Fieldwork to resume on Ecology’s Bellingham waterfront cleanup project
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story conflated cleanup on the I & J Waterway and a project on the Central Waterfront. The location and size of the site, the cost, responsible parties and reimbursements were corrected June 2, 2020.
Fieldwork on cleanup on the I & J Waterway on the Bellingham waterfront will resume today, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology. People around the waterfront will see boats with laser and sonar scanning equipment to map the water and upland area.
Work on removing contaminated sediment on the waterway along with many other projects was halted during the coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent Stay Home, Stay Healthy order. As much of the state now moves into the next phase of reopening, work on the waterway will continue from now through early July.
Contractors will survey the waterway and the adjacent soil, collect samples of water and soil and conduct other tests during this stage of the project. Hazardous substances found in the water so far include mercury, nickel, phthalates, polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxins and furans.
Many of the substances found can be traced back to historic industrial plants such as a pulp and paper mill, municipal landfills, wood treatment plants, shipyards and a coal gasification plant.
This stage of the cleanup is known as the pre-remedial design investigation, an investigation that shows the nature and amount of contamination in the waterway. It is the third stage on the Model Toxics Control Act guidelines for conducting cleanups and allows Ecology to design a cleanup plan.
Plans for the 3.1-acre cleanup project in Bellingham Bay started in 2015 when an environmental study was conducted by the Port of Bellingham and Bornstein Seafoods, with Ecology supervision. From there a cleanup action plan was created with the aim of finishing designs and securing permits by 2021, with actual cleanup starting in late 2021 or early 2022.
The 3.1-acre in-water site is located on the downtown waterfront between Hilton Avenue and Bellwether Way.
The Port and Bornstein Seafoods will pay about $1.1 million for design. The Port is eligible to be reimbursed for up to half of its cost through Ecology and the state’s remedial action grant program, which helps pay to clean up publicly owned sites.
The waterway cleanup is one of 12 projects in the Bellingham Bay area designed to clean up water and soil contaminated by historical production places. Two of the sites have completed cleanup projects.
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 1:34 PM.