The Environmental Protection Agency today released an aggressive $290 million plan to reduce the amount of pollution in Seattle’s East Waterway, one of two industrial channels of the Lower Duwamish River below the Spokane Street Bridge.
Under EPA oversight, cleanup of the East Waterway is primarily being conducted by the East Waterway Group consisting of the Port of Seattle, the City of Seattle, and King County.
East Waterway is one of seven parts, or “operable units,” of the larger Harbor Island Superfund Site which was placed on EPA’s National Priorities List in 1983 due to high levels of PCBs, furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that accumulated over 150 years of urbanization and industrial development. These pollutants have contaminated the food web in the Lower Duwamish River and East Waterway, posing health risks to people who eat the local fish and shellfish. PCBs are the primary driver of risk to people who eat contaminated fish or shellfish, or who are exposed to contaminated sediment in East Waterway. The average concentration of PCBs in East Waterway sediments is 460 parts per billion.
EPA’s Proposed Plan establishes a long-term cleanup goal for PCBs in East Waterway sediments of two parts per billion, the same goal the agency established for the cleanup of the Lower Duwamish Superfund Site.
“The people who live, work, and play in the Lower Duwamish Valley have disproportionately suffered from the impacts of 150 years of industrial pollution,” said Casey Sixkiller, EPA Regional Administrator for the agency’s Pacific Northwest office in Seattle. “It’s long past time to cleanup East Waterway, and this step shows our broader commitment to the communities in the valley.”
“While bringing pollution down to non-urban background levels will take decades to achieve, we owe it to future generations to do the best we possibly can,” Sixkiller continued. “I believe that ‘good enough’ rarely is, so for this plan to succeed in the long-term, all levels of government must tackle the many sources of pollution that impact the Green/Duwamish and the communities that rely on it.”
EPA’s plan focuses active cleanup of 120 acres of the mile-long waterway, prescribing removal of approximately 960,000 cubic yards of heavily contaminated sediment from 99 acres, on-site treatment of 12 acres under docks and piers, and capping another seven acres with clean material. A mix of other processes would be used to tackle the remaining acreage.
As part of maintaining an effective in-water cleanup and making meaningful progress toward the long-term goal of achieving non-urban background levels of PCBs, EPA will work collaboratively with the Washington Department of Ecology, other state and local agencies, and industries to identify and reduce or eliminate sources of pollution to the East Waterway.
“We support EPA’s efforts to clean up as much contaminated sediment as possible from the East Waterway, as soon as possible,” said Laura Watson, director of the Washington Department of Ecology. “While there’s still work to do to reduce other sources of pollution, the sediment cleanup is a key step in the right direction. We’re hopeful that removing this major source of PCBs will get us much closer to our shared vision of a clean river for the community.”
After the approximately 10 years of cleanup activities have concluded, EPA will evaluate the effectiveness of the cleanup and source control work to determine what additional work, if any, is necessary to achieve cleanup goals. EPA will then begin a new process to develop a final cleanup plan, called a Record of Decision.
Until then, the Proposed Plan released today is considered an Interim Proposed Plan, and the agency’s next step will be to issue an Interim Record of Decision, likely sometime in the late Fall.
Following 10 years of active cleanup work and a period of extensive monitoring, the agency anticipates pollution levels in East Waterway sediments would be significantly reduced, thus decreasing contamination levels in fish and reducing risk for those who use the East Waterway for food and recreation, as well as for their livelihoods.
How the public can get engaged
EPA has established a 60-Day public comment period from April 28 through June 27, 2023, and will hold a virtual public meeting in English on Thursday, May 25, 2023, and an in-person public meeting with interpreters in Spanish, Vietnamese, and Khmer on Saturday, June 3, 2023.
EPA will accept comments by email at EastWaterwayComments@epa.gov, on the EPA website at www.epa.gov/superfund/harbor-island, and by mail at
ATTN: East Waterway Proposed Plan
c/o Laura Knudsen
U.S. EPA Region 10, 1200 Sixth Avenue, Suite 155
Superfund Records Center, Mail Stop 17-C04-1
Seattle, WA 98101
The agency will also accept oral comments in any language at 206-553-6520.