Ocean Going

There's a battle brewing on the King County Council over the construction of a new sewage processing facility in Seattle. All the council members agree that we need more infrastructure to handle a growing population; yet, none of the council members wants the facility built in his or her neighborhood.

Into the breech stepped the Seattle Times, with an article and an irresponsible editorial questioning the need for secondary treatment of sewage. We could save so much money, they reasoned, if only we just strain out the big solids and let most of the toxic particles pass on through the outflow pipe and into Puget Sound. What the articles didn't tell us is that secondary treatment is required by state law and the federal Clean Water Act. Further, secondary treatment removes far more toxic particles from sewage than primary treatment alone.

Right now raw sewage already leaks into Lake Washington, the Ship Canal, Lake Union, and the sound. Seattle's deteriorating sewer system (maintained by the county) is so overtaxed that heavy rains frequently bring sewer backups into our waterways. In addition, the proliferation of boats, houseboats, apartments, and homes along our shorelines contribute to the problem. The Port of Seattle is also getting in on the act: the construction of a cruise ship dock at the Bell Street Pier will invite an industry to town that's known all over the world for dumping raw or minimally treated sewage into formerly pristine waters.

The Times article based its argument on the fact that Puget Sound is connected to the Pacific Ocean. Because the sound has strong currents, the author reasoned, water would flushes the waste on through Puget Sound and disperse it directly out to sea. Local environmentalists, environmental engineers, employees of the state Dept. of Ecology, and members of the governor's Puget Sound Water Quality Team were quick to point out that those strong currents mostly move back and forth in the sound, much like water sloshing in a bowl. Dump pollution in one end of the bowl and it quickly spreads throughout the whole basin.

Aside from this fact, the Times writer articulated a common but erroneous assumption: the oceans are indestructible. Nothing could be further from the truth, as researchers at Louisiana State University can tell us. They just released the results of a study showing that every year during the summer months, a 7,000 mile wide section of the Gulf of Mexico becomes a "dead zone" because of agricultural and industrial waste. The technical term is "hypoxic zone"--a region of water that has too little oxygen in it to support most marine animals. What was particularly stunning about the study is that the Gulf of Mexico is widely open to ocean currents, unlike other bodies of water that have large dead zones (for example: Lake Baikal, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the New York Bight, and Chesapeake Bay). Furthermore, the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone is increasing at a rapid pace; it has already doubled in size since 1992. This alone speaks to the ocean's inability to flush out even the most open bays and sounds.

Yet another discovery has cast doubt on the ocean's ability to absorb the byproducts of our modern lifestyle without washing it all back to us. A University of California Sea Grant study has found that DDT, PCBs, and other chemical deposits left in the offshore sediments of the Palos Verdes Shelf are being pulled out of the sediments and dispersed along the California coast. First dumped into the sea by sewage outflows and pesticide manufacturing in the 50s and 60s, the DDT hasn't been broken down by the ocean's currents, as many scientists once believed it would be. Instead, the ocean is sucking it up out of even the deepest deposits and sending it up the coast to the Santa Monica and San Pedro basins. Evidently, in the ocean, DDT and PCBs move very easily from sediments into water, even when there's no physical disturbance of the ocean floor. The sea literally takes the garbage we give it and spits it back at us.

And we deserve it.

Sources for this article include: "Crystal clear views on sewage treatment issue" by Neil Modie, the Seattle P-I, 2/2/99, page B2; "Midwest Farm Runoff Causes 'Dead Zone' in Gulf, Scientists Say" by Paul Recer, Associated Press, 1/25/99; "Farmers Can Help With Dead Zone in Gulf," UniScience News Net, Inc., 1/25/99 at unisci.com/stories/19991/0125994.htm; and "Offshore DDT Deposit Spreading, Research Suggests," Science Daily, 2/3/99 at www.sciencedaily.com.