Sister seas on opposite shores face same foe: polluted runoff

Water and a sheen of motor oil gurgle down a drain in a massive Fred Meyer parking lot on Aurora Avenue North in Shoreline, just north of Seattle.

Traffic whooshes down the wet, seven-lane road following the first rain in weeks.

This expanse of asphalt, perhaps surprisingly, is the headwaters of a salmon stream: Boeing Creek, known as Hidden Creek before the 1920s, when industrialist Bill Boeing purchased much of the watershed as his private hunting reserve.

Downstream of the parking lots and car dealerships of Aurora Avenue, the creek tumbles through parks and forests, and chum salmon can be seen spawning there in November.

The city of Shoreline recently removed a small dam Bill Boeing had built on the creek, and volunteers have been restoring native plants to try to make its watershed healthier. But making Boeing Creek safe for salmon is an uphill battle when so much of the land around it is paved.

The big-box store’s parking spaces alone stretch for three city blocks, enough impervious surface to send large pulses of polluted water, with all sorts of automotive crud mixed in, into the creek when it rains.

It’s a problem all around Puget Sound: Gunk running off of pavement is the dominant source of toxic contaminants in the sound, according to the Washington Department of Ecology.

For decades, Puget Sound and its East Coast counterpart, the Chesapeake Bay, have had federal, state, and local programs aimed at restoring them to ecological health.

Yet America’s two biggest estuaries south of Alaska remain in poor health.

Washington state established the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority in 1983, the same year that Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and the Environmental Protection Agency created the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Billions have been spent to save the polluted yet vital waterways.

In Congress, the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Caucus and the Puget Sound Recovery Caucus have been steering increasing sums of federal dollars back home, while the Environmental Protection Agency has special offices dedicated to each troubled estuary.

While such efforts have successfully curbed some types of water pollution over the past four decades, agencies have blown past their deadlines for cleaning up these inland seas. Regionally treasured icons like orcas and oysters, salmon and striped bass continue to languish, as do people who rely on them.

Why have efforts to restore these crucial waterways fallen short, and how might they turn the corner?

Nowhere is Puget Sound’s urban runoff more polluted than along Washington’s busiest stretch of highway.

“We're standing underneath the Ship Canal Bridge on I-5 right now,” landscape architect Dakota Keene says. She is dwarfed by a tall concrete column: Interstate 5 towers more than 100 feet overhead. A downspout runs all the way down the column, carrying runoff from the highway lanes far above.

“The polluted water is going directly into the waterway,” Keene says.

The waterway is the Seattle Ship Canal, heavily urbanized and polluted, yet still an important corridor for migrating salmon.

I-5 runoff is a nasty stew including oil, brake linings, antifreeze, and tire dust. A recently discovered chemical in tire dust called 6PPD-Q, a breakdown product of a tire stabilizer called 6PPD, is acutely lethal to salmon. Small amounts can kill coho salmon in a matter of hours.

West Coast states, tribes, and fishing-industry groups that depend on salmon are trying to force the tire industry to change its chemical recipe. Tire manufacturers say they’ve already screened 60 potential replacement stabilizers and identified seven for further evaluation.

Still, it could take many years to get toxic tires off the roads.

“We don't want to wait for 6PPD to be removed from tires. We want to treat it now,” Keene says.

A Seattle-based nonprofit called Stewardship Partners (Keene is on its board of directors) adopted the I-5 downspout by installing what look like two large planter boxes, each slightly larger than a dishwasher, at its base. Sedges and bulrushes grow out the top of each box.

Since October 2023, the two boxes have been intercepting dirty runoff and filtering it through mulch, gravel, coconut husks, and a charcoal-like substance called biochar. The boxes have been sending water into the Ship Canal with 90% less toxic tire dust.

They yield is a “disgusting” sludge that is eventually hauled away as hazardous waste, according to David Burger with Stewardship Partners.

“It's black, gooey, and you need to wear rubber gloves when you take care of it,” he says.

“We want to be able to scale this up as much as we can, as fast as we can, so that we can prevent the death of coho salmon before they can spawn,” Keene says.

The Nisqually Tribe and the nonprofit Long Live the Kings got similar results filtering Highway 7 runoff with compost before releasing it into the Nisqually River basin in the foothills of Mount Rainier.

“We are looking into easily scalable and adaptable stormwater treatment systems to remove 6PPD before it kills our fish,” Nisqually Tribe biologist David Troutt said in an email.

“Our test project has proven successful and could be implemented throughout the region.”

In Seattle, the Ship Canal Bridge pilot project treats 5% or less of the busy bridge’s runoff: a drop in the filthy bucket.

“All across the city, whenever it rains, there are billions of gallons of stormwater, polluted stormwater that go out untreated to our water bodies,” says Andrew Lee, general manager of Seattle Public Utilities. “The scale of the problem is huge.”

New buildings and new roads in Seattle are required to treat or filter their own stormwater. One new project called Northlake Commons does much more. It is cleaning water from neighboring properties with an oversized bioswale—basically an engineered, landscaped pond that filters runoff—as well as its own runoff.

Northlake Commons developer Mark Grey says he was moved to help clean up Seattle’s Lake Union after seeing a small oil slick on the lake that had originated from ordinary street runoff.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Grey says of his pollution-grabbing landscaping. “It's good for the community. Esthetically, it's pleasing. It's great for the environment. It’s great for our salmon. It’s just better. It makes for a better Seattle.”

Andrew Lee says very few developers go above and beyond like Grey has, building a bioswale capable of handling 2.5 million gallons of runoff, twice as much as he was required to.

“This is not very common right now,” Lee says. “We can't do this work entirely on the public dime, in a sense, right? So when we have people who are willing to step up, it's huge.”

Whether in Washington state or Washington, D.C., the land is what most fouls the water. In the Chesapeake Bay, the harmful substances come mostly from farms, not city streets.

On a calm morning at the mouth of the Susquehanna River in Havre de Grace, Maryland, geese and ducks dabble at the glassy surface. The Susquehanna is the biggest river flowing into the biggest bay on the East Coast.

Beneath the surface, acres of native seagrasses wave in the Chesapeake’s shallows, while invisible pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorous overfertilize the bay and deprive its famous crabs, oysters, and fish of oxygen.

It’s a problem the six states of the Chesapeake Bay watershed have been fighting for more than 40 years.

“What happens on the land matters enormously to what's going on in the bay,” says Denice Wardrop, head of the Chesapeake Research Consortium and a professor at Penn State University.

“Water quality is improving, but we're far off the mark now. We're nowhere near where we thought we would be,” Wardrop tells a group of journalists at the Havre de Grace Maritime Museum.

She calls it “amazing” that the region made any progress on pollution in the face of its rapid growth.

“It wasn't a bad thing that we were making homes for all those people in the watershed, and it wasn't a bad thing we were feeding all of them,” Wardrop says. “But there are tradeoffs.”

About 10 miles upriver from Havre de Grace, the Susquehanna is spilling loudly over the Conowingo Dam after a heavy rainstorm.

The big dam has been generating hydropower for nearly a century.

It has also been keeping pollution out of the Chesapeake. Millions of tons of sediment have been caught behind the dam.

But it’s not working so well anymore.

“The dam does a really good job -- until there's real high flow,” says University of Maryland environmental scientist Bill Dennison.

He says the Conowingo and smaller Susquehanna dams have all silted up. Now, when the Susquehanna runs high, sediment gets stirred up, and over the dams it goes.

“We've lost that ability for the dam to trap the sediments and nutrients associated with those sediments,” Dennison says.

So it’s not just water over the dam: It’s soil, farm chemicals, and manure, too, all headed for the bay.

Environmentalists are pushing the dam’s owner, Constellation Energy, to change its operations. Company officials say Constellation already does more than any other private entity to protect the Susquehanna and its watershed.

Dennison says that dredging the Conowingo reservoir could help but that the real solutions lie upland, mostly on farms.

“There’s only 1.1 million people on the whole Delmarva Peninsula,”— the eastern shore of the Chesapeake — “but there are 590 million chickens,” Dennison says. “So it isn’t a people population, but a chicken population problem.”

B

rian Eckman has about 70,000 chickens and 3,200 pigs on his farm on a branch of Conowingo Creek, just north of the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.

“It keeps us busy,” he says. “We started farming with my dad back in 1988 here, when I graduated high school.”

The Eckman family farm has done more than many farms to keep pollution out of local waters.

A retention pond parallels the farm’s two massive chicken houses, each as long as two football fields. The lengthy pond captures runoff before it reaches the creek. Creekside trees offer further protection.

Eckman says his no-till farming practices also keep soil from spilling into the creek.

“It helps me be a better farmer,” Eckman says. “Less erosion from the soil benefits me, and we get higher yields per acre. We're not sending that topsoil down into the creek and into the bay.”

Instead of keeping manure in stinky mounds or leaky lagoons, the piles of poop stay indoors.

“Mine are all concrete, under the barn and ventilated, completely sealed,” Eckman says. “This is just a much, much better way to do that here.”

Most of these measures are voluntary, with outside funding from government grants and the farm’s main customer, Perdue Chicken’s organic division, to help pay for them.

Of course, when conservation is voluntary, not everyone does it, and results are spotty.

“Progress is mixed. We've controlled wastewater treatment plants and point sources pretty well, but non-point sources have been tough,” Adam Ortiz, the Environmental Protection Agency’s top official for the mid-Atlantic states, says. “The sheer scale of non-point sources is overwhelming—38,000 farms in just one state [Pennsylvania], that's overwhelming.”

Activist Fred Tutman with Patuxent Riverkeeper in Maryland says a more ambitious approach could quickly clean up the Chesapeake.

“Why do we think it takes 40 or 50 years to fix an estuary, a series of rivers, or even a bay?” Tutman says. “If you stop putting shit in these rivers, they get better fast, right?”

The same could be said of putting urban crud in Puget Sound.

“The main reason it is taking so long to deal with the critical stormwater pollution of our rivers and bays and Puget Sound is simply money,” Nisqually Tribe biologist David Troutt said in an email. “The need far outpaces the resources to fix.”

In 2022, Washington state legislators authorized $500 million to clean up highway runoff as part of a 16-year package of transportation spending. A year later, they put funding for all but one of the stormwater projects – a $6 million effort to filter all the runoff from the Ship Canal Bridge – on hold.

State transportation officials then postponed construction on that Ship Canal Bridge project (not to be confused with the current pilot project that is treating runoff from just one downspout) until at least 2027 to allow a repaving project to finish before replumbing the bridge.

The Chesapeake is expected to miss its federal cleanup deadline in 2025.

To be sure, voluntary efforts are preventing pollution on both coasts, and increased federal spending on infrastructure and climate is boosting what can be accomplished.

"This begins to approach the level of funding we need to make progress at the speed that’s required," writes Laura Blackmore, director of the Puget Sound Partnership, the state agency that was tasked with cleaning up Puget Sound by 2020.

But without more widespread action, whether subsidized or required by government, a healthy Puget Sound and a healthy Chesapeake Bay will remain elusive goals.