Thanks for the attention to this effort and posting a link to our proposal. As you can see, there are two proposals under review by the parties to the Cruise MOU of the three offered by environmental community. I’m sure time precluded coverage of the 2nd alternative that we believe should still be seriously considered.

Rather than banning all discharges throughout the Sound as preferred (and which NOAA just did in the 2400 square mile Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary) we just ask that they not do so while docked.

A critical part of the cruise lines’ claims to the quality of their effluent is that the discharge is diluted by the wake of the vessel. Their highly concentrated waste (vacuum flushes) retains far higher quantities of ammonia than you find at Westpoint which is among the nutrients the Sound use less of. Furthermore cruise ships make their discharge at the surface, not affording opportunities for vertical dilution that facilities like Westpoint do for their less concentrated waste in the first place. Obviously the volumes are different, but these ships still can hotel 5000 passengers and crew.

Only two ships from Norwegian Cruise Line have sought to continue to be able to discharge in the Sound while at the dock. However, for the first time they chose not to do so last year so we know they don’t have to.

Here’s their chance to show their Puget Sound homeport that there can be some restraints on “Freestyle Cruising” by amending the MOU accordingly. I’m sure it would be appreciated by visitors and residents alike. felleman@comcast.net

Discuss

Every year, vessels carry more than 15 billion of gallons of oil and fuel through Pacific Northwest waters, putting Washington and Oregon at constant risk of spills that could cripple parts of their economies and devastate marine life and environmentally sensitive shorelines.

A major spill at the mouth of the Columbia River or in the Strait of Juan de Fuca could cost Washington state 165,000 jobs and $10.8 billion in economic losses, said Curt Hart, communications manager, Washington Department of Ecology.

Bonnie Stewart / OPB

The Oregon Responder releases boom during an oil spill prepardedness drill in the Columbia River. | credit: Bonnie Stewart.

Avoiding calamity requires readiness resources. Yet as oil tanker traffic is rising, Washington’s oil spill program is facing budget cuts. It lost 7 of its 77 full-time staff positions during the 2009-2011 biennium and expects cuts to its $29 million two-year budget in the next biennium.

Most of the new tanker traffic comes from the Alberta oil sands industry, which pipes oil into Canadian ports and pumps it into tanker ships that carry it through the Strait of Juan De Fuca on the way to Asia.

Plans for a second pipeline into Canadian ports could add even more traffic, but the added risk is not offset by Canada because the crude oil from Canadian ports is not subject to taxes that fund Washington’s spill programs, Hart said.

The risk is great, too. Each tanker can carry about 36 million gallons of crude oil and another million gallons of heavy bunker fuel to power the ship, Hart said. Should a tanker run aground it would meet a rough landing on a rocky shoreline, and depending on the conditions, even a double hull could be breached.

“In the blink of an eye, a mistake could be made and we would have a disaster,” Hart said.

PREPARING FOR SPILLS

Both Oregon and Washington require every company that operates ships in their waters to develop a plan it would follow during an oil spill. In that plan, company officials must list a “primary response contractor” they would call to handle a clean up. The states also require the companies to demonstrate that their plans will work by completing oil spill drills — equipment deployment drills on the water or tabletop drills on land.

WASHINGTON STATE DRILLS TAKE A HIT

In the past, Washington officials performed hundreds of unannounced drills with individual vessels each year. But the number of those visits has dropped significantly during the past two years. This year, the department estimates it will oversee about 55 unannounced vessel drills.

Surprise Spill Drills Decline

Source: Washington Department of Ecology

Unannounced major spill drills have disappeared completely. Ecology oversaw eight of them in 2005, but hasn’t performed any since 2007. They required 15 to 20 Ecology staffers from several department to drop what they were doing and do the drill.

“It’s very hard to do one of those with the resources we have,” Hart said. 

The Department of Ecology has shifted its focus to drills everyone knows are coming. Those planned equipment deployment drills have more than doubled since 2006, from 41 drills to 88 in 2011.

A SPILL TEAM TESTS ITS EQUIPMENT

On a recent Saturday, she gathered about 30 volunteers on Lopez Island for an equipment deployment drill in Fisherman’s Bay.

“If people need anchors let me know,” she said.

Knight laid out the plans for the drill and the group broke into four teams that spread out around the bay. Each boat was loaded with equipment and hundreds of feet of boom – those floating yellow curtains that corral oil and keep it away from sensitive parts of the shoreline.

“We’ve been doing this since 1988, and we’ve only had one year that we haven’t had a response,” she said.

The people participating in this drill have come from the surrounding islands. They’re carpenters and fishermen, retirees and teenagers, and most of them are not getting paid to be here. The boats, and the people driving them, are an eclectic mix.

The Island Oil Spill Association is a low-budget non-profit set up mainly to handle smaller-scale spills. They don’t have large skimming boats or miles of boom needed for something like the Exxon Valdez or BP Deepwater Horizon disasters.

But if a spill were to occur in the San Juan Islands, Knight and her team probably would be the first on the scene, followed by the Coast Guard and larger primary response contractors.

FISHING VESSELS AND TRIBAL INPUT

The Department of Ecology’s budget cuts have left shortcomings in cleanup equipment quality and capacity to store oil from spills, said Chad Bowechop, manager of the Makah Tribal Council’s Office of Marine Affairs. He said the tribe is deeply concerned about the increase in tanker traffic that passes tribal lands, which are located on the Strait of Juan de Fuca – the watery freeway for oil transport in the region.

He wants to see tribal knowledge tapped for spill preparation and response.

“Our feeling is nobody knows our treaty area, our waters better than our own fishermen and that’s why we’ve been working so hard to advocate the development of a tribal ‘vessel of opportunity’ program,” he said.

“Vessel of opportunity” programs enlist local fishing vessels and other commercial boats to help with an oil spill cleanup. During the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of fishing vessels were hired to put out boom, skim oil and collect tar balls. The vessels are used in addition to Primary Response Contractors.

Although the Department of Ecology has such a program, it recently concluded in a post-BP Deepwater Horizon report the state needed to do more to take advantage of those resources by making sure they are trained and included in oils spill drills.

Bowechop said the Makah tribe has worked with some clean up contracting companies on spill drills off the Olympic coast, he said there are more opportunities for tribes, response contractors and government to collaborate.

“If we don’t work together as partners, then the job is too big for any one of us to do by ourselves,” Bowechop said.

A COLUMBIA RIVER DRILL

Ships doing business on the Columbia River are subject to the same requirements as those that travel through Puget Sound or along the coast. They have to have oil spill response plans on file with Washington’s Department of Ecology or with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

No crude oil is transported on the Columbia, but tankers and tank barges carry millions of gallons of diesel fuel and bunker fuel up and down the river.

When someone reports an oil spill on the Columbia River, the Clean Rivers Cooperativeand the Marine Spill Response Corporation are among the Primary Response Contractors shipping companies pay to clean up the mess. Like their counterparts in the Puget Sound, the contractors must complete spill drills.

About 40 people from the two response groups rehearsed a few weeks again, setting up a command center at the Elochoman Slough Marina in Cathlamet, Wash., about 10 miles from the mouth of the Columbia.

Ernie Quesada, the general manager of Clean Rivers, oversaw the drill, walking everyone through their roles before they boarded their boats.

On the water, the 229-foot Oregon Responder placed a circle of large, black boom on the river. Once the imaginary oil was contained, the crew lowered an orange skimmer into the circle to suck up the spill.

Down river, teams of small boats stretched yellow boom, linked like sausages, across the entrance of a side channel and along the shore.

“What these guys did over here, they laid the boom up on the shore to have a better seal from the shore to the water so there’re no gaps,” Quesada explained.

The crew ran out of boom, but they loaded more boom from another boat and finished the task. That’s a detail that could be part of a report listing areas the companies need to improve. The equipment deployment drills are more about gaining experience and making plan and deployment improvements than penalties for shortcomings.

NEAR THE MOUTH OF THE COLUMBIA

On October 11, the same day that the Oregon Responder and other boats were practicing for a spill on the Columbia River, the Washington Department of Ecology and the U.S. Coast Guard were responding to a disabled vessel at the mouth of the river, about nine miles west of Cape Disappointment.

The Egyptian-flagged, 728-foot bulk carrier, The Edfu, had lost propulsion power and had only one anchor to keep it from drifting to shore. A Coast Guard helicopter assessed the scene, and the Coast Guard ordered the ship to have two tug boats at its sides. Two days later, the ship regained its power and was escorted across the Columbia River bar to the Port of Astoria. There, Coast Guard inspectors found numerous deficiencies, including defective firefighting equipment, which according to the Coast Guard’s report, “prevented the ship’s crew from being able to respond to a fire aboard the ship.”

In this case, no oil was spilled, but had the anchor given way before the tug boats arrived, the situation could have become serious because bulk carriers like The Edfu carry millions of gallons of bunker fuel.

The two leading causes of oil spills from vessels are equipment failure and human error, according to a 2011 study from the Pacific States-British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force.

“We are under no illusions that a major spill could not happen. It could,” said Ecology’s Hart. “Could we be better prepared? Yes.”

This report is the first in an occasional series on oil in the Pacific Northwest.

Find more on this story and additional environmental news at Earthfix.

SEATTLE, Wash. — On December 1, Washington’s Olympic Coast National Marine
Sanctuary will enact regulations banning cruise ships from discharging sewage, graywater,
oily bilge and other harmful waste in waters bounded by the Sanctuary, a move that will
safeguard more than 2,700 square miles of extraordinary marine resources.
The Sanctuary represents one of North America’s most productive marine ecosystems and
provides habitat to a wide variety of marine species including toothed and baleen whales,
seals and sea lions, sea otters, and numerous fish and sea bird species. These treaty
protected resources also support four federally recognized tribal governments—Makah,
Quileute, Hoh and Quinault.

Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that led the charge to successfully ban cruise
ship waste discharges in all west coast sanctuaries, lauded the decision as a victory for
clean water and called upon the Port of Seattle, the Washington State Department of
Ecology and the Northwest & Canada Cruise Association (NWCCA) to extend the same
protections to all of Puget Sound.
“We applaud the Sanctuary for taking this step to protect the open waters of our nationally
recognized coast,” said Fred Felleman, Northwest consultant for Friends of the Earth. “Now
is the time to ban cruise ship pollution in Washington State’s endangered inshore marine
waters in order to protect the health of the public and our region’s diverse and vulnerable
marine ecosystems.”

However, the only thing protecting Puget Sound is a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
between the Department of Ecology, the NWCCA and the Port of Seattle, originally signed
on April 20, 2004, and which has been amended five times. Because there is no law
prohibiting cruise ship wastewater discharges outside of the marine sanctuary, cruise lines
using the Port of Seattle can simply seek permission to discharge at the beginning of each
new cruise season.

Friends of the Earth, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, and People for Puget Sound are formally
petitioning (attached) these entities to amend the MOU to include a cruise ship wastewater
discharge ban in Puget Sound and the Straits. Due to a change in policy in 2010, this is the
last year proposed MOU amendments will be subject to an annual review. Following this
year, there will be no public opportunity to update the MOU provisions until 2015.
Cruise ship pollution is a significant threat to water resources. While treatment is required to
discharge wastewater, the U.S. EPA has found that older sewage treatment systems
discharge wastewater in excess of federal water quality standards.

Each large cruise ship calling at the Port of Seattle is capable of generating more than one
million gallons of wastewater in a single week. The port’s 2011 cruise season was more
robust than expected, with 196 cruise ships bringing 885,949 passengers through the
waters of the sound between late April and early October. While none of the 14 cruise ships
that call the Port of Seattle home sought permission to discharge in Puget Sound waters this
past season, there are no guaranteed protections without a permanent ban.
The Department of Ecology states in their public notice, “The MOU agreement supports the
broader Puget Sound Initiative – a comprehensive effort by local, tribal, state and federal
governments, business, agricultural and environmental interests, scientists, and the public
to restore and protect the Sound, including the Strait of Juan de Fuca.” The proposed MOU
amendment specifically supports the Action Agenda’s item C8.1 “Establish no discharge
zones for commercial and recreational vessels in all or parts of Puget Sound that have
nutrient and/or pathogen problems.”

“We all must do our part, including cruise ship companies, if we are to succeed in achieving
Puget Sound recovery by 2020,” said Felleman. “Cruise ships calling on Seattle have
demonstrated that they can refrain from discharging wastewater while in Puget Sound. By
codifying this conservation commitment through the MOU the NWCCA can be a true partner
in the region’s economic and ecological restoration,” concluded Felleman.
###

This was a long interview I did in July 2010

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wq/wastewater/cruise_mou/index.html

Nov 3, 2011

By Arwyn Rice
Peninsula Daily News

http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20111103/news/311039991/olympic-coast-national-marine-sanctuary-gets-new-mangement-plan

PORT ANGELES — A new ban on cruise ship wastewater dumping will keep coastal waters cleaner — and new mapping techniques revealed that the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary is smaller than previously thought.

This was announced when a new management plan for the sanctuary was officially adopted on Tuesday.

Marine scientists are raring to put it into action.

“We’re excited that we are actually starting to do the work,” said George Galasso, acting sanctuary superintendent.

The sanctuary’s headquarters are at The Landing mall in Port Angeles.

The sanctuary stretches from Cape Flattery near Neah Bay south 162 miles to the mouth of the Copalis River in Grays Harbor County and 25 to 40 miles offshore.

The management plan is a roadmap for the future of the sanctuary.

“It includes detailed guidance for program priorities that we will use to manage this special undersea place for future generations to enjoy,” Galasso said.

‘Upswelling zone’

The sanctuary protects a productive “upwelling zone” that is home to rich marine mammal and seabird faunas, diverse populations of kelp and intertidal algae, and thriving invertebrate communities, and has more than 150 documented historical shipwrecks.

The new management plan began with public workshops and forums in 2008.

Then National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) representatives worked closely with the Intergovernmental Policy Council — an agency comprised of representatives from the Hoh, Quileute, Makah and Quinault coastal tribes and the state of Washington.

The plan emphasizes the nature and significance of the sanctuary’s treaty trust responsibility to the tribes, and includes 20 directives, composed of a series of non-regulatory actions, regulatory strategies and activities.

The initial draft of the plan was introduced in January, with public meetings and comment sessions through March.

It provides a framework for the sanctuary to refine its research, education and outreach programs; create and enhance partnerships; and manage potential threats to the sanctuary’s marine resources.

Periodic management plan review is required by Congress for each of NOAA’s 13 national marine sanctuaries.

Cruise ships

The most obvious change is a ban on cruise ship wastewater dumping.

Bans on cruise ship wastewater dumping within the marine sanctuary include treated or untreated sewage, bilge water and gray water.

Cruise ships cross the sanctuary an average of 280 times each year, Galasso said.

Sixty percent of those ships have advanced wastewater treatment on board, thanks to strict regulations in Alaska and California and voluntary cooperation by cruise ship owners, he said.

However, Galasso said, he still believes there is a large potential for wastewater contamination of the marine sanctuary.

It takes about 2½ hours for a cruise ship to cross the sanctuary, which is not enough time to cause problems for ships turning off their dumping systems.

Size of sanctuary

Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, designated in 1994, was believed to span 2,500 nautical square miles of Pacific Ocean off the Olympic Peninsula coastline.

Measurements using modern mapping techniques indicate that the sanctuary actually includes 2,408 square miles of ocean, the report said.

“It wasn’t really a surprise to me,” Galasso said.

Mapping coastal areas as large as the marine sanctuary is challenging because the sheer size of the area means the curvature of the Earth has to be factored in, he said.

New geographic information systems are far more accurate than older techniques, he said.

The final management plan, regulations and final environmental assessment can be read at http://olympiccoast.noaa.gov/.

________

Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.

http://crosscut.com/2011/10/28/environment/21354/Big-Coal-meets-Cherry-Point-s-tiny-herring/

Concern for survival of a once-great herring stock has halted industrial schemes at Cherry Point before. Will it happen again, with the proposed coal-shipping terminal?

By Bob Simmons
October 28, 2011.

Fishers of a certain age will tell you about going after north Puget Sound salmon with a short stop for bait in the waters off Cherry Point. With a vertical array of bright hooks, you could bring up a bucket of herring before your coffee got cold. And the herring bait would always attract a salmon somewhere between Cherry Point and the islands.

Those, as someone surely said, were the days. Since the late 1970s or early 1980s, something has gone wrong with the Cherry Point herring. Biologists don’t know what it is and disagree over what it might be. Whatever it is caused a 95 percent drop in the population since the late 1970s.

There’s a lot more at stake than a convenient bait shop for sport fishermen. Biologists call the Washington herring a keystone species; they give life to a wide range of sea creatures who crave herring every bit as much as your Uncle Sven in Ballard. Scientists believe herring make up two thirds of the diet of the federally protected Chinook salmon; the Chinook in turn provide two-thirds of the food supply for Puget Sound Orcas.

That’s not to say that agencies ignore the herring. Biologists of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife have tracked the decline for many years, but they haven’t identified any provable cause that might shift public policy to protect what’s left of the Cherry Point stock.

An icy, windy morning in April finds biologist Kurt Stick and a colleague in an open boat, dragging a specially designed rake through the kelp and eel grass along the Cherry Point shoreline. The rake gathers vegetation coated with herring eggs. Weighing the eggs in a carefully measured area, Stick and his coworkers estimate what remains of a stock that once comprised half the herring in Washington waters and supported a multi-million dollar industry. (Japanese food buyers imported Cherry Point herring roe for sushi as recently as 1996.)

WDFW figures there were 15,000 tons of Cherry Point herring in 1973. Last year, there were 774 tons. Regulators shut down all harvesting of herring and their eggs in 1996, but the fish kept disappearing.

Cherry Point herring have an engaging political history. They have managed to be in the wrong place when industries want to develop the shoreline and tidelands. Presently they seem fated to mix it up with the biggest ships in the world, as SSA Marine’s Gateway Pacific Terminal moves toward approval.

The Seattle-based builder and operator of seaports would create the West Coast’s largest coal shipping port at Cherry Point, a dozen miles northwest of Bellingham, on the Strait of Georgia. The GPT would eventually ship 48 million metric tons of Wyoming and Montana coal to Asia every year, most of it to China. One customer — Peabody Coal — has contracted with SSA to ship 24 million tons per year, a partnership announced a day or two after SSA filed for state and federal approvals to build the project.

The ships that would haul coal from GPT are known as “capesize”; that is, they go around Cape Horn at the tip of South America because they can’t maneuver through the Panama Canal. Think three-and-a-half football fields in length, with a seven-story building below the waterline. What they’ll do to the herring, salmon, crab, and other aquatic creatures along the shore is unknown. A troika of Federal, state, and county agencies will pursue that question and give us their best guess during environmental impact studies that are still to be scheduled. About all that’s known for now is that the Cherry Point herring are swimming in the direction of gone.

They’re a peculiar strain. While other herring in Washington spawn in winter, those around Cherry Point, for reasons of their own, don’t get around to it until April or May. That procrastination has left them genetically separated; they don’t mix with other herring stock in Puget Sound or Canadian seas.

In 2005, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife lobbied federal regulators to list the Cherry Point stock as distinct and threatened, needing protection under the Endangered Species Act. The feds turned them down. Not that the Cherry Point herring aren’t endangered, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service held that they’re not all that special, not worthy of listing with other endangered creatures such as the Chinook salmon, for whom they’re prime steak.

Adult Pacific herring — Clupea pallasii — are supposed to live eight or 10 years and grow to 12 to 18 inches. In the past several years, however, the fish that make up the Cherry Point stock have grown smaller. They seem to consist largely of 2- and 3-year-olds, producing fewer eggs than adult fish are expected to. Ominously, some 60 percent of the eggs they do produce are abnormal, often becoming deformed fish.

In pondering who or what’s to blame, industrial waste is an easy target. There are three industrial plants at Cherry Point, which were attracted to its naturally deep docking area. All three have outfalls that carry industrial effluent into the strait. The companies operating there say they are scrupulously careful not to pollute, and state agencies seem to agree.

“Conventional wisdom would say, ‘it’s the industrial development, stupid,’ ” Stick told Crosscut. “But it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

Industries began settling on the Point in 1954, when General Petroleum built its Ferndale refinery (now owned by Conoco-Phillips). Alcoa’s Intalco Aluminum came in 1966 and the ARCO (now BP) oil refinery in 1971, all with piers and effluent discharges. But the Department of Fish and Wildlife does not blame the industries for losing the herring.

“The fish were thriving for many years after the shoreline went industrial,” Kurt Stick observes. “The most productive year we’ve measured, in 1978, happened with two refineries and an aluminum plant in operation.”

Some biologists suggest the problem has to do with ocean-warming cycles that encourage predators from southern waters to venture north. Or a herring virus that’s been identified here and there around the Sound. They raise the possibility that the herring — known to visit relatives for extended periods — simply moved to Canada.

Some observers see this as classic trouble-avoidance by the state agency. “If DFW acknowledged that the herring problem is human-caused, they’d have to do something about it,” says Fred Felleman, a fisheries consultant and outspoken advocate for the Cherry Point herring. “They don’t have the money or the appetite for it.”

Felleman recently presented a paper at an American Fisheries Society conference in Seattle, in which he argues that industrial pollutants including a 1972 oil spill — covered by the Bellingham Herald but not to be found in state records — contributed to the herring’s decline. He’s convinced that small amounts of industrial pollutants, accumulating drip by drip for half a century, are a major cause of the problem.

State agencies admit they don’t really know what’s in the waters off Cherry Point, and they don’t have the resources to find out. Some resource managers continue to hope that SSA Marine will pay for so-called “baseline” studies to provide the first solid information on pollution, disease, ocean currents, and other living conditions for sea creatures in the Cherry Point waters. SSA agreed in 1999 to do the studies in order to settle a challenge to its Whatcom County shoreline development permit, by a coalition of state agencies and private organizations. But the studies never happened.

SSA Vice President Bob Watters agrees that SSA has not done the work it promised, but says the company had its reasons. His explanation suggests that it’s the fault of the Department of Natural Resources, the state agency controlling the use of Washington tidelands.

DNR administers the Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve, 3,000 acres of saltwater set aside in 2000 for special management. For the first 10 years there was no document spelling out details of how the Aquatic Reserve would managed. Without those details, Watters contends, it would not have been economically prudent for SSA to do the studies it had agreed to.

“DNR had declared the area part of an Aquatic Reserve but there was no management plan,” Watters told Crosscut. “So we didn’t know what the restrictions would be, or if it would even be economically desirable to build the project. No bank would lend on such a project if we didn’t know whether we’d ever get to do it.”

“Now that we have the management plan and have seen the language, we can do the studies.”

Resource specialists who have worried over the herring for years find it hard to aceept Watters’ explanation. They point out that the 1999 settlement contains nothing about the DNR’S management plan being completed, nor the project being economically desirable, nor banks being willing to lend. For whatever reasons, the studies remain undone and a dozen years of data, which might have helped solved the herring dilemma, were never gathered.

The company has applied for new federal and state permits to build the terminal. Whatcom County planning officials ruled that the company’s 1999 permit is no longer valid and it must apply for a new one.

Coming events may seem eerily familiar to anyone who was watching state politics 30 years ago. Cherry Point herring — and the creatures that feed on them and with them — created heavy political drama in the early 1980s. Industrial companies came bearing gifts in return for the right to develop at Cherry Point in ways that could have damaged the herring, salmon, crab and shorebirds that hang out there. State regulators, biologists and activist citizens opposed the projects and one by one, Gov. John Spellman turned them down:

1975. The (6) Northern Tier Pipeline company began a seven-year campaign for approval to bring Alaskan crude oil ashore at Cherry Point, headed for the Midwest. Spellman blocked it in 1981, on grounds that it presented too great a risk of an oil disaster in the Sound.

1982. Chicago Bridge and Iron Corporation wanted to build oil-drilling platforms at Cherry Point, for use in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. The state legislature created a special law for the company, specifically removing the CBI property from the state’s fledgling shoreline protections. Spellman vetoed the bill, following a political conflict that gripped the state capitol for months.

1983. Peter Kiewit, Inc. pushed a similar oil platform scheme; the state departments of Ecology and Fish and Wildlife recommended against it, and Spellman again said no.

The very same piece of property and descendants of the same fish will be the center of conflict in the next few years, as scientific panels ponder SSA’s proposal. This time, however, any potential threat is more subtle. No one is trying to dredge a channel into the tidelands or build an artificial lagoon to be periodically drained into the sea, as CBI wanted to do. SSA is more politically savvy and not so brazenly self-confident as its predecessors. It carefully secured political, business, and organized labor support for a port, before revealing in February that 80 percent of what it ships will be coal.

The state is even more strapped for jobs and money than it was in the Spellman days. The herring have dwindled to a sliver of the abundance Gov. Spellman worried about. Salmon fishing is a fraction of the major business it was in the early 1980s. Conditions seem favorable for a shift in public policy that might look something like this: if we damage a resource badly enough, for so long that it barely exists, then we can shrug it off in exchange for jobs and revenue.

Bob Simmons is a freelance writer and former KING-TV journalist living in Bellingham, Wash. You can reach him in care of editor@crosscut.com.
View this story online at: http://crosscut.com/2011/10/28/environment/21354/Big-Coal-meets-Cherry-Point-s-tiny-herring/
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