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Tulalip site scoured for toxic leftovers
By Krista Kapralos
TULALIP – Sixty years after chemical weapons training was conducted on the Tulalip Reservation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is circling back to make sure soldiers didn’t leave anything toxic behind.
They are using clues from an old photograph that warns “Danger. Poison gas” and decades-old memories to hunt for vintage chemical weapons.
Crews from a company under contract with the federal government began investigating the site last month, Corps spokesman Steve Cosgrove said.
They’ve cleared brush from the heavily wooded site just west of Quil Ceda Village and used ground-penetrating radar to search for unusual material.
“They’ve located a few things that are not natural, and we don’t know what those are,” Cosgrove said.
“They’re going to go out there and check to see if there is any relation to munitions that may have been left there since World War II.”
The anomalies – more than 60 have been identified - could be anything from discarded logging equipment to actual weaponry.
Tribal officials don’t expect any major stores of ammunition to be found.
“Worst-case scenario is that we’ll find a little mustard gas,” said Foley Cleveland, an employee of the tribes’ Special Projects department. “It probably won’t be anything.”
Crews expect to be finished with the cleanup by the end of the month. They work wearing biohazard suits and under the constant watch of emergency medical teams, just in case they come across an unexpected weapons store.
Tents that can be used for decontamination are nearby.
Mustard gas, tear gas, hydrogen cyanide and other materials were stored and used in training exercises at the site, according to the Corps.
During World War II, The federal government claimed 2,175 acres of Tulalip lands for its own use.
Ammunition, including chemical and conventional materials, was stored on a 676-acre section, according to federal documents. The rest of the land was used for training, including drills involving chemical warfare.
The site was known as a Backup Ammunition Storage Depot until 1947, when it was decommissioned. It was later used for storage and training.
Boeing leased the land for use as a testing center between 1959 and 2000. The company didn’t use the dozens of abandoned army bunkers, Boeing historian Mike Lombardi said.
The Tulalip Tribes has been working with the federal government to make sure the area is clean, Cleveland said.
Tribal leaders hope to develop part of the site and restore the rest to wetlands.
The depot is one of 91 sites nationwide identified as areas with possible chemical weapons stores, said David Hurtle, site safety and health officer with Parsons, the company contracted by the federal government to do the clean-up.
Suspicions about the Tulalip site were raised when a historic photograph surfaced several years ago, Cleveland said.
The photograph shows a soldier, crouching near a weapons cache, holding a sign warning of danger from poison gas.
“Do not dig for one year from the date below: May 18, 1946,” the sign reads.
As part of their search for clues about what may be buried on the reservation, federal officials sought out retired military personnel.
“Unfortunately, the lieutenant who would have known what happened here died five years ago,” Cleveland said.
What’s left are hazy memories of events generations ago, Hurtle said. The only way to find out what’s there is to dig.
The Corps began investigating the site about six weeks ago. Crews found dozens of unusual deposits under about 10 acres of the site.
An investigation the Corps conducted between 1994 and 1997 concluded chemical and conventional weapons had been stored at the site.
“That’s frequently the case at old ammunitions sites,” Cosgrove said. “Often, there are things that were left over.”
The U.S. government frequently located weapons depots and training grounds on or near reservations, said Gregory Hooks, a sociologist at Washington State University. In 2004, Hooks released a report on the old weapons sites in the American Sociological Review.
“They wanted places where they could operate chemical weapons with some secrecy and not next to large population centers,” Hooks said. “They wanted a bunch of land and Native Americans didn’t count.”
Open-air training was conducted with mustard gas and other chemicals on many reservations, Hooks said. Counties with reservation land in them are more likely to have traces of chemicals and dangerous weapons left over from that era.
Quil Ceda Village manager John McCoy said tribal members at times hunted on the former military site.
Tulalip tribal leaders are among many American Indians around the country who are working to rid their land of chemical weapons, McCoy said.
Lost crab pots killing off resource
PORT SUSAN — The Stillaguamish Indian Tribe has spent $70,000 over the past five years to locate and remove more than 400 crab pots that have been abandoned on the seabed of Port Susan.
There are still about 100 crab pots left. Many are buried in sediment or too tangled to be easily raised.
“They not only kill crabs, but also fish and other species,” said Jen Sevigny, a wildlife biologist for the tribe. “It damages bottom habitat like eel grass beds.”
Fishermen leave the pots behind when they inadvertently drop them too deep into the water.
Boats skimming the surface of the water often slice a pot’s line, letting it fall to the sea floor. In other areas, ferries drag pots left in their paths to ports miles away.
Sevigny and other biologists know the abandoned pots are a problem, but how much of a problem isn’t clear. Over the next year, the tribe will conduct a crab mortality study in an effort to fill in that data gap.
Last month, tribal crews dropped 12 crabbing pots into the port — six pots at 30 feet and six pots at 60 feet.
“We’re deploying pots as if they were abandoned,” Sevigny said.
Every week for the next year, divers will check the pots to determine how quickly crabs are caught.
After a year, the tribe will have a good idea of how many crabs are caught in abandoned pots, how long they survive before dying, and how long abandoned
pots continue to attract fresh catches. The data will be turned over to the University of Washington, which will create an economic model and determine the value of the loss to the crabbing industry.
The Stillaguamish tribe, which is funding the study, said cleaning up the crab pots helps the ecosystem and native fisheries.
While the tribe conducts the study, the Northwest Straits Commission will conduct its own research in Clallam County.
Together, the data sets will offer fresh insight into how quickly abandoned pots accumulate, and exactly how many crabs die in them.
The data will help the Stillaguamish tribe get grants and other funding to continue clearing out abandoned pots and to educate fishermen on how to catch crabs responsibly.
Stillaguamish tribal employees found 145 crabs in the 12 purposely abandoned pots during the first seven days of the study, Sevigny said.
That number doesn’t surprise her.
The Northwest Straits Commission estimates up to 20,000 derelict crab pots have accumulated in Puget Sound waters over the last three to five years.
The commission estimates that more than a third of those pots, though abandoned, continue to actively catch crabs and fish for several months to a year. Each pot has the potential to catch between 10 and 75 crabs a year. The commission says the pots could have killed between 50,000 and half a million crabs.
Recreational crab pots may cost as little as $20. Larger, commercial-quality pots for catching Dungeness crab cost between $100 and $150, including line and buoy, said Flo Fanning, office manager for Dungeness Gear Works Inc. in Everett. Commercial Dungeness crab fishermen often use 200 or more pots at a time. It’s not unusual for them to lose three pots a year, she said.
Dungeness crabs are thriving in the Puget Sound, said Ginny Broadhurst, director of the Northwest Straits Commission.
That means more fishermen are setting traps all over the region, even in the path of state ferries. The ferries can snag the pot lines and drag them to ports, Broadhurst said. The commission found about 300 pots in a small area near one ferry dock at Lopez Island in the San Juans, she said.
Crab pots have been lost as long as fishermen have been using them, Broadhurst said.
“You can buy the pots at any of the big sporting goods stores, so the loss of the pots isn’t being felt by one manufacturer in particular,” she said.
To commercial fishermen, who sell Dungeness crabs for about $3.35 each, the economic loss caused by abandoned pots throughout the region could be as high as $1.8 million each year, according to the commission. The estimated annual crab harvest value is about $2.3 million.
It costs about $193 to remove each abandoned pot.
The Stillaguamish Indian Tribe owns land near Arlington, inland from the coastline, but the damage caused by those derelict crabbing pots reverberates throughout the region, Stillaguamish Tribal Chairman Shawn Yanity said.
“Everything that goes on out in the salt water and in the mouth of the river is going to have an effect on our watershed,” Stillaguamish tribal Chairman Shawn Yanity said.
Abandoned fishing nets are as much a cause for concern as abandoned pots. According to the Northwest Straits Commission, one net known to have been abandoned for just one week trapped a seal, 68 crabs, 30 dogfish sharks, and more than 200 other fish, including endangered chinook salmon.
The Stillaguamish tribe has been working since 2003 to locate and remove thousands of pots and nets that litter the sea floor.
Science is hitching a ride on tribal canoe journey
The canoes will be hand-carved from cedar.
Tribal members will scoop paddles studded with abalone shell into the water to move forward.
Cultural revival has always been the prime hallmark of the annual summer Canoe Journey, when American Indian tribal members from around the Coast Salish region use their ancient travel routes to meet for the biggest potlatch of the year.
This year, there will be room for science, too.
Canoes traveling on five or six of the major journey routes on their way to Cowichan, B.C., will take along water quality testing systems. Using the most modern GPS technology and water probes, provided through a partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, the canoe pullers will sample the water that has been their lifeblood for centuries. The result will be a rare picture of the health of the region’s waterways, culled almost simultaneously from hundreds of locations.
“We’ll get a snapshot that we’ll be able to compare each year to measure climate change,” said Eric Grossman, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Tribal leaders from the northwest United States and Canada formally approved the plan Thursday. They are meeting this week at the Coast Salish Gathering on the Tulalip Indian Reservation.
“There’s been a disconnect between modern science and native science,” said Jon Waterhouse, director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council.
But in terms of testing water quality, the Indian way is ideal, Waterhouse said.
“You can’t do this with a motorboat,” he said. “You need to be going as slow as about 5 miles per hour. That’s perfect for a canoe.”
Tribal members will be trained to use probes worth about $20,000 each to take the water samples to test for water temperature, salinity, oxygen and PH levels, dissolved solids and nitrate levels, Grossman said.
At the same time, the tribal members will imprint each sample with data from a GPS unit, Grossman said. At the end of the journey, the tribes and the U.S. Geological Survey will be able to map out data captured almost simultaneously along hundreds of points in the Puget Sound region.
“This is a very unique and very rare opportunity to measure water quality simultaneously,” Grossman said. “It’s hard to mobilize a high number of boats, and here we’ll have 88 canoes simultaneously looking at what’s happening.”
Most importantly, Grossman said, the partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey and the Coast Salish tribes combines modern and traditional sciences.
“Our historic scientific records go back 50 to 100 years, but theirs goes back thousands of years,” Grossman said.
Waterhouse first used a water test probe last year, when he embarked on a two-month canoe journey along the Yukon River.
“We took samples every 30 minutes for about 1,500 miles,” Waterhouse said.
The samples revealed an increase of carbon dioxide, he said. Scientists believe the rivers are absorbing permafrost melt.
“Now, we have more questions than answers,” he said.
Waterhouse hopes the samples that tribal members take this summer will help reveal the rate of the earth’s climate change.
Waterhouse hopes the data will also include an element that isn’t recognized by many modern scientists: oral history, as told by elders the tribal members meet along the way. On the journey along the Yukon River, Waterhouse brought a video camera and interviewed elders about the environmental changes they’ve seen over the course of time.
He plans to encourage tribal members here to do the same.
“We have this valuable information,” he said. “It was dormant for a long time, but now the native people are leading the way.”