EPA unveils options for Duwamish cleanup

Contractors are ripping windows out now, preparing to demolish one of the most contaminated buildings along the Duwamish River: Boeing's Plant 2.

But tearing down the old manufacturing hub that once produced B-17 bombers may be, in a sense, the easy part.

The most complex and expensive portions of the decades-long rehabilitation of Seattle's dirtiest waterway are likely to come.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently unveiled a draft plan outlining 11 options to clean up the toxic waste contaminating the lower Duwamish. They range from dredging and removing nearly 300 acres of toxic sediments, to capping pollutants with rock, to essentially letting nature take its course. Several options mix all three.

The projects would cost at least $220 million and perhaps as much as $1.3 billion. The bill would be paid by Boeing, local taxpayers and an assortment of South Seattle businesses. The work could take as little as four years — or as many as 43.

A final choice on how to proceed isn't expected until 2012.

The river that cuts through Seattle's Georgetown and South Park neighborhoods was polluted by a century of industrial use. High levels of long-lasting polychlorinated biphenyls and other toxic substances are in river sediments and along its shorelines. More comes in every day.

Years ago, state and federal investigators ordered King County, the city of Seattle, the Port of Seattle and Boeing to begin cleaning up a handful of the most dangerous sites, such as Boeing's Plant 2.

But nearly 10 years after the EPA listed the lower five miles of the Seattle's industrial river corridor as a Superfund site, it's clear that cleaning the river itself is not without complications.

The $66 million already being spent on early work, such as the razing of the Boeing plant, alone will reduce river contamination by nearly half. EPA predicts each of the remaining cleanup options ultimately could reduce contamination by about 90 percent.

But the effectiveness of some approaches is more uncertain than others. That's one reason the price tags and time frames vary so dramatically.

And those same time frames and cost estimates don't take into account additional, ongoing efforts to find and stop hundreds of sources of new contamination. Halting the pollution running off all the toxic sites and into the river will itself take years and millions of dollars more.

Still, those most closely tied to the cleanup say the Duwamish River is unlikely to ever be pristine. Anglers in the future will still be advised to avoid regularly eating certain resident fish.

That news came as a blow to neighborhood groups that have spent years complaining that their blighted river doesn't seem to receive the same attention as others.

"If everything in there works, it would be 90 percent cleaner, but that remaining 10 percent has serious health impacts on the low-income, immigrant and tribal people who are out there every day catching fish," said BJ Cummings, with the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition. "We have a menu of options that basically guarantees failure in meeting that basic goal."

Others working on the cleanup say that's in part because small amounts of pollution from the Green River upstream are expected to continue flushing into the Duwamish for decades.

"We live in an urban environment; there are a lot of urban places where you can't drink surface water. Eating fish from urban areas is in the same category," said Steve Tochko, environmental remediation manager for Boeing. "It's why we have fish- consumption advisories around every urban area in the Puget Sound region. If you really want a place where there're no fish advisories you generally have to get to a place where there are no people."

Eventually, the Port and the city of Seattle will be responsible for a significant portion of the work, and officials with those agencies aren't willing to identify which option they prefer. But it's clear they don't support the most expensive and slowest one, which relies almost exclusively on dredging and removing most of the sediments.

Cleanup has to take into consideration cost as well as the length of disruption to the city's trade corridor, said Dave Schuchardt, the city's program manager for the Duwamish.

The EPA next year is expected to put together a final list of cleanup options. It will chose one of the options in 2012.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com