Rescue begins for a shoreline tied to tracks

After every major rainstorm, park ranger Doug Dailer shovels clogging gravel and mud away from the railroad underpass at Meadowdale Park.

Both pedestrians and Lund's Gulch Creek rely on the underpass to reach Puget Sound. A boardwalk overlies the creek, which plunges into a grate before emerging on the beach at the other side.

If the grate clogs, beachgoers must slog through water to reach the shore.

"I've seen salmon swimming over the boards," Dailer said. "In this site, we have a funnel instead of a delta. The railroad chokes off the creek."

Many environmentalists call the BNSF Railway, built on 26 miles of beachfront between Seattle and Everett, one of the worst environmental problems for Snohomish County's shoreline.

The railroad creates what amounts to a wall between the land and the shore. It hampers beach access, disrupts salmon creeks and prevents sediment from eroding down to the beach, starving beaches of sand and gravel, they say.

Now, efforts are under way to restore pockets of shoreline along the railroad line. Some planners and environmentalists have hailed the restoration projects — including opening up creek mouths, nourishing beaches with sand, and restoring tidal marshes — as pilots for a future approach to a healthier shoreline.

The efforts are piggybacking on transportation work along the rail line. Each project, by state law, must include environmental mitigation in return for damage done to surrounding ecosystems.

The largest project, by BNSF Railway, will widen nearly two miles of the line to add a second track. The double-tracking is part of a deal with Sound Transit to allow four Sounder commuter trains to run on the rails.

Meanwhile, a new pier, the Port of Everett's new Satellite Rail/Barge Transfer Facility, was completed in July 2006, and a proposed ferry terminal in Edmonds will go before voters in a transportation package in the fall.

"The railroad is there, the railroad is going to be there, and there's nothing we can do about that," said Chris Townsend, senior environmental planner for Sound Transit. "We have the opportunity to go in and take a situation that's bad and make it better."

From a different era

Built in the 1890s — long before environmental regulations limited construction on beach habitats — the railroad line provided a convenient corridor between growing port towns.

Sound Transit restoration projects


To compensate for ecological damage during an upcoming widening of the BNSF railroad tracks, Sound Transit has planned the following restoration projects:

1. Rebuild the railroad's retaining wall with a more gradual angle between the wall and the beach. The gentler angle breaks up wave energy that can scour sediment away from the beach.

2. Place a one-time addition of sand and gravel in front of widened sections of railroad, making broader, restored beaches.

3. Purchase about 15 acres of land in the Snohomish River estuary for the Qwuloot project, an effort spearheaded by the Tulalip Tribes to convert 350 acres of farmland into a tidal-flat environment.

4. Build a large box culvert to allow Willow Creek, at the Edmonds Marina, to pass beneath the railroad. The creek currently flows underground in a pipe, but it may be brought to the surface as environmental mitigation for a new ferry terminal in the future.

5. Expand two intertidal lagoons behind the railroad near Deer Creek in Woodway by removing landslide fill from between them. Clear a blocked culvert between the lagoons and Puget Sound to allow fish passage.

6. Remove two abandoned, blocked culverts to enlarge off-channel habitat at Deer Creek.

"When railroads were built, [the shore] was the most favorable grade and also connected the beginning of the establishment of these towns — Seattle, Everett," said BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas.

Now, about 35 freight trains run daily on the Seattle-Everett stretch. Each freight train takes an estimated 280 to 500 trucks off the highways, said Melonas.

And hundreds of commuters rely on the railroad instead of cars, with 830 one-way trips taken per day on the four Seattle-Everett Sounder trains.

Yet these benefits come at a cost.

"A lot of the things we normally associate with beaches on Puget Sound — a high-tide beach, with trees leaning over the beach and drift logs — most of that is now under where the railroad is built. We lost that," said Hugh Shipman of the state Department of Ecology. "That's not something that heals itself. It's just gone."

The Seattle-Everett line represents just 1 percent of Puget Sound's 2,500 miles of shoreline, Shipman said.

But about a third of that shore is armored by built structures, including seawalls, bulkheads and parking lots, he said.

And the railroad is one of the most continuous examples of armoring on the Sound, Shipman said. It provides less beach access for people, creeks and sediment than do other areas.

Nearly 70 creeks and smaller drainages intersect the railroad between Everett and Seattle, according to the Department of Ecology. About a dozen are major streams, Shipman said.

These often flow through pipes or culverts too narrow for salmon to swim through. And some small drainages just seep through the rocks, he said.

By preventing sediment crumbling from bluffs along Snohomish County's shore from reaching the beach, the railroad makes beaches narrower, steeper and coarser, Shipman said.

"The railroad, it brings attention to itself because it's so dramatic, it's so continuous. It's a very severe impact," he said.

Port rebuilds a beach

Thursday, four biologists crowded together on a long wedge of gravel and sand by the Port of Everett's Satellite Rail/Barge Transfer Facility.

They were counting small, silvery fish — including coho, chinook and chum salmon — plucked from a net they had dragged along the shore.

"I think the juvenile salmon like it just fine on this beach," concluded Jim Starkes, a fisheries biologist with consulting firm Pentec Environmental, as he looked into a bucket of wriggling fish.

The beach is new, rebuilt in January 2006 by the Port of Everett, Pentec and Coast & Harbor Engineering as environmental mitigation for the transfer facility.

About 14,000 cubic yards of sand and gravel were placed along a 1,100-foot stretch for a price tag of $800,000, said project manager Jon Houghton of Pentec.

By studying the beach over time, scientists hope to learn more about rebuilding and re-nourishing other beaches along the rail line.

Salmon in particular need healthy beaches, biologists say. Juvenile salmon hide from predators on the shallow, sloping lower beach. Small fish eaten by salmon lay their eggs in high-tide areas among the sand and gravel.

At the pier, "We're actually trying to simulate what a natural Puget Sound beach looks like, but we're putting it in kind of an artificial place, in front of the railroad tracks," Houghton said.

New track, better shore

Sound Transit also has developed a plan to rebuild beaches in front of widened sections of the railroad line, said Townsend, Sound Transit's environmental planner.

In a 2003 deal to allow Sounder trains to use the line, Sound Transit paid BNSF $258 million for track improvements.

As part of the agreement, Sound Transit took on the planning for $10 million in environmental mitigation.

Overall, BNSF will fill in four acres of beach to extend double tracks to the entire Seattle-Everett line. Currently, segments in Mukilteo, Woodway and parts of Edmonds have only one track.

The expansion is necessary "to enable timely and efficient operations of rail traffic through this corridor in the future," BNSF spokesman Melonas said.

Planned restoration work includes broadening tidal marshes near Deer Creek in Woodway, building a new culvert for Willow Creek in Edmonds, and designing a shallower retaining wall for the railroad that will prevent beach sand from being scoured away.

"I think it's a Cadillac mitigation project," Townsend said. "We've made a very honest, very concerted effort ... to develop real environmental mitigation, not just something that's going to get us by."

Some see shortcomings

But some critics call restoration efforts along the railroad line Band-Aids, saying they are short-term solutions to a long-term problem.

Jim Brennan, a marine-habitat specialist with Washington Sea Grant at the University of Washington, advocates what he calls "strategic retreat" from shorelines. In the long term, he said, the railroad should be moved.

"There's a lot of human health and safety issues as well as ecological issues," Brennan said. "Why not use the existing transportation corridor, the I-5 corridor? It doesn't make a lot of sense to build more infrastructure when we're already having problems."

Aside from environmental issues, landslides at times disrupt rail traffic, Brennan points out. In 1997, a slide in Woodway swept four rail cars from the tracks.

Brennan also notes that a global-warming-induced rise in sea level could threaten near-shore structures in coming years.

And when it comes to nourishing beaches, Brennan and other critics note that wave action will gradually remove new material, requiring repeated work to maintain the beach.

"Are we actually able to replicate that natural system by further filling a tidal area?" Brennan asked. "It's a disruption. You fill something in, you're going to kill a lot of things by covering it up. Every time we have to go in and do this, what's the cost?"

The state Department of Ecology is considering a plan to allow BNSF to place landslide material on the shoreward side of the tracks during landslide cleanup. Currently, federal and state regulations prohibit the dumping of sediment in the Sound.

Such material could damage eelgrass beds and other offshore habitats if not placed carefully, Shipman notes.

But every so often, the sediment gets there anyway.

In Woodway, a huge chunk of sand and mud sits on the shoreward side of the railroad. It landed there during the 1997 Woodway slide, said Houghton, of Pentec.

Around the chunk of land — so large that young trees have rooted in it — a wide beach has grown up.

"Here, because we have that sediment source, we have a complete beach face," Houghton said.

"No way" rails will go

Moving the railroad would be next to impossible, railroad officials say.

"It would just be so fabulously expensive that there's no way you could do it," said Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray.

The railroad also helps stabilize the bluffs, slowing erosion that could eat land away from under houses or other structures built there, Shipman notes.

Shipman, who calls himself "a bit of a rail buff," said a railroad of similar capacity would be difficult to replace.

Looking seaward, he said, may offer the only option for rebuilding beach environments.

"In an ideal world ... we go back to the way the beaches used to be," he said. But, "even with the railroad there, there's a lot of good stuff that could happen."

Naila Moreira: 425-745-7845 or nmoreira@seattletimes.com