Toxic soil headed for Georgetown neighborhood

There’s a barge sitting in Elliott Bay with contaminated sediment that will soon be loaded onto a Waste Management site along the Duwamish River.

James Rasmussen, Director of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, believes this may pose a danger to the people who live there.

“We’re talking about the community of Georgetown,” he said. “This is right next to houses.

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“We worry about oil cars, but these are rail cars full of contaminated sediment. I look at this being a step above that, especially when they’re right next to a community.”

The soil in this case is from a toxic cleanup site in Bellingham Bay. A coalition of agencies needs to issue permits for this type of transloading: King County Solid Waste, King County Industrial Waste and the Department of Ecology, which grants an industrial stormwater permit.

“As soon as those permits are issued, that barge comes into the Duwamish River and gets offloaded to the pier, which has had no construction yet on being a transloading facility or on allowing contaminated soils to be transferred onto the pier,” Rasmussen said.

Officials with Waste Management and King County disagree.

Yolanda Pon, Senior Health and Environmental Investigator with King County Solid Waste, says loading the contaminated sediment is not dangerous.

“If it’s handled appropriately, it should not be a problem,” she said.

“Anyone who goes onto the property will see that there are bermed areas, there’s a spill plate so that when material is brought off the barge onto it, that if anything spills onto the spill plate, it will flow back into the barge on there and to avoid it going back into the Duwamish,” she said. “There are preventative measures in place and we’re going to keep a close eye on how it’s operated once it’s permitted.”

She says the permits are ready on the Solid Waste side, but won’t be issued until after Tuesday, when King County Industrial Waste performs another test.

Rasmussen says his organization should have been given more information.

“If Waste Management has a really good plan, the community wants to know that. It’s just that all of this has been done through the back door,” he said. “That usually means it’s not a great plan. But if it is, I’m not saying stop all of this. I’m staying slow it down so you can explain that to community.”