John Dodge
The Olympian
Every time it rains, pollution pours into Puget Sound.
Once the rain hits the ground, it becomes an instant delivery system for much of the pollution that 4 million people in the Puget Sound basin spread across the landscape — oil and grease on parking lots, driveways and roads, fertilizers and pesticides on lawns, animal waste and even the heavy metals that result from wear and tear on brakes and tires.
The pollution pathway is called stormwater runoff — the No. 1 pollution problem in urban Puget Sound.
"In the face of population growth and development, stormwater may be the biggest challenge we face in the effort to clean up and protect Puget Sound," state Department of Ecology director Jay Manning said.
Here are some of the reasons stormwater is so devastating:
• A recent Ecology estimate of toxic chemical loading confirmed that runoff sends more pollution into Puget Sound than any other pathway. It delivers 22,580 metric tons of oil and petroleum each year — a slow-moving oil spill more than 20 times the volume of direct oil spills entering the Sound.
• About one-third of the state's water bodies that don't meet federal Clean Water Act standards have storm-water to blame.
• The ability of stormwater to flush pet, livestock and wild animal wastes into rivers, streams and Puget Sound is a key reason tidelands approved for commercial shellfish harvests dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004.
• Marine sediments near stormwater discharge pipes in urban bays are among the most polluted in Puget Sound. Look no farther than lower Budd Inlet and the high dioxin levels near the Port of Olympia marine terminal.
• Stormwater, especially after a heavy rain, erodes stream banks, dumps sediment in the water and scours gravel from the streams — all obstacles to the recovery of salmon and the 40 other imperiled species living precariously in Puget Sound.
High intensity storms, such as the one experienced in Western Washington in December, create stormwater runoff that overwhelms regional sewage treatment plants, sending untreated human waste into Puget Sound. Here in South Sound, stormwater rushing through the LOTT Alliance sewage plant pushed 10 million gallons of untreated wastewater into Budd Inlet.
It all spells trouble for the marine web of life, and humans, too. Salmon exposed to heavy metals and toxins have trouble reproducing or fending off predators. The toxins accumulate in their bodies, placing humans at risk when they eat contaminated fish and shellfish. "We need to address stormwater pollution, if we are to have any hope of restoring the Puget Sound ecosystem," said Bruce Wishart, policy director for the conservation group People for Puget Sound.
Messing with Mother Nature
The best tool for preventing stormwater pollution is Mother Nature. Undeveloped land, particularly forested property, soaks up most of the rainfall that lands on it each year in Western Washington. Cut down the trees, scrape away the vegetation, then add rooftops, parking lots and driveways and the stormwater problems mount.
"Once you've cleared the site, you've lost the battle," said Tom Holz, an Olympia-area stormwater engineer. "It's very unlikely we will meet Gov. Chris Gregoire's goal of a clean, healthy Puget Sound without some radical changes in land use."
Most new development in the Puget Sound region is required to capture stormwater on site, then either treat and infiltrate it back into the ground, or release it slowly off-site. But that practice has been in vogue only since the mid-1980s.
Less than 10 percent of urban Thurston County was served by stormwater retention or detention ponds 25 years ago, said Andy Haub, city of Olympia stormwater engineering supervisor.
But collecting stormwater in ponds to settle out pollutants that bind to solids or to allow the water to seep back into the groundwater are stopgap measures, Holz and 13 other engineers and biologists said in an Oct. 26, 2006, letter to the Puget Sound Partnership
Ecology's own 2005 stormwater manual, which prescribes how stormwater should be controlled, states: ... "land development as practiced today is incompatible with the achievement of sustainable ecosystems."
While new stormwater management techniques are debated and litigated, older developments just send the stormwater they generate to the nearest ditch or stream.
"Older developments and neighborhoods are sitting out there like a bleeding sore," Holz said.
No one has estimated what it would cost to retrofit older developments for some semblance of stormwater control. Just replacing a stormwater pipe serving the Tanglewilde development near Lacey — the pipe discharges into Woodland Creek and eventually Henderson Inlet — with grass-lined ditches to soak up the water would cost an estimated $750,000.
The stormwater from Tanglewilde is a major contributor of bacteria and nitrogen to lower Henderson Inlet, a public and environmental health problem that makes shellfish unfit to eat and contributes to oxygen-robbing algal blooms in the marine waters of South Sound. There are hundreds of Tanglewildes from Bellingham to Olympia, waiting to be fixed.
Remedies costly
The state highway system is another major source of stormwater runoff. Only about 12 percent of the state highway mileage in Clark, Pierce, King and Snohomish counties is equipped with some type of stormwater treatment, said Megan White, environmental services director for the state Department of Transportation.
While the cost to remedy stormwater runoff is astronomical, so is the cost of doing nothing, according to a 2006 study by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington.
The damage and economic costs of stormwater runoff in the Puget Sound region in the next decade will total at least $1 billion, the report estimated. This includes degraded water quality, landslides, flooding, shellfish harvest closures and habitat losses and repairs.
"We can't keep stripping land bare and then paving it over," Wishart said.
"We need to do land-use planning in a different way that takes into account water quality."