing,” wrote the Seattle Times in 2000. “But Boeing would not agree to those terms.” Their refusal killed the deal. EPA listed the river on the Superfund National Priorities List, enacting all federal cleanup requirements and ensuring NOAA’s ability to assess damages for the full period allowed by the law.6
A QUESTION OF SCIENCE
Meador’s earlier research had found that PCB levels in Chinook salmon fry passing through the Duwamish estuary reflected the PCB loads in the sections of the river where they were caught. The salmon tended to hug one shore or the other and did not cross the channel. As a result, young salmon traveling down the east side of the Duwamish, where there were more factories and outfalls, had three to five times more PCBs in their bodies than salmon fry found on the west side of the channel. This discovery made it easier to figure out exactly where on the river the greatest harm was being caused and which entities were responsible.7
Even so, the task was far from simple. Wild Chinook salmon migrating from upriver streams had to be distinguished from salmon raised in the watershed’s hatcheries, where it was discovered that they were being fed PCB-tainted fish pellets. In addition to poisoning the hatchery fish, the chemical-laden fish food undermined the scientists’ efforts to measure the amount of PCBs picked up in the river. All of the hatchery salmon—marked as such by removal of their small adipose fin—had to be removed from the study to eliminate the influence of the fish pellets on the results. Once the data were limited to the wild fish, the pattern could be clearly seen.8
“It was really scary,” says Meador. “The concentrations were really high in some of those fish” NOAA recommended that the areas with the highest PCB concentrations be cleaned up first, which they predicted would significantly lower PCB levels in Duwamish Chinook. This would help the Chinook to begin recovering before the entire river was cleaned up, which was expected to take decades. In response to Meador’s findings, EPA selected seven “early action areas”with high levels of PCBs. Cleanup of these areas would be fast-tracked while the comprehensive studies, reviews, and engineering plans required for the full river cleanup were in progress.9
Thirty years after joining the team of scientists at NOAA, and nearly two decades after the river became a Superfund site, Meador is still at it. His most recent research shows that Chinook salmon migrating through the Duwamish and other contaminated estuaries of Puget Sound have a 45 percent lower survival and return rate than Chinook from clean areas. He hopes that new Chinook data will be collected now that cleanup of the early action areas is complete: the results would show how effective the early cleanups have been in reducing the PCB load in the bodies of the salmon.10
Meador removed himself from the increasingly charged technical meetings about how best to clean up the rest of the Duwamish River after EPA agreed to an approach proposed by Boeing and the other polluters that he saw as suspect. The actual scientific assessments were being done by the polluters directly, with EPA providing oversight. “It was interesting to see how they were spinning science in their direction,” he mused in a 2019 interview. “I was skeptical that they would come up with a good plan.” Agencies like NOAA reviewed the data collection plans in an advisory capacity but had no authority to approve or deny the methods used; that was up to EPA. Meador did not think the plans accounted for his finding that the feeding patterns of juvenile salmon were restricted to small areas. “They divided the river up into reaches, and then within those everything was averaged. It kinda diluted the whole thing.” Despite his disagreement with EPA, however, Meador is glad to see that the Duwamish River cleanup is under way. “I’m optimistic that over time, it can be cleaner.” After a pause, he added: “Hopefully, clean enough.”11
Getting the complex science right is an integral challenge of every Superfund site, and especially of mega-sites like the Duwamish River. Scientific assessments, and the people who conduct them, are inherently biased, despite most scientists’ best efforts to avoid bias in their research. Value judgments about what information is important guide the questions scientists ask and influence the conclusions that they come to. Judgments about the costs and time involved in a cleanup also come into play. Is it more important to be frugal and speedy, to get the cleanup done quickly, or to have a comprehensive understanding of all the long- and short-term ways in which pollution is affecting the fish, wildlife, and people in order to design the best cleanup plan possible?12
Not surprisingly, on the Duwamish River, there was a wide variety of opinions about how best to study and resolve the river’s long legacy of pollution. The river flows through an urban landscape, surrounded by residential and industrial neighborhoods. It is used by recreational and subsistence fishermen from dozens of different nations and protected by tribal treaties with the US government, which effectively supersede all other applicable laws.
In addition, the cleanup raised complex scientific issues. The site contained a stew of forty-two different toxic chemicals in concentrations that exceeded safe levels for environmental or human health, or both. Were all these pollutants equally important? Some were found nearly everywhere in the river, while others were found in only a few spots. Which ones posed the greatest risks to fish, wildlife, and people? Could any of the chemicals be considered as markers for knowing whether the cleanup was successful? And most important, how clean was “clean enough”?
A BOTCHED JOB
In 2003, John Beal, the steward of Hamm Creek, was perched at the top of a rip-rap bank, an engineered slope of large boulders reinforcing the artificial shoreline under his feet. For days he had been watching the crane on a rust-colored barge anchored just offshore as its operator repeatedly lowered and lifted a metal bucket on a heavy chain. The base of the bucket consisted of hinged, interlocking teeth. Each time the bucket was lowered to the river bottom, the jagged teeth opened and bit deep into the soft mud. The bucket, heavy with contaminated sediment, was then raised above the water and swung around, opening its iron jaw to release a mound of slurry onto the barge. This project was the first EPA early action cleanup on the river.
Once or twice each day, a volunteer from nearby Georgetown or South Park would come by for a couple of hours to relieve Beal of his vigil. On a clipboard they recorded the time at which each bucket was lifted out of the river. In most cases they made notes about the volume of mud flowing over its top. Sometimes, if an obstruction prevented the teeth of the bucket from closing fully, it came up empty, the last of its slurry briefly seen as it escaped through the bottom. When that happened, the tainted mud was carried away by the current.
The sludge on the barge, and spilling into the river, represented decades of chemical pollution flowing from over 2,500 acres of industrial lands. In addition, the flow often contained untreated sewage, which gushed from a pair of concrete tunnels jutting out from the riverbank. Whenever the network of drainage pipes buried under the nearby factories filled with rain, a foul mix of industrial waste, sewage, and excess stormwater overflowed into the river. When the river was listed for cleanup, an average of more than three hundred million gallons of combined sewage and stormwater escaped each year from the pipes into the river. By 2003, system upgrades had reduced the volume to an average of sixty-five million gallons, overflowing roughly twenty times each year. Each overflow brought a new slug of PCBs, heavy metals, dioxins, and other chemicals to the river, just a few yards from where the accumulation of polluted mud was now being removed.13
The cleanup project was being conducted by King County. The outfall—called a combined sewer overflow (CSO)—was one of eleven within the five-mile Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund site. Each of them carried polluted stormwater mixed with raw domestic sewage and partially treated industrial waste to the river during rainstorms. This particular overflow was named the Duwamish/Diagonal CSO, for its location at the intersection of the river and Diagonal Way South. EPA was officially supervising the work and had assessed the extent of contaminated sediment before the cleanup began. When the project was finished, the data would be used to determine whether the dredging had been successful.14
The project was also a test of EPA’s promises of transparency and inclusion to local environmental groups, the Duwamish Tribe, and local residents. Whenever Beal saw the dredge bucket spill its toxic loads into the current, he made detailed notes. Whenever the spills increased in volume or frequency, Beal called the EPA manager supervising the operation. Beal and his volunteers—myself included—made dozens of calls over the sixtyseven days of dredging.15
John Beal had been a key player in forming a community advisory group to oversee the river cleanup. In the months leading up to the Superfund listing, the salmon habitat restoration group he had founded—the International Marine Association Protecting Aquatic Life (IMAPAL)—had partnered with the Duwamish Tribe and a team of environmental and social justice organizations to raise money to hire technical consultants and a coordinator for their oversight and advisory efforts. As the former director of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, I was asked to help manage the effort.
The coalition incorporated as the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition (DRCC), and at Beal’s urging, the neighborhood associations representing the residents of South Park and Georgetown soon joined it. DRCC’s scientific consultants worked with Beal and others to examine the safety of King County’s cleanup proposal. Several aspects of the plan caused the group concern, including the method of removing the most toxic mud. Instead of the specialized environmental dredgers in use elsewhere, King County’s contractors used crude buckets that had not been designed to handle contaminated material. Indeed, when the dredging was finished, tests showed that while the targeted area was now clean, the surrounding river bottom—which had been relatively clean before the dredging began—was contaminated with PCBs spilled from the bucket.16
To reduce costs, King County had hired an unskilled operator who was inexperienced at working in environmentally hazardous conditions. As Beal’s complaints to EPA accumulated, the agency ordered the county to slow down and exercise greater care. Yet these repeated demands failed to significantly improve the dredger’s performance. Finally, the contractor agreed to switch to a state-of-the-art environmental dredge bucket. Relieved, we rushed to the riverbank to see the new bucket in action.
As the new bucket broke the surface of the water, it spewed mud from all sides. Beal stared in disbelief. Instead of an environmental dredge designed to seal off and prevent spills of contaminated mud, the new bucket had only a coarse metal screen. It was in fact a rock dredge, designed specifically to release all fine gravel, mud, and water—the polar opposite of a specialized environmental bucket. EPA issued a stop-work order, and the original open-top bucket was reinstated.
As the DRCC consulted with technical experts working on other Superfund sites around the country, they also became concerned that the work was being done before the full extent of pollution in the river had been studied. Because King County had been sued years earlier by EPA and NOAA for the environmental damages caused by outfalls like this one, the county had already planned to clean up the polluted area around this CSO. They were eager to get the job done before stricter cleanup standards could be imposed by the Superfund process. In the interest of speed, EPA agreed to permit the county to go forward under the rules of the previous settlement rather than follow all of the Superfund requirements.
Rushing to review King County’s plans for the fast-tracked cleanup, DRCC was able to convince EPA to expand the cleanup zone to encompass a polluted sediment hot spot just upriver of the originally proposed boundary, so that the tainted mud there wouldn’t drift into the cleaned-up river bottom. In addition, DRCC joined the City of Tacoma’s mayor and council in opposing a proposed disposal site for the toxic mud from the Duwamish in Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. Instead, EPA agreed that the material would be loaded onto railcars and transported by train to an eastern Washington landfill, permanently removing it from Puget Sound. However, the train carrying the first load of contaminated sediments derailed near the Columbia River, requiring another cleanup.17
At the end of the Duwamish/Diagonal CSO cleanup, EPA’s test results confirmed the spread of contamination as a result of the dredging snafus. King County had to return to the river to remove the mud spilled by the dredge, at a cost of another $100,000. To the dismay of county officials, EPA refused to exclude the dredged area from future river cleanup plans, maintaining that the area might require additional cleanup to remove pollution still gushing from uncontrolled sewage and stormwater overflows into the Duwamish River.18
TURNING THE TIDE
Before the first bucket of contaminated mud was spilled at King County’s sewage outfall, EPA was already drawing up plans for the next early action cleanup—a former asphalt company in South Park, about three miles upriver. In 1985, investigators Dan Cargill and Lee Dorrigan of the Washington State Department of Ecology had stepped onto a mud-filled lot owned by a company with the unintentionally ironic name of Malarkey Asphalt. Unpaved, pocked with pools of oil, and crisscrossed with exposed piping, the site had no visible pollution collection or treatment system. Ribbons of multihued runoff joined mounds of soft asphalt oozing toward the riverbank. Cargill and Dorrigan’s report noted semiburied, dilapidated storage tanks scattered around the property. They collected samples showing that the adjoining beach contained high levels of lead, zinc, and arsenic.19
Once a seasonal floodplain prized by early settlers for its fertility, this reach of the Duwamish River was dredged in 1918 as part of the waterway project to straighten its meanders and deepen its draft. Here the canal made a thirty-degree eastward turn before continuing its straight line south. The adjacent floodplain and a neighboring river oxbow were filled with dredged mud, rocks, and debris to create new land. A couple of homes were built here as the neighborhood of South Park expanded. In 1937, the Duwamish Manufacturing Company bought the property, removed the houses, and began manufacturing asphalt roof shingles. In time, the company changed hands and became Malarkey Asphalt Co., named for its principal owner, Michael Malarkey. It ceased operations in 1993 and later sold the property to the Port of Seattle.20
I had passed the Malarkey Asphalt property dozens of times while patrolling for pollution as the Puget Soundkeeper in the 1990s, and later while leading environmental education tours on the river for the DRCC. The most dramatic feature of that part of the riverfront at that time wasn’t the asphalt plant but the fifty-foot-high tanks owned by the Basin Oil Company, across the street from the shuttered plant. In the years immediately following the Duwamish River’s listing as a Superfund site, John Beal frequently called the Puget Soundkeeper’s pollution hotline to report mysterious burning in the tanks at night, or spills of oil running into nearby street drains. Historical pollution on the Malarkey site—now known as the Port of Seattle’s Terminal 117—had triggered an EPA cleanup order, which the port completed in 1999. After that cleanup, the site had become a quiet parcel of land leased out for truck parking and storage.
In 2003, despite the previous cleanup, the old Malarkey riverbank made EPA’s list of hot spots within the Superfund site that posed an immediate threat to the environment and human health. Planning for a new early action cleanup began. In the world of Superfund cleanups, however, early is a relative term, and after seeing the results of King County’s cleanup at its sewer outfall, Terminal 117’s South Park neighbors did not want to risk sacrificing quality for speed. Residents took a special interest in overseeing the investigation and cleanup of the waterfront property. Any spillage here could wind up on local public beaches or at the shoreline park just a short distance downriver.21
Guy Crow owned a marina next door to Terminal 117. As EPA worked with the port on a new cleanup plan, Beal and I often sat with Guy to talk about his recollections of Malarkey. Over two decades, he had seen company staff dump asphalt sludge onto the riverbank, bury drums of oily waste on the factory grounds, and pour hundreds of gallons of waste oil into an old railcar they used as a makeshift holding tank to heat the oil before pumping it through a series of pipes to machinery in need of lubrication. It was the railcar that had been the focus of EPA’s cleanup in 1999: the tank was unsealed, and the oil seeped out into the surrounding soil and groundwater. In the 1990s, the EPA investigation was confined to the footprint of the railcar, which had been removed. The thick blackberry hedge between the railcar and the riverbank was not included.
Seeping out from under the hedge, and visible from the water, I had seen the lava-like flows of asphalt that would ooze sludge if pressed gently with the toe of a boot, along with the random barrels toppling out of the bushes at the top of the bank. The buried drums, however, I had heard about only as rumors from Crow and one or two other longtime neighbors.
If the previous upland cleanup had failed to remove the visible drums and spilled asphalt, what else might still be buried unseen on the site? Residents’ worries were exacerbated by the lack of soil sampling under much of the property’s thinly paved parking lot, and even more by a single sample taken at the edge of the pavement near the bank, which showed startlingly high levels of PCBs: 1,000 parts per million (ppm), a thousand times higher than the state standard for a residential area. When EPA released its draft early action plan in 2005, it proposed to remove the contaminated riverbank up to the edge of the parking lot but no farther. Any PCBs that might lie buried inland of the riverbank would be left alone.22
The DRCC knew that asking for more sampling would add time to the cleanup, but the high levels of PCBs at the site could pose a longterm risk to both the environment and human health. On April 7, 2005, the coalition wrote a response to EPA’s cleanup plan. “Unfortunately, the site is inadequately—indeed, incompletely—characterized. . . . DRCC is extremely concerned that EPA and Ecology are sacrificing quality for speed in their first cleanup proposal for the Duwamish River, and we are unable to support the proposed action.” In addition, the coalition noted, “The public cannot provide informed comment on the adequacy of an incomplete plan.” The DRCC asked EPA and the port to conduct more testing under the parking lot where Crow claimed that barrels and transformers had been buried. Separately, it also requested that the drums and sludge along the shoreline be removed immediately to prevent any remaining oil from seeping into the river.23
EPA and the Port of Seattle insisted that there was no cause for concern. The agency’s published reports stated that the previous cleanup on the property had reduced all PCBs in the soils to 25 ppm or less, and that at an industrial site, 25 ppm was a level low enough to protect people’s health. They viewed the 1,000 ppm sample at the top of the bank as an anomaly. Fortunately, though EPA had ordered the cleanup, it was also required to satisfy all state laws. Washington State required PCBs to be cleaned up to levels of 10 ppm or lower on industrial properties and to 1 ppm or lower on any property within one hundred feet of homes.24
To reassure the community, the Port of Seattle sent a team of technicians to Terminal 117 to take more samples near the hot spot at the top of the bank. The technicians collected samples by punching small holes through the four-inch thick asphalt covering the parking lot. A short distance inland from the bank the samples revealed PCB concentrations of 1,400 ppm. Levels were increasing rather than decreasing as crews worked their way toward the property boundary, the public right-of-way, and the houses across the street.25
Guy Crow was watching a sampling crew in the parking lot at Terminal 117 in March 2006 when they suddenly jumped back from the hole they had punched through the asphalt. They turned and rushed off the property, outside the fenced barrier the port had erected a few weeks before. When they returned, they were wearing protective suits. The samples they took, just a few feet from the fenceline and within one hundred feet of the closest homes, showed levels of 9,400 ppm of PCBs—nearly ten times higher than the levels at the top of the riverbank. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted the port spokesman David Schaefer: “Everybody was surprised. . . . We may need to dig out more material.”26
In the meantime, Greg Wingard, now executive director of the nonprofit group Waste Action Project, planned a site visit to count the number of fifty-five-gallon drums sitting along the riverbank below the old Malarkey plant. Volunteers, myself included, had noted on several trips up the river that at least one—a rusty drum clearly visible from the water—appeared to be dripping oil. Accompanying Wingard to the site, I brought sterile bottles for collecting samples of leaking oil. If EPA and the port wouldn’t test the drums, any lying below the high-tide mark on the public shoreline were fair game for us to sample.
We arrived by kayak, pulling up on the shoreline at low tide. Prodding at the blackberry bushes at the top of the slope, Wingard counted a couple of dozen drums, most in a state of advanced corrosion. One drum was buried deep in the beach at our feet, with only the top couple of inches visible above the sand. The barrel we had noticed on previous boat trips was perched halfway up the bank, supported by a collection of rotting timbers jutting out over the water—remnants of an old retaining wall.
A visible sheen dripped from the exposed barrel. Wingard pulled on safety gloves and collected a sample in a small glass vial. A nearby lab, which had offered to run a chemical profile of any samples we collected, delivered the results a few days later. The sample tested positive for PCBs. We forwarded the results to EPA and the Port of Seattle, requesting immediate removal of the barrel and any others on the riverbank that might still be leaking PCB-laden oil into the river.
Following the new discovery of high levels of PCBs near the Terminal 117 fenceline, EPA ordered the City and Port of Seattle to extend their sampling beyond the property line, into the unpaved city streets and residential areas nearby. PCBs were found in dirt in the streets and parking strips. Residents’ private yards and gardens showed levels ranging from 20 to 93 ppm. A handful of homes were also tested and showed low levels of PCBs inside.27
In light of all the new data, EPA developed a revised cleanup plan that would include the upland property and neighboring streets. The City of Seattle’s power utility—Seattle City Light—was added as a responsible party to help pay for cleanup because the original source of the oil used by Malarkey was waste oil from the utility’s power transformers.28
Based on the new sampling, EPA released a second plan to address the upland property in order to cover the entire area of contaminated soil, sediment, and groundwater. The front yards of two homes across the street were removed and replaced with clean soil in an emergency action. In addition to cleaning up the polluted beach, deepwater sediments offshore, and the riverbank, the new plan would remove the top layer of PCB contamination throughout the uplands (plus a few deep bores where PCB levels were highest). It would also replace all the dirt roads with clean pavement on the streets surrounding the Malarkey plant. It specified that PCB levels on the Malarkey property not exceed 10 ppm at the surface and 25 ppm at depth. The plan would restrict all future land uses to industrial and require that the entire property be paved and fenced in perpetuity to protect the public from any health risks that remained.29
The South Park community was stunned. After discovering the extent of toxic PCBs at the site, EPA intended to leave ten times more pollution near their homes than state law allowed. In doing so, EPA and the port were limiting how the community could use their waterfront, no matter who might ultimately own the narrow strip of land. The decision would ensure that no one could ever buy the land from the port without also taking on the liability that would come with the PCBs left behind.
The DRCC again responded to EPA’s plan: “The Port, as a public agency, must take public concerns into account before deciding that this property will forever be highly restricted industrial property,” they wrote. “This predetermined land use does not maximize the potential for re-development opportunities that may better serve the South Park community.”30
Residents also complained to their city councilors. Technically, Terminal 117 was in unincorporated King County—a remnant of zoning years before that had left a narrow strip along South Park’s riverfront surrounded by, but outside, the city limits. The city had planned for years to annex the “Sliver by the River.” But EPA’s decision would limit the city’s options for future land uses along the river, despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars to clean it up.31
At EPA’s public hearing on the proposed plan in May 2006, residents showed up in force and spoke out against the plan, and the Seattle City Council presented their objections: “The City Council is currently reviewing the area including the T-117 for annexation into the City of Seattle.” Citing future commercial and recreational possibilities, they added: “We are interested in ensuring the land is clean enough to be used for any zoning designation that the city may determine appropriate.”32
In a last-ditch effort to change the plan, the DRCC held a series of one-on-one meetings with members of the Seattle Port Commission. In addition to raising environmental justice issues—challenging them to consider whether they would support such a decision near the homes of Seattle’s wealthier residents—coalition members emphasized the financial implications of the permanent liability the commission would incur by leaving PCBs buried on their property. Until then the port had been largely unresponsive to environmental concerns. However, Seattle’s newspapers had been sympathetic to the low-income South Park neighbors’ plight. On the day of the Port of Seattle Commission meeting, where the port was expected to sign its agreement to carry out EPA’s cleanup order, South Park residents carpooled en masse to the commission’s meeting seven miles south, at Sea-Tac International Airport.
The large, usually empty, meeting room was packed. Agency staff and reporters lined the room. Residents lined up to testify. One by one, they decried the port’s plans to leave toxic chemicals buried in their neighborhood. One mother broke down crying as she described walking and playing with her young children on the streets around the Malarkey property, where they had been unknowingly exposed to PCBs for years. Others accused the port of environmental racism for its decision to leave this largely Latino community burdened with toxic pollution.33
Newly elected port commissioner John Creighton voiced his concern that failing to fully clean up the site would expose the port to more liability and added, “I do think we need to earn back the trust of the community.” Each commissioner speaking after him then voted to clean up the site more than EPA’s plan required. Paradoxically, the Port of Seattle commissioners were unanimously rejecting EPA’s cleanup plan on the grounds that it did not require them to do enough—even though the EPA plan had been largely written and designed by the port’s own staff.34
Dan Cargill, the state inspector who had first investigated the site in 1985, was reviewing the T-117 cleanup plan on behalf of Washington State and had watched as EPA approved a plan that failed to meet state standards. When the port rejected the cleanup order, “We were surprised and overjoyed,” he later recalled. “We had been trying to get EPA and the Port to understand that the levels they selected would be an ongoing source of recontamination” to the Lower Duwamish Waterway. His frustration was compounded, he said, because he was one of the few people who had known just how badly polluted the site was when Malarkey was still operating, and had shared his observations with EPA. “We knew it was far more contaminated than the City, Port, or EPA thought it to be. Our concerns and comments were ignored, rebuffed, or dismissed at every turn.”35
The Port and EPA managers responsible for the rejected plan were removed from the project. The new managers—Roy Kuroiwa for the Port of Seattle and Piper Peterson for EPA—welcomed the involvement of the community. The Port of Seattle commissioners held their next monthly meeting in South Park—the first they had ever held in a neighborhood affected by their activities. The top item on the agenda was the neighborhood’s vision for the port’s property. Over a hundred South Park residents attended and unanimously endorsed a plan that would turn the entire property into a salmon habitat restoration project, with public viewing platforms and a small boat ramp.
Given the new positions taken by the Port and the City of Seattle—the parties who would pay for most of the cleanup—EPA went back to the drawing board. In June 2010 it issued a new cleanup order requiring full removal of all PCBs above a level of 1 ppm. Later that year, the port began planning a full site cleanup to haul out the contaminated soil and create off-channel river meanders that would eventually support the Duwamish River’s migrating salmon.
In August 2013, port contractors hit something hard as they dug deep into the contaminated dirt at Terminal 117. More than forty buried drums of toxic waste, never detected by the port’s sampling probes, were discovered buried under the site of the old asphalt plant and removed.36
BOEING’S PLANT 2
In the years it took EPA and the Port to finalize a cleanup plan for Terminal 117 that the community would support, the City of Seattle had quietly planned and, in 2012, finished a cleanup of Slip 4, a remnant river meander in Georgetown, across the channel from South Park. Slip 4 borders Boeing’s Duwamish River property and receives drainage from Boeing as well as City of Seattle and King County CSOs and storm drains. The PCB levels found at the slip, along with dioxins and heavy metals, landed it on EPA’s early action list. It was here that Jim Meador and his NOAA researchers had collected their most highly contaminated salmon.
Georgetown residents had been watching South Park’s fight over the cleanup of T-117, and the city didn’t want a repeat performance in the historically scrappy neighborhood with ties to organized labor and City Hall. To avoid it, they consulted with residents at each step in the process. The result was a cleanup plan for the slip that everyone could agree to: in fact, the standards set at Slip 4 became a model for future cleanup actions, and a smooth approval process with community support facilitated a fast cleanup. Within a few years of EPA’s proposed plan for Slip 4, river otters were seen recolonizing the previously contaminated riverbank. The remaining challenge was ensuring that the slip wouldn’t be polluted again by PCBs from an unidentified source.37
One of the drains into Slip 4 ran from the north end of Boeing Field and under the city’s historic Georgetown Steam Plant, which had lost its water intake when the river was straightened. The airfield had been used by Boeing since the 1930s, when it moved to the land bought for one dollar from the South Park farmer Giuseppe Desimone. Over the years, Boeing had used caulk containing PCBs to seal everything from blocks of tarmac to windows in its warehouses and business offices. After an extensive search, investigators discovered that the PCBs in the caulk were leaching out and into stormwater runoff—right into the flume running from the steam plant into Slip 4.38
The pipe belonged to the city, and Boeing initially denied any responsibility. Seattle accused Boeing of illegally using its drain for their polluted runoff. “There have been over twenty lines attached to our ditch that came from the Boeing Company,” complained the city utility manager, Martin Baker. Eventually, the PCBs were traced to Boeing. The company dug out all the old caulk from its airfield but the chemical had seeped into the surrounding concrete and continued to contaminate Boeing’s stormwater. Finally, EPA required the company to install a PCB treatment system to cleanse the water in its drain before it hit the river.39
Boeing’s new treatment system solved the threat to the newly cleaned Slip 4, but the company had a much larger problem stretching southward. EPA had flagged more than a mile of riverfront fronting Boeing’s historic Plant 2 as an early action cleanup area. It was the largest and most highly contaminated reach of the Duwamish River, with toxic chemicals found buried at depths of more than four feet below the river bottom and dozens of sources of ongoing pollution scattered throughout the property.40
Even before the Duwamish River was listed as a Superfund site, cleanup plans were under way for Plant 2. Decades of airplane manufacturing, particularly before the environmental laws of the 1970s, left high levels of toxic material throughout the plant. During World War II, when the plant was producing as many as seventeen B-17 bombers a day, pollution control had not been the priority, and employees described waste-management practices continuing into the 1970s that consisted of sweeping the debris from the factory floor into the river at the end of each shift.41
The EPA had ordered Boeing to clean up Plant 2 and its adjacent riverbank in 1994, under the requirements of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). RCRA requires cleanup when hazardous wastes have been improperly released or mishandled. This was Boeing’s preference: the company had fought to keep Plant 2 off EPA’s Superfund site list. Even so, Boeing challenged and resisted EPA’s oversight at nearly every step.42
The company had a reputation for dragging its feet and attempting to intimidate regulators at dozens of its toxic-waste sites around the country. Its representatives fought with the City of Seattle over who was responsible for polluting Slip 4, and now they fought with EPA about the standards for the Plant 2 cleanup. A key point of contention was whether people should be able to fish in the Duwamish. “I think we need to set reasonable expectations for cleanup in industrial areas,” said Boeing’s Steve Tochko in 2009, scoffing at the idea of fishing and industry coexisting on the river. Shawn Blocker, the EPA cleanup manager for the site, saw things differently. “Boeing doesn’t feel that stretch of the river could ever be restored to where you could harvest these kinds of fish. We disagree with them.”43
In 2006, a shift in attitude at the company began to change this longstanding dynamic. Boeing’s legal battles against EPA and states had become so expensive that they decided to commit funds to clean up their pollution in order to rid themselves of legal bills. Boeing’s top executives allocated half a billion dollars to clean up dozens of contaminated sites in the Pacific Northwest. They proposed cleaning up Boeing Plant 2 by removing some contaminated sediments and then building engineered caps of sand and gravel to isolate the material left behind. Cost estimates for this approach were between $50 million and $60 million for Boeing’s mile of riverfront.44
Shawn Blocker wanted more, but his authority was limited. Technically, Boeing’s cleanup proposal would meet the requirements of the law. EPA could, however, require the company to prove that it had the financial resources to maintain and monitor the caps containing the buried waste. Such assurances were usually required for a period of thirty years, but on occasion EPA stipulated longer periods. At the Iron Mountain Mine in California, EPA had required the property owners to show they had the ability to monitor and contain the remaining toxic chemicals for three hundred years. Blocker approved Boeing’s plan but told the company he would require a one-hundred-year period of financial assurance for the toxic material they left in the Duwamish River.45
Like an insurance policy, such assurances cost money. To meet EPA’s requirements for a financial guarantee, Boeing needed to provide a letter of credit from a bank. The bank’s price to “insure” Boeing’s caps was $49 million—nearly as much as the cleanup itself. Boeing did the math. Overall, it would be cheaper to remove the remaining contamination than to pay the cost of not doing so. Boeing decided to remove all PCB contamination above 2 parts per billion (ppb)—the standard set by Slip 4—thus avoiding the need to purchase any insurance for the remaining contamination; there was none.46
EPA had not ordered a full cleanup of all of the contamination Boeing had trickled and dumped into the river over its century of airplane production. That the company decided to remove it was purely a business decision, designed to avoid future costs. Two of the river’s polluters—one public agency and one private industry—had now decided to clean up more of their historic contamination than EPA had required. What would the standard be for the rest of the river? Perhaps more important, who would decide?
A VISION OF HEALTH
Trace de Garmo walked along the damp paths of trampled ground to rouse his fellow homeless campers from their tents on a chilly spring morning in May 2012. Hot coffee and doughnuts were laid out on tables next to a makeshift pantry that was stocked with donated cans of food, bread, and paper towels. A team of staff and interns from the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition waited to greet the tent city residents with clipboards, maps, and a colorful stack of “Duwamish dollars”—credits redeemable at nearby convenience stores and cafes.
The collection of tents tucked into a shallow depression between the First Avenue Bridge and the Duwamish River was known as Nickelsville—recalling the Hooverville that existed on the tide flats in the 1930s and playing on the name of Seattle’s former mayor Greg Nickels. The residents called themselves Nickelodeans. The encampment had been moving around Seattle since 2008. They had been evicted from this same piece of property by Nickels several years earlier, and they and their supporters held Nickels responsible for making the city increasingly inhospitable to homeless residents. Under the new mayor, Michael McGinn, the city pretty much left them alone.
Anna Schulman, a student at Antioch University, poured cups of coffee and explained the reason for the coalition’s visit. The DRCC was interested in learning about any health concerns Nickelsville residents had while they were camped near the river. Staff members Paulina Lopez, a South Park resident from Ecuador, and Alberto Rodriguez, originally from Honduras, recorded the residents’ answers on survey forms and maps. The information would be used to help the residents decide how to use a small community health grant to improve conditions in their encampment.
The Nickelsville effort was part of the DRCC’s Duwamish Valley Community Health Project. The Terminal 117 cleanup campaign had shown that the future of the Duwamish waterfront could be very different from its present state. EPA was now making plans for the rest of the river, and DRCC was seeking input from the community about their vision for the waterfront.
The Superfund site, which extended along both shores of a five-mile length of the river, affected the activities of residents, businesses, workers, fishermen, tribes, and a growing number of recreational visitors. What did these people want the river to look like? Collecting input from interviews, workshops, surveys and focus groups, along with information from twenty previously published river basin plans that addressed topics from green space to affordable housing, the coalition published its final report on the community’s vision for the Duwamish Valley in 2009.47
The vision was wide-ranging: cleaner and greener neighborhoods, a revitalized business and industrial base, improved transportation networks, and strategies to ensure that Duwamish Valley residents could afford to remain in their neighborhoods after the cleanup. But the overarching message was simple: people wanted the river cleanup to catalyze holistic and wide-ranging improvements in individual, environmental, and economic health.48
The coalition knew that reducing toxic pollution in the river bottom would not be enough to achieve this goal. The valley was riddled with pollution sources on land and in the air; low-income residents had poor access to health care; and if cleaning up the Duwamish attracted developers who gentrified the waterfront, residents and businesses alike could find themselves displaced. Community members had a deep fear that after fighting for a cleaner and greener Duwamish Valley, they wouldn’t be the ones who ultimately benefited.
The report articulated particular concerns of and for the most disadvantaged members of the river’s community. By the early 2000s, generations of new immigrants from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa had made the Duwamish Valley’s zip code one of the nation’s most diverse. Children in the local schools spoke more than thirty languages. Most were from low-income and working-class families. Residents of homeless encampments fished in the river alongside sports anglers and tribal members. The report committed to a principle of “acting with compassion for neighbors and others in need.”49
The DRCC had secured a grant from EPA to help implement some of the community’s ideas. They focused on improvements that were unlikely to be addressed by the Superfund cleanup itself, including health improvements to the Nickelsville encampment—to be determined by the camp’s own residents. Other projects included tree planting, food banks, and support for youth and multiethnic programming at the historic Marra Farm, now a city-owned community garden used by many of the valley’s immigrant families. But the EPA grant would not be sufficient to address the community’s more challenging needs.50
In March 2013, Bellamy Pailthorp of the public radio station KPLU reported on “more illness, shorter lifespans in Duwamish Valley.” A Seattle health-advocacy organization, Just Health Action, in cooperation with DRCC, had just released a report on local environmental and public health. The report, funded by an EPA environmental justice grant, was the first to compile localized health data. It compared disease rates in different parts of the city as well as indicators of environmental and social health like income and access to parks. The study examined “the cumulative health impacts of exposure to pollution and other factors,” Pailthorp explained, particularly those “known to make people more vulnerable to illness, such as poverty and stress.”51
The study detailed the presence of more toxic waste sites in the Duwamish Valley than elsewhere in the city and higher levels of diesel pollution in the air. It found that asthma hospitalization rates here were also among the city’s highest, validating the concerns of residents who had long suspected that their children suffered disproportionately from the disease. The most striking finding was that the average life span of people who lived in South Park and Georgetown was eight years shorter than the city average—and a full thirteen years shorter than that of residents of the study’s healthiest neighborhood, Laurelhurst, which was also one of its wealthiest and whitest.52
In a television interview on KOMO News, the lead researcher and author of the report, Linn Gould, commented: “This study shows that Duwamish Valley residents are disproportionately and unfairly burdened by multiple stressors outside of their control. . . . Decision makers should take action to resolve these inequities.” James Apa, a spokesman for the city and county health department, agreed that “place matters” and stated that the department’s job was to develop solutions to eliminate these disparities.53
The DRCC urged the city to create a community health task force with a dedicated fund. It also recommended scrutinizing the Duwamish River cleanup plan in light of the new data on the valley’s pervasive health disparities. Linn Gould and Dr. Bill Daniell of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health stepped forward to help. Daniell secured a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts to conduct an independent study of the health impacts of EPA’s cleanup plan for the river. Time was of the essence: EPA had released its draft cleanup proposal for the full cleanup of the Duwamish Superfund site the month before.
Daniell’s team had started doing background research for their health impact assessment (HIA) of the cleanup plan several months before it was formally released for public review. As part of that team, and in my capacity as DRCC’s health program manager, I was working with Jonathan Childers, a doctoral student in public health, to examine the implications for local residents. Other team members were researching implications for the tribes, subsistence fishing families, and workers in the Duwamish Valley.54
As EPA was getting ready to make its cleanup plan public, King County published its own assessment of expected impacts. As part of the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group—the polluters who had to pay for the cost of cleanup—the county argued that less removal of contaminated sediments would be better for residents’ health and well-being. The county asserted that extensive cleanup would increase truck traffic through the riverfront neighborhoods (which were already trying to reduce freight traffic on their streets), and levels of diesel air pollution—already disproportionately high in the Duwamish Valley. These predictions, packaged as an “equity review” of the project, struck directly at the heart of riverfront neighbors’ fears.55
Not everyone in county government agreed with the reviewers’approach or conclusions. The Seattle-King County Department of Public Health criticized the report for “lacking an analytical review.” They also cited the county’s Wastewater Division for conducting the analysis in isolation, suggesting that a single person had done the analysis in a single sitting, and for failing to involve members of the affected communities—a violation of the core principles for all of the county’s equity impact reviews. Three pages of specific technical and procedural criticisms were given to the county’s review team by its public health department after the report was released.56
Hurrying to complete their work, the HIA researchers learned from King County advisers that trains, not trucks, would be the primary means for transporting sediments dredged from the river. In addition, they learned that EPA rules did not allow diesel fuels to be used in those trains. These facts directly contradicted the neighborhood impacts cited in King County’s report. The HIA attempted to set the record straight, but in some respects it was too little, too late.
Representatives of King County and the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group had been publicly airing their claims about truck and air pollution impacts while EPA’s proposed plan was out for public review. At one event in South Park, John Ryan, a consultant hired by the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group, rose and spoke in Spanish to the largely Latino audience, many of whom were hearing details of the cleanup plan for the first time. He told them that a big cleanup would cause “a line of trucks from here to Olympia,” a distance of fifty miles. King County and the Waterway Group also distributed an infographic highlighting the disputed truck and air pollution impacts as fact.57
“One thing Ryan did not say explicitly,” wrote a reporter who attended the event, “was that he was working for the local governments and the Boeing Co., all of whom as polluters and owners of polluted land are on the hook for [a] share of the cleanup costs.” On its face, it appeared that the King County analysis misrepresented the data in order to exaggerate the negative impacts of cleaning up the river and to gain public support for less removal of the river’s toxic sediments.58
The analysis also suggested that removing contamination would harm fishing communities by stirring up toxic materials in the river’s bottom mud, causing the fish to absorb more contaminants than if the chemicals were left undisturbed. But HIA researchers were finding that residual pollution could have serious and permanent impacts on the tribal and subsistence fishing communities that relied on the Duwamish River for their food and cultural needs.
Amber Lenhart, a University of Washington doctoral student, led the health assessment on subsistence fishing communities. She was surprised to learn the importance of fishing to the health of many immigrant and low-income families. “If it’s a choice between a free fish or a one-dollar Big Mac, fish is going to have better nutrition,” she explained in a 2019 interview. “But the social connections, physical activity, and nature contact are health supporting as well.” The study found that trying to prevent people from fishing in the river in order to protect them from illness could eliminate an important food source, increase stress, and worsen their overall health.59
Linn Gould, who studied the cleanup plan’s potential impact on local tribes, found that the definition of health in tribal communities differs markedly from the standard medical descriptions typically used by EPA to evaluate risks: preventing disease and having access to clean food and water. Tribal definitions of health include cultural and spiritual metrics that are threatened by environmental pollution and degradation. These include access to local natural resources, maintenance of cultural traditions, and self-determination. The HIA study concluded: “Restrictions and man-made despoliation violate Tribal fishing rights, which will lead to substantial disempowerment, an established determinant of health.” The report warned that tribal members would likely continue to eat local fish, even if EPA’s cleanup left them with high levels of contamination.60
One tribal member consulted during the study articulated the importance of eating salmon. “It’s our spiritual food so it feeds our soul,” he explained. “It might poison our body, but then we’d rather nourish our soul.”61
Perhaps the most surprising findings of the HIA, however, were the potential effects of EPA’s cleanup plan on the employment prospects of the Duwamish Valley’s workers. Employment is strongly correlated with health, and Dr. Bill Daniell found that the financial uncertainty and fear of liability associated with contamination that might be left behind could act as a drag on the local economy and lead to the loss of jobs.62
Previous King County reports, which had not been publicly released, concluded that although some jobs might be lost because of cleanup costs borne by local companies, employment opportunities could actually increase. Daniell drew on these reports in his findings: “Existing businesses and employment could benefit substantially,” he wrote, “if the cleanup reversed the constraints and stigma of a blighted river and if this stimulated industry revitalization and economic robustness.” In other words, although money spent on cleaning up the river would represent a cost to the responsible parties, it might also stimulate local economic growth.63
Daniell’s assessment also pointed to the benefit of jobs generated by the cleanup itself. One business on the river that benefited from the early action cleanups was the LaFarge Cement Plant, just south of Kellogg Island. LaFarge is the successor to the Holnam Cement Company, the factory sued for its polluting releases by Wingard’s Waste Action Project in the 1990s. Built in the 1960s on the historic airfield used by Boeing and US Postal Services, the plant had not changed significantly in nearly fifty years. In 2010, changes in the industry led to the shutdown of LaFarge’s enormous kiln, which meant laying off half of the plant’s employees unless the company could find a new line of business.64
“The plant was dying,” said the plant manager, Jonathan Hall, in 2019. If it wanted to “do something with this facility and the people who work here,” the company would need to reinvent itself. It now uses its waterfront berths and industrial cranes to serve as an offloading, dewatering, and transfer facility for contaminated sediments dredged from the Duwamish River. Hall describes the change as an “upmarket solution” and says onethird of his work force—about twenty employees—is now involved in cleanup-related business at the plant. The King County internal report cited by Daniell estimated that the full river cleanup would generate 270 year-round jobs and another 210 seasonal jobs during the life of the project, feeding $377 million into the local economy.65
The HIA team developed a list of recommendations to the local government agencies responsible for the cleanup (the city, county, and port), as well as to EPA and the state agency responsible for controlling ongoing sources of river pollution. The HIA report was a road map, in effect, for policymakers interested in using the cleanup as an opportunity to improve the overall health of the Duwamish Valley—exactly the same goal first articulated by the community in its Duwamish Valley vision document nearly five years earlier.66
A QUESTION OF JUSTICE
Regarding the Duwamish River Superfund cleanup, King County and the University of Washington had dramatically different approaches to questions of health. Both sought to provide information to guide EPA’s cleanup plan, but their conclusions were as divergent as their research methods. In the midst of these conflicting studies, EPA decided to conduct its own analysis. As a federal agency, theirs was based on US government policy: in this case, Executive Order 12898, known as the environmental justice or EJ order.67
The order, signed by President Bill Clinton in February 1994, stated that the pursuit of environmental justice was part of the mission of every federal agency. It required all agencies to identify and address the environmental and health effects of their policies, programs, and activities on minority and low-income populations. Environmental justice was defined as the “fair treatment” and “meaningful involvement” of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income in the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.
The Obama administration had recommitted to the EJ executive order in anticipation of its twentieth anniversary in 2014. Taking a more “targeted and energetic approach” to integrating environmental justice concerns in federal decisions, Obama’s EPA provided guidance on how to analyze impacts on minority, low-income, and Native communities and set out a road map for fully implementing the order by 2014. It was in this context that EPA’s Duwamish team undertook the first environmental-justice analysis of a Superfund cleanup plan. As with the HIA, its purpose was to determine the likely health impacts of its cleanup proposal and to develop recommendations to minimize or mitigate any adverse or unjust consequences.68
The Duwamish Valley’s communities had long clamored for attention to what they characterized as environmental injustices. From too much pollution to too few trees, people living in the Duwamish Valley felt overburdened and underresourced. They also suspected that these conditions were permitted, or even encouraged, to exist because their neighborhoods were poorer and “browner” than the centers of financial and political power in Seattle. Until EPA took on an environmental-justice analysis of its proposed cleanup plan, however it had not formally recognized the people living and fishing in the Duwamish Valley as covered by the order. The analysis established the EJ status of the river’s communities.
One focus of the EJ analysis was a set of restrictive covenants and behavioral guidelines, called institutional controls, intended to protect people from exposure to harmful chemicals in their environment. The fence at Terminal 117 that EPA would have required the port to install around the property is one example of an institutional control: it was intended to protect the community by excluding people from the contaminated site. Another is the fishing advisory that had been in place for the Duwamish River since the site was listed. Both kinds of controls put the burden of avoiding the remaining pollution on the affected community rather than on the responsible polluter.69
Institutional controls are intended to be in effect only until a site is cleaned up, but in the case of the Duwamish River, EPA was anticipating permanent fishing advisories if ongoing pollution could not be reduced enough to make the river’s fish safe to eat. In that case, the EJ analysis said, EPA needed to consider how to mitigate the impact on the river’s fishing communities. Instead of simply posting a warning sign, the analysis concluded, EPA should require mitigation or compensation for the lost resources—something that had never been done before.70
The EJ analysis concluded that fishing advisories often wrongly assume there are accessible and affordable food substitutes for fishers, and that attempting to change people’s behavior is an acceptable approach. In addition, the EJ analysis found that “restrictions on fish consumption may also lead to short- and long-term changes in diet with significant health consequences.”71 The Administration for Native Americans, an office under the federal Department of Human and Health Services, agreed, calling fishing restrictions on the Duwamish an “untenable burden for subsistence and tribal fishers.”72
A Washington Health Department sign warning people to avoid eating fish from the Duwamish River that are contaminated with toxic chemicals. Photo by the author.
The report also warned that discouraging people from eating fish “may be akin to recommending abandonment of their cultural heritage and identity.” James Rasmussen, who became director of the DRCC in 2010, often spoke about the significance of a healthy river to his own Duwamish Tribe. “I am a native of this river and this river is a part of me,” he explained. “The species that live here—they are my cousins and my aunties and my uncles and my grandfathers and my grandmothers. They are a part of my family.”73
The analysis suggested mitigation options such as underwriting the cost of transportation to healthier fishing locations, providing uncontaminated seafood or monetary compensation for lost resources, and developing aquaculture facilities where people could raise and catch their own fish. In all cases, the analysis concluded, any mitigation needed to be decided on in close consultation with the affected communities. This was not a prescription to do something for the affected communities, but to do it in partnership with them.74
Clifford Villa was EPA’s assistant regional counsel while the EJ analysis was being conducted. “The idea that some people should be compensated for the loss of fish—or any natural resource—isn’t hard to understand,” he said several years later. The tricky part was figuring out who was entitled to compensation and how to do it. Regardless, he said, the needs of the Duwamish community and EPA’s EJ analysis “succeeded in putting some very challenging questions of environmental and economic justice on the table.”75
The EJ analysis was released in conjunction with EPA’s proposed cleanup plan in February 2013. Both documents were considered drafts that would be approved only after a public review and consideration of all comments received. The findings and recommendations of the analysis, however, helped to transform the community’s expectations about what would happen to them once EPA finalized its cleanup plan and issued its record of decision.76
HOW CLEAN IS CLEAN?
The EPA project manager Allison Hiltner explained the details of the agency’s proposed cleanup plan at a public meeting at South Seattle College’s Georgetown campus in April 2013. When the floor was opened for public testimony, Ken Workman, the four-times great-grandson of Chief Se’alth, began to speak. Alternating between English and the Lushootseed language, he welcomed the attendees to his family’s traditional land. He spoke about participating in the University of Washington’s Health Impact Assessment on behalf of the Duwamish Tribe, and about being taught by his father not to eat certain fish from the river, because of the cancer in them.
Workman is not what many people in Seattle envision when they think of Native people. A passionate motocross racer and a Boeing Company analyst, Workman began to teach himself Lushootseed at the age of fiftysix. He grew up knowing his family’s Duwamish heritage, but he discovered that he was a direct descendant of Se’alth only when he was in his fifties. For him, being Duwamish meant he was “imprinted” on the land around the river. “I was born and raised in West Seattle, on the beach of Alki, and in the woods along the West Bank Duwamish River,” Workman later said. “The trees called. I played in the woods and swam in the river, and this is all I know. Rivers draw my family.”77
At the meeting, Workman had a direct request for EPA. “I would ask that we be able to use the river, to walk on those beaches without fear, to drop a line in the water and pull up a bottom fish, a bottom fish, and throw it on the fire and cook it without fear,” he said. “I would encourage that, when we clean up the Duwamish River, that we do it right, we do it for the long term.”78
Workman’s statement marked the first time EPA had received public testimony in a Coast Salish language. As the deadline for a cleanup decision approached, Native and immigrant community leaders, fishermen, business owners, longshoremen, environmental and neighborhood organizations, artists, media personalities, and even the hip-hop icon Macklemore lent their voices to a River for All campaign that sought to strengthen the final plan and protect the health of the river’s most exposed and vulnerable constituents.79
By the time the public comment period on the plan was over, EPA had received more than 2,300 comments on its proposal in ten languages. The Duwamish River cleanup would affect the health and well-being of dozens of racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities. Those most acutely affected would be people whose health, for economic or cultural reasons, was inextricably linked to the health of the river’s fish. These communities—traditionally the most marginalized in highly stratified Seattle—had become the driving force behind the Duwamish cleanup.80
The central question EPA had to decide before finalizing a plan for the river that would protect both the environment and people’s health was “How clean is clean?” Since the 2001 Superfund listing, federal, state, and local governments had been working to investigate not just what pollution was already in the river, but also its past and present sources. PCBs were ubiquitous; even areas with no direct sources collected PCB particles from the air and from decomposing salmon contaminated with the chemicals. This unnatural yet ubiquitous background level of contamination is high enough to threaten the health of anyone who eats large amounts of fish from the river. Yet this level was the best EPA could hope for, given the global sources of pollution that find their way into Puget Sound, tainting even its most remote rivers and bays.81
The bigger problem, however, was the volume of PCBs continuing to run into the river from sources within its watershed. If left uncontrolled, continuing pollution would stall cleanup of the river with PCB levels far above safe or legal limits. Where most of the PCBs were coming from, however, remained a mystery, one that threatened to undermine the effort to protect the health of the river and its people.
The Lower Duwamish Waterway extends five and a half miles from the southern tip of Harbor Island, on the river’s former tide flats. It collects runoff from twelve square miles of urban and industrial lands, three highways, the King County Airport, and the CSOs that route sewage and stormwater from a much larger area to outfalls on the river. It also receives all of the water from the upper Duwamish and Green Rivers, an area of 480 square miles.82
Following construction of the Howard Hansen Dam on the Green River, extensive tracts of farmland were replaced with industries, shopping malls, and parking lots, all of which introduced additional chemical pollution into local streams and the Duwamish River. The consultants hired by the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group stated that no matter how much polluted bottom mud was removed, pollution levels in the river would ultimately depend on how much pollution was still coming in from upriver.83
Technical consultants working for the DRCC disagreed with the Waterway Group’s assumptions. They countered that the more toxic mud was left behind, the greater the risk that it, too, would add to the river’s pollution burden as it was, inevitably, reexposed—scoured by ships, disturbed in an earthquake, or simply churned up during the increasingly violent floods that were accompanying climate change. Removing more pollution would result in a cleaner river and a greater likelihood that the river would stay clean in the long run.
The Waterway Group and the DRCC also disagreed on what could—and couldn’t—be done to reduce upriver pollution. The Waterway Group wanted required cleanup levels to be based on its own estimates of the amount of pollution coming from upriver sources before cleanup began. As far as they were concerned, upriver pollution was simply a preexisting condition that constrained what could be achieved by the cleanup. Their estimates were based on a model; real data were scarce. The model did not assume upriver pollution would be reduced, and the group did not believe that EPA had the authority to require upriver pollution controls in their cleanup order. The DRCC, by contrast, advocated for controlling upriver pollution before cleanup. Only once those sources of pollution were found and controlled, the coalition argued, could EPA know how clean the river could and should be.84
In 2007, after lengthy debates, the Washington State Department of Ecology stepped in. Their focus up to that time had been on finding and preventing ongoing pollution within the Duwamish Superfund site—itself a herculean task. They now decided to look into just how much pollution might actually be coming from upriver.85
To identify pollution sources, the state took sediment samples from the upper Duwamish and Green Rivers. If the concentrations were the same throughout the upriver area, that would indicate ubiquitous sources throughout the watershed—which could confirm the Waterway Group’s assumptions. Isolated hot spots of chemical contamination, however, would indicate a localized source that could be identified and controlled. Initial tests suggested that contaminated hot spots of PCBs and other chemicals were tied to particular locations and sources. The state’s data also showed that upriver pollution loads, particularly for key chemicals like PCBs, were not nearly as high as the Waterway Group had estimated.86
Once the ecology department began investigating, King County also began testing water and riverbed sediments upriver to determine where upper Duwamish and Green River pollution was coming from. While the Waterway Group publicly stated they would not do any work upriver of the Superfund site, Dan Cargill, the state’s source control manager for the Superfund site, credits King County with “taking a longer, more comprehensive view of things.” From the beginning, the pipes and industrial lands east and west of the lower Duwamish River were recognized as sources of pollution that should be controlled before the cleanup was done. Upriver pollution to the south, however, had been considered outside the scope of the Superfund investigation, even though the lower river was a sink for sources in every direction.87
Before EPA issued its final cleanup decision, the river’s responsible parties took the position that they were not liable for the costs of stopping upriver pollution. King County in particular, despite its new sampling effort, dug in its heels: since the upper watershed was county land, they likely faced the greatest costs if upriver pollution sources to the Duwamish had to be controlled. But they also had the most at stake if it continued unabated. The county was acutely aware that the entire Duwamish River was an active fishing ground for the Muckleshoot Tribe. Faced with the argument that the tribes had treaty fishing rights that needed to be protected from pollution, one King County staffer protested: “The Tribes have rights to fish, but not to clean fish.”88
Five years before EPA issued its final cleanup decision, Hedrick Smith of Frontline had interviewed the state governor, Christine Gregoire. “How clean is clean?” he asked her. “Do we need to get rivers back to where people can fish and safely eat the fish without fear to their health?” Gregoire had responded: “That’s the goal. That is the goal. That has to be the goal.”89
In the end, EPA concluded that no amount of PCB contamination in the river sediment was safe or acceptable. In its final cleanup order, issued on November 21, 2014, EPA set a target of 2 ppb for PCBs in sediment—the background level found in the most pristine parts of Puget Sound. In an accompanying plan, the state ecology department committed to overseeing pollution control efforts along the Duwamish Waterway and upriver. Only after a concerted effort to clean up the river and all contributing pollution throughout the watershed would the state and federal agencies consider whether the river had reached an “equilibrium” that justified relaxing EPA’s cleanup standard. Thirteen years after the Lower Duwamish Waterway was listed as a Superfund site, the cleanup plan for the whole river was finally done.The work could start just as soon as ongoing pollution sources were controlled enough to protect the river from being recontaminated. Once started, EPA estimated the cleanup would take seventeen years to complete, at a cost of nearly $350 million.90
AT THE HEART OF IT
A human figure hovered, suspended, inside a white translucent sphere seventy-five feet above the river, a vision of delicacy and grace despite the crane rigging and arc of cable preventing it from plummeting into the black water below. The figure cast a shadow on the paper globe tethered to the crane’s neck as it danced within, appearing half human and half pupa as it slowly descended and emerged from the illuminated orb into the night air. Flowing fabric attached to the dancer’s arms and legs completed the illusion of gestation.
Tanya Brno was performing the most unusual aerial dance of her career, one that included literally walking on water. The piece, with music accompaniment by the Native flute player Paul Cheoketen Wagner, was part of a summer-long arts and culture program called Duwamish Revealed. In 2015, a year after the river’s environmental fate had been decided by EPA, different forces were beginning to shape the river’s social and cultural place in the future of Seattle. Artists were bringing life to a message from the Duwamish Valley community: “We’re tired of fighting. We want to celebrate.”91
As Brno descended headfirst toward the river, the smokestack at LaFarge Cement loomed as a stark industrial backdrop to the display of limbs and silky gauze. LaFarge was a partner in the arts project. Pacific Pile and Marine, an industrial contractor based in South Park, donated both the use of the crane and the labor of its skilled operators, who guided Brno through the air and across the surface of the water.
The Environmental Coalition of South Seattle (ECOSS)—one of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition’s founding members—served as the artists’ sponsor and project manager. The city, the county, the Port of Seattle, and Boeing all provided grants or material support for the program. The fifty-plus installations and live performances that made up the program represented the first expression of cooperation and collaboration between factions that had spent more than a decade arguing about the river cleanup.
The local arts critic Jim Demetre described Duwamish Revealed as a celebration of the river’s “thriving and tragic past, complicated present and transformative future. . . . The extent of support from municipal agencies, environmental groups, cultural organizations and local businesses bodes well for future joint efforts at the river. Together they’ve opened a public arena where a discussion of the river’s future can take place.” The organizers, Nicole Kistler and Sarah Kavage, hoped to help transform the river from toxic blight to public asset, bringing their own artwork as well as their expertise in urban planning and landscape architecture to the project. “In the making, in the sharing, in the dialogue there’s a lot of healing both for the place and for the people experiencing the place,” said Kistler.92
The project also attracted attention from people who knew little about the river or even about the history of Seattle. “The art creates a reason to come down to a place that most Seattleites haven’t seen before,” said Bill Pease, a South Park resident who works at ECOSS. At the opening ceremony, James Rasmussen told the audience: “This is home. It’s important that you understand that you are in a place that has been a home for people for over ten thousand years. You all have only been here for a little over a hundred-and-some-odd years? God damn, you can change a place.”93
Kavage and Kistler wanted to encourage not only river-inspired artistic expression but also creative expression by the river’s diverse Native and immigrant cultures. “‘Cultural affirmation is the highest form of empowerment,’” Kavage said, attributing the statement to the Duwamish Revealed artist Jose Montano. “That has become a mantra for us.”94
In one of the festival’s ceremonial performances, Sophorn Sim knelt by the river’s edge and released a small, neatly folded boat of banana leaves into the water. Lit candles sat atop the boat as it drifted into the current, joining several dozen small, illuminated rafts floating away from the park. It was twilight, at the end of the Water Festival in South Park, an event filled with performances by Cambodian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Mexican artists. The traditional Cambodian lantern ceremony, known as Loi Protip, was being held just downhill from White Center, home to Seattle’s largest Cambodian community.
Next to Sophorn stood Song Vann, a Buddhist monk who was guiding the participants. He had not performed the ceremony in over forty years: it had been all but lost with the flight of Cambodian refugees from the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge several decades earlier. In Cambodia, performing Buddhist ceremonies had been punishable by exile or death. An estimated fifty thousand Buddhist monks were executed during the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. Vann was one of the survivors.95
All afternoon, children and adults had been making the floats that would carry the candles downriver, along with people’s prayers. Ruben Chi, whose mother immigrated to the United States from Venezuela, launched one of the floats and watched as it was carried away with the outgoing tide. He explained that its purpose was to “give gratitude to nature and the Duwamish River, Seattle’s only river.”96
The revitalized lantern ceremony was just the most recent of Sim’s labors of love for Seattle’s immigrants and refugees. “When Cambodia was under the Rouge regime for three years, eight months, and twenty days—I remember exactly—all religious and cultural festivals were banned,” she said in 2019. Sim herself was only nine years old when she was sent to a child labor camp by the Khmer Rouge. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, she and her family escaped through minefields to a refugee camp on the Thai border. She was eventually admitted to the United States as a refugee in 1985, arriving in Seattle in the fall of that year.97
For those like her who left Cambodia, “the lantern festival was all but forgotten,” she said, even though “the river back home was very precious to our people.” They didn’t know what the rules were in their new home, and some were still afraid. When ECOSS and the arts festival gave her an opportunity to re-create the festival of Loi Protip on the Duwamish River, Sim was overjoyed. “The lantern ceremony has been awakened by that,” she said, noting that the Cambodian community has asked that the ceremony be continued in future years. “The culture that is embedded in our people for a long time is to celebrate and give thanks to Mother Nature. We want to teach the young generation to appreciate the environment surrounding us, that we depend on.”98
To Sim, culture is also a bridge to improving the environment and well-being of her Cambodian neighbors. Working as a community health advocate, Sim educates Cambodian fishermen about the risks of eating fish and shellfish from the Duwamish River. She suggests healthier options, like fishing at sites away from the river or consuming only lesscontaminated fish, like salmon. But fishing “is their culture,” Sim says. “They are not fishing as much as they do in their home country or town, and when they have the river right next door, they try to fish. They are not necessarily aware of pollution.”99
In March 2019, Sim participated in a storytelling event organized by Sarah Kavage at which she and other Native and immigrant community leaders in the Duwamish Valley expressed the centrality of rivers to their own personal and cultural experience. Sim sang a Cambodian song she wrote for the occasion. “Rivers in my hometown were so precious and important to us,” Sim said. “No matter what part of the world you have come from, somewhere, somehow, I believe you connect with your river.”100
Duwamish Revealed was not the first creative celebration of the river. Belulah Maple, born in 1893 to one of Jacob Maple’s daughters, drew scenes of the Duwamish River and the settlers’ early imprints on its landscape. Today prints of her work are displayed at the Tukwila Heritage and Cultural Center, managed by Louise Ann Jones, a Maple descendant herself. Belulah did not consider herself a professional artist; she began producing illustrations in her later years, when she saw that her grandchildren were forgetting the stories of her family’s early life on the river. “I’m trying to put our history back where it belongs,” she told the Seattle Times in 1967. “My artwork may be amateurish, but I think it gets across what I’m trying to say.”101
Born thirty years after Belulah Maple, Richard Hugo of White Center wrote poems about his dysfunctional family life and the river where he found solace. His first book was published in 1961, while he was working as a technical writer for Boeing. It included the poem “West Marginal Way,” which describes the river he knew as a young man. “One tug pounds to haul an afternoon of logs upriver. The shade of Pigeon Hill across the bulges in the concrete crawls on reeds in a short field, cools a pier and the violence of young men after cod.”102
In 1998, the Seattle artist Gene Gentry McMahon began to explore the Duwamish River and images from its history, including a piece inspired by Jacob Maple’s twin granddaughters. Her earliest piece, “Cry Me a River,” was exhibited at the Seattle Convention Center in 2008. An eight-by-six-foot mural illustrating historical views of Puget Sound and the Duwamish estuary was displayed at the Seattle Aquarium in 2011. Other artists followed suit, including the Mexican-born Amaranta Sandys, the Swiss transplant Fiona McGuigan, and the Chinese American painter Juliet Shen. A trio of experimental artists known as Sutton-Beres-Culler lent their name and imagery to the River for All campaign in 2014, as did Macklemore and the Native glass artist Preston Singletary. South Park and Georgetown have both sprouted vibrant community-based arts organizations, and a Duwamish River artist residency, cofounded by McGuigan and fellow artist Sue Danielson, has been meeting along the river for ten days every summer since 2012.103
Yet the history of immigrant artists pales in comparison to that of the river’s Native artisans, dancers, and storytellers, for whom the Duwamish River has long been a subject of artistic and cultural expression. In addition to Singletary’s work, a striking contemporary example is a cedar tile collage representing a traditional ceremonial basket, which serves as a centerpiece on the floor of the Duwamish Tribe’s cultural center, located along the river bend that Cecile Hansen, the Duwamish tribal chairwoman, saved from development. Designed by the Native artist Mary Lou Slaughter, a basket weaver and a direct descendant of Se’alth, it was installed for the center’s grand opening in 2009. James Rasmussen of the DRCC, a jazz artist, performed at the center in 2015 with the composer and musician Steve Griggs, playing a series of compositions called Listen to Seattle, based on the life and words of Chief Se’alth.104
The many works of art that have been inspired by the Duwamish River’s history and its changing character remind us that the restoration and cleanup of the river is not just a scientific or policy question but one of heart and culture as well. Today, seven generations after Rasmussen’s and Slaughter’s ancestors welcomed the first immigrants to the watershed, a new generation of artists and advocates are taking their place in the river’s history.
GENERATION NEXT
The DRCC’s Paulina Lopez gathered a group of three dozen middle- and high-school students at Duwamish Waterway Park on the afternoon of March 30, 2019. They assembled at the edge of the park, getting ready to welcome friends, family, and elected officials to the unveiling of their latest project, a celebration of the river’s past and their vision for the future. One of the teens slung a guitar over his shoulder, and the group began to walk, singing, across the manicured field toward the former electric company warehouse at the park’s south end.
Lopez joined the DRCC staff in 2012 to help with the creation of the Duwamish Valley Vision. She arrived in the United States from Ecuador at age twenty-six and lived in Miami while completing a degree in international human rights law. She moved to Seattle with her husband in 2004, when she was pregnant with their first child. She was drawn to South Park by its vibrant Latino community and its proximity to the Duwamish River. When Lopez first arrived, she did not know that the beach park a few blocks from her new home was not a safe place for children to swim or fish.105
A year after she arrived, a neighbor’s teenage son was fatally shot. That shook Lopez, who became involved in seeking ways to help solve the problems threatening the community’s youth, including family poverty, incarceration, gang violence, and a lack of structured youth programming and gathering places. Ten years later, with the DRCC’s support, she started a new program, the Duwamish Valley Youth Corps, to serve the neighborhood’s middle- and high-school age children, focusing on ways to make their community cleaner, healthier, and safer. The program thrived. “And we haven’t stopped,” Lopez said in 2019. “In five years, we’ve engaged six hundred youth.”106
At the start of its second year, the Youth Corps hired Carmen Martinez, a veteran youth coach, to help manage the program and its growing number of teens. Martinez is a third-generation South Park resident whose grandmother moved to Seattle in the 1950s from near the Texas border with Mexico. Her family was part of the first wave of Latino migrants to the Duwamish Valley. As a child in the 1960s, Martinez watched her uncles swimming in the river. “They would get sores,” she recalls, “but they’d still do it.” Together, Lopez and Martinez set out to empower the neighborhood’s youth, teaching them about the river, environmental justice, and the issues affecting their community’s well-being.107
Paulina Lopez, a South Park resident originally from Ecuador, visiting a Duwamish River street-end park with her children in 2013. Courtesy of Paul Joseph Brown.
As Lopez and the teens gathered at the river, they talked about what it meant to welcome their guests to this place. Usually, on a sunny Saturday like this one, the group could be found building rain gardens to help clean the neighborhood’s stormwater of its pollutants or planting new habitat for fish and wildlife along Hamm Creek or the Duwamish riverbank. Many of the teens who participated in the Youth Corps went on to take paid positions with the Duwamish Infrastructure Restoration Training (DIRT) Corps—a green-jobs incubator and professional development program for young adults. Environmental restoration is a core component of the Youth Corps curriculum. But today, the group was preparing to unveil a mural they had painted on the wall of the old warehouse next to Duwamish Waterway Park.
Over several weeks, the Native artist Roger Fernandes had helped the group design the Salish-inspired mural. The first section of the mural depicted the natural river bends of the past and Native stories about the origin of the river, as well as a ten-foot-tall image of a Duwamish man with his arms raised in a gesture of welcome. “It was important to the youth that we portray him as welcoming his visitors,” Fernandes said. Most of them, after all, had come from distant places themselves, including Mexico, Honduras, and Somalia. The Duwamish tribal elder Ken Workman had spoken with the group as they embarked on the project and made a point of raising his arms to them to let them know that they were welcome here. They wanted to share that welcoming gesture with other immigrant and refugee families living nearby.108
Members of the Duwamish Valley Youth Corps gather to promote the River for All campaign at Duwamish Waterway Park in South Park in 2013. Courtesy of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition.
The second section of the mural, still unfinished, would depict the current Duwamish River flowing under a wide bridge. The historic Fourteenth Avenue Bridge connecting South Park to the rest of Seattle had been closed between 2010 and 2014 while city and county leaders debated whether to rebuild it. Neighborhood advocates eventually prevailed in getting the bridge replaced, but the closure and prolonged uncertainty had hampered transportation and emergency services and left South Park feeling once again like the city’s neglected stepchild, in the words of Tony Ferrucci a generation earlier. “Imagine what it meant to them,” mused Workman, standing at the back of the crowd. “You are marginalized. You don’t matter.” The bridge in the mural represents the community’s triumph in demanding to be heard and to be treated as a priority by their local governments.109
The third section of the mural showed tall trees and fish along the river. Fernandes explained, “They want it to be clean again. They can swim in the river. They can canoe in the river. They can fish from the river. All the things they should be able to do, they want to see in their future.”110
After the teens unveiled the mural, the Duwamish Tribe’s chairwoman, Cecile Hansen, congratulated them on their efforts, and Lopez introduced the Port of Seattle commissioner Ryan Calkins. The port had funded the mural and was planning a paid internship program for Duwamish Valley youth. “At the outset, the Port of Seattle was about bending this river to our will,” Calkins said. “Today, we understand that was a mistake. Now we understand that the way we ought to care for it is by thinking of the river seven generations ahead.” If Calkins’s thinking prevails in guiding the port’s activities, the effect could be transformative for the Duwamish River.111
Concluding the unveiling ceremony, Roger Fernandes once again addressed the crowd, asking for their help in completing the final phase of the mural. “We want to make sure that on the future side, we add some cultural imagery that comes from you, of the cultures that brought you here.” Speaking for the Youth Corps, Daniella Cortez agreed. “Creating that bridge between ages, between races, is going to be amazing for our city.”112
ALL TOGETHER NOW
By 2018, cleanup of the early-action areas that EPA had identified in 2004 had removed about 50 percent of the PCBs from the river bottom. Design and engineering for the riverwide cleanup were also well under way. In early 2019, the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance reached a $1 million settlement agreement with an industrial metals recycler in the center of the Superfund site to eliminate continuing PCB pollution. Other sources of pollution from the surrounding Duwamish Valley and upriver were gradually being identified and brought under control. Perhaps most significantly, EPA’s environmental justice analysis had spurred the agency to consult directly with subsistence fishers on how to conduct the cleanup. They were working on strategies to protect fishing families without putting unjust burdens on those who were not responsible for the pollution.113
Beyond the scope of the Superfund cleanup, the City of Seattle had established a Duwamish River Opportunity Fund to help carry out the improvements recommended by the University of Washington’s health impact assessment. In 2018, the fund had disbursed more than $1 million in grants to community projects. The city also hired the DRCC’s former program manager, Alberto Rodriguez, to develop a Duwamish Valley action plan to deliver measurable improvements in the community’s health.114
The Port of Seattle and King County were also making their own investments in improving environmental and human health in the Duwamish Valley. The worst of the conflicts between local governments and the valley’s communities seemed to be fading, with artists and the valley’s youth helping to bridge past divides.
James Rasmussen, director of the DRCC, didn’t think these initiatives were enough. He envisioned a partnership made up of all of the river’s engaged parties—agencies, industries, tribes, environmental organizations, and community members—to promote cooperation and problem solving as the cleanup progressed. The job of the group would not be to determine what should be done to clean up the river—that had already been decided—but to decide how it should be done to mitigate adverse impacts and support each group’s needs. Rasmussen firmly believed that cleaning up the river was good not just for its fishing and residential communities, but also for its industries—if it was done right.115
After the EPA cleanup decision was finalized, Rasmussen spoke at a Green-Duwamish Watershed Symposium attended by community, business, and government representatives in 2016. “Coming out of this, we go back to work or we go back to war,” he told them. “Everybody in the room wants the best. Partnering is how we do that.”116
James Rasmussen welcomes a tribal canoe carrying Chief Seattle’s great-great-great-great grandson Ken Workman to the Duwamish Waterway Park during the 2018 Duwamish River Festival. Courtesy of Tom Reese.
EPA was thinking along the same lines. The 2013 environmental justice analysis recommended that EPA develop strategies for enhancing communication and coordination among all parties during the cleanup. In 2017, EPA’s community involvement coordinator, Julie Congdon, proposed convening a roundtable discussion to help guide the cleanup work and prevent the kind of disputes over conflicting versions of technical and scientific facts that had plagued earlier cleanup planning. The participants would seek ways to mitigate impacts and benefit affected communities as the cleanup was under way.117
If the roundtable approach works, it will bring together everyone with a stake in the river cleanup for the first time. Although the fundamental requirements of the cleanup have been determined by EPA, details like timing, technology, and mitigation measures could still make or break the Duwamish River Superfund project.
Jonathan Hall, the LaFarge Company’s plant manager, was among the industrial representatives at the preliminary convening of the roundtable in 2018. LaFarge is liable for costs related to its own pollution of the river and is also one of the companies benefiting from cleanup-related income and job creation. He acknowledged that the company had vested interests in the cleanup, “but ironically these interests can be in conflict with each other.” He suggested that the dual roles of responsible party and cleanup contractor gave his business a valuable “yin and yang” perspective on the cleanup and the complexity of issues it hopes to address. “In short, my involvement is a genuine interest in helping to make the process go more smoothly for everyone,” he said after the initial gathering.118
Alberto Rodriguez described the roundtable as an opportunity to “cocreate” solutions and build trust among all of the river’s disparate interest groups.119 James Rasmussen leads the roundtable’s community advisory group caucus. “We have only asked for an open and transparent process with everyone at the table. Now we have it, and it’s up to us to make this work for everyone,” Rasmussen said. “We have learned that if given a small chance to lift the community voice, it will not only be heard, but will move mountains.”120
More effort will be required to ensure inclusion of the river’s most heavily affected communities: no representatives of the tribes or the subsistence fishing community were present at the first meeting, but several fishing community representatives have since joined. When and if the roundtable approach is established, Rasmussen hopes it will enable the Duwamish communities—ancient and new, resident and industrial—to work together to shape the future of the Duwamish River for the next generation.
The Duwamish Valley’s earliest industry is still thriving in the twenty-first-century. In 2018, at least fifteen breweries were operating in South Park, Georgetown, and the filled tide flats that make up the city’s Sodo District. In April 2019, glasses of Counterbalance Brewing’s Pale Ale were lined up alongside samples of Fran’s Chocolate, a relative newcomer to the valley, housed in the historic Rainier Brewing building in Georgetown.
The Duwamish Valley businesses were supporting a fund-raising event for the DRCC, held at the Duwamish Tribe’s Longhouse and Cultural Center. The event also marked a leadership transition: the outgoing director of the DRCC, James Rasmussen, was being succeeded by Paulina Lopez. The significance of a first-generation Latina South Park resident taking over from a Duwamish elder was not lost on the crowd.
Jolene Hass, the daughter of Cecile Hansen, welcomed the guests to the longhouse. Over the shoulders of both Rasmussen and Lopez she draped a blue and black blanket decorated with traditional Coast Salish designs. “This is not a gift,” said Hass. “It is meant to show our appreciation. We ask that you use these blankets, that they are not stored away. And that when you use these blankets you feel the appreciation, the adoration, the love that we have for you.” She thanked Rasmussen for his years of service—to the river, the tribe, and the community at large. Embracing Lopez, she said, “We welcome her in.” The guests erupted in applause.
Rasmussen is continuing his work with the organization with a focus on the roundtable, where he hopes to help transform generations of conflict into consensus about the future of the river. Lopez—with the youth she mentors at her side—is setting her sights even higher. She has a vision for the environmental, social, and economic vitality of the entire watershed—one that includes not just a fishable and swimmable river, but clean air, vibrant local businesses, more parks, and affordable housing.
Together, Rasmussen and Lopez hope they have built the momentum necessary to restore the health of Seattle’s hometown river and of its Native and immigrant communities for the next generation of children who will live, work, pray, and play along its banks. Lopez is determined to make sure that that the Duwamish Valley communities have what they need not just to clean up their environment but to remain “healthy, strong, resilient, and in place” while doing it.
Expressing cautious optimism about the future of the river valley, Lopez mused, “The wealth of Seattle was built right on the back of the Duwamish River.” She admitted, “Sometimes I feel like we’re being crushed. But then I wake up in the morning and I see our youth—how much potential they have.” She recounted what one young woman said to an elderly neighbor as they worked together planting trees: “Every time I plant a tree, I feel like I’m leaving my heart. . . . I have already planted forty trees, so that means my heart is in forty different places.”
The words struck Lopez as joyful. “Hope is always there,” she said, smiling at the sea of faces from the Duwamish Valley’s neighborhoods, local businesses, and government agencies. “I feel like we’re building a movement.”