SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: Golden Gardens sewage spill 10 times bigger than we thought
Jul 1, 2019, 5:32 PM
For Seattleites, Golden Gardens is a favorite place for bonfires and waterfront strolls on summer evenings. (MyNorthwest.com Photo/Alyssa Kleven)
(MyNorthwest.com Photo/Alyssa Kleven)
I’ve got a special place in my heart for Golden Gardens.
I spent a lot of my childhood there. I would ride my bike around the marina. Then I’d dump the bike and go swimming at the beach. And in those days, the bike wouldn’t get stolen.
For days over the last week, you couldn’t go into the water at Golden Gardens.
We knew last week that there was a raw sewage leakage into the water there. The city at first thought it was 16,000 gallons. No — it was 10 times that, totaling 165,000 gallons.
RELATED: King County Wastewater Management’s incompetence cost us $300,000
Seattle Public Utilities said that a blockage in the sewer system was responsible for the pollution. And so no one was allowed to go swimming at one of Seattle’s favorite beaches right as the summer kicked off.
Remember when King County told people in rural areas of the county that it wanted them to pay a yearly fee for their septic tanks, in case a little bit of sewage leaked out, and a little bit of that got into a stream, and a little bit of that got into a river, and a little bit of that went into the sound?
But when government has a problem that leads to 165,000 gallons spilling, there are no consequences. They are ready to beat you up and make you pay if you lose a drop, but they can lose 165,000 gallons. And by the way, who is in charge, to where that kind of raw sewage gets leaked?
We had hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage spilling into the waters off Discovery Park two years ago. But they told us that the sound “healed itself” after that.
Every time the government spills raw sewage into the sound, they tell us how resilient the sound is. But they tell you how to alter your life so you will never get one drop of anything in the sound. Why is it that the sound is fragile if we pollute it by a tiny amount, but it’s resilient if government pollutes it by thousands of times that amount? Could it be that they’re lying?
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