Boeing ‘must pay fair share’ to Duwamish cleanup says new lawsuit from Port of Seattle

The Port of Seattle is demanding Boeing cover a bigger share of the Superfund Cleanup in the Lower Duwamish Waterway in a civil lawsuit against the aerospace company.

The port has worked with Boeing, the City of Seattle, and King County to clean up the waterway for the past two decades, and all four entities have shared the cost of that cleanup. Now though the Port wants Boeing to reimburse the Port for millions of dollars that they have spent over the last 22 years “based on its status as the largest industrial manufacturer responsible for toxic waste in the river.”

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In the suit, the Port of Seattle claims that Boeing pumped polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) from numerous transformer vaults (holding leaking transformers) from its facility located on the Duwamish river.

In their study of the river, the Port has found that the PCB levels in the Duwamish River were nearly 500,000 times higher than PCB cleanup levels set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which they say lead directly to the environmental toxicity and designation as a superfund site to clean it up for the past two decades.

“The Port cannot accept an arrangement whereby local taxpayers would be stuck effectively subsidizing Boeing’s cleanup bill,” the Port says in their suit. “Boeing has gleaned billions of dollars in profits over the past several decades partly through externalizing its waste disposal costs by dumping wastes into the Lower Duwamish River.”

Drawing on local taxpayers to cover Boeing’s obligations, they argue, is “unjust and limits the availability of public funding” which is needed to support other environmental, employment, and environmental justice initiatives in local communities.

In response to the lawsuit, a spokesperson from Boeing released a statement about the announcement of the lawsuit, and their past joint efforts to clean up the river.

“As part of this joint effort, for the past eight years, Boeing has been participating in an ongoing voluntary allocation process with the Port and many other parties, where an experienced mediator and Superfund expert evaluated information on Lower Duwamish Waterway contamination and assigned shares that reflect each party’s responsibility for cleanup costs. Boeing had agreed to accept its assigned share as part of an overall negotiated resolution of this matter. We hope that, rather than resorting to litigation and press releases, the Port of Seattle will take appropriate responsibility for its past contributions to the contamination of the Duwamish, and constructively support this important environmental cleanup.”