Plans to dump PCB-tainted soil in Elliott Bay raise concerns

Port of Seattle Chief Executive Tay Yoshitani says he wants to run the “cleanest, greenest and most energy-efficient port in the United States.”

But some environmentalists are calling the meaning of his words into question because of a port project that has received permission to dump PCBs in Elliott Bay.

PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls, toxic chemicals used as fire retardants that were banned in the 1970s. They are so toxic and so long-lived that they are usually measured in parts per billion — yet the port proposes to dump 9 pounds of them into the bay for an upcoming dredging project. The mud to be dumped would come from an area being studied for cleanup as part of the Harbor Island Superfund site.

The dredging project — which would dispose of 66,000 cubic yards of PCB-contaminated mud in the winter of 2008-09 — has passed muster with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the state Ecology Department, the state Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

But a coalition of environmentalists says the tests used by those agencies are inadequate and do not protect the health of humans and orcas, which eat salmon that over time have been exposed to Puget Sound’s polluted waters. Scientists say PCBs likely are making it tough for orcas to reproduce and possibly to find food.

Environmentalists would like the port to send the most contaminated part of the dredged materials — roughly one-third of it, containing about 7 pounds of PCBs — to a landfill rather than to the waters of Elliott Bay as planned.

PCBs have been shown to cause behavioral and learning deficits in children exposed in the womb, according to the state Health Department, which recommends that people — and especially women of childbearing age and young children — limit meals of Puget Sound chinook salmon to one a week.

Scientists who study Puget Sound’s 86 resident orcas, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, fear that the high levels of PCBs in their offspring are killing them or, if they survive, making it difficult for them to reproduce.

Stephanie Jones, the port’s senior manager of seaport environmental programs, said it would cost $1.8 million to dispose of the most contaminated part of the dredged materials in a landfill, rather than in the open water as planned.

The materials are being dredged to make way for deeper-draft ships at Terminal 30 as part of a $118 million port project to reconvert the terminal into a cargo terminal instead of using it for cruise ships, which would dock at Terminal 91 in Interbay.

The $1.8 million price tag for landfill disposal — less than 1 percent of the project’s total cost — raises the questions: What does it mean to go above and beyond environmental requirements, and in which projects should the port pony up to earn the title of cleanest and greenest that its chief has set forth for it?

While nearly 2.5 million cubic yards of similarly tainted material dredged for construction projects has been dumped in Elliott Bay since the disposal site there opened in 1989, environmentalists are saying newly understood threats to the health of humans and wildlife require stricter rules for what can be dumped in the Sound in the future.