The Struggle to Reclaim Seattle's Only River
The Road Back - From Seattle's Superfund Sewer to Haven Once More
They call this part of the Duwamish River the Turning Basin, a bowl of placid water five miles from where the last of the river merges into the mud with Elliott Bay. It's up here in the basin that tugboats and barges have room to come about and point downriver again, ploughing back to the bay and to the sea beyond.
Nowhere is the collision of nature and industry more apparent than it is on this, the last stop for ships on the waterway. From a kayak, the Turning Basin reveals a sad tangle of what this once-untamed river has become — and, what it could still be.
Red-wing blackbirds flit from cattails. Shore birds peck at the mud where crippled barges and derelict boats once laid moldering. People have come, hauled away the hulks, and gently nursed the shoreline back to some pale semblance of its natural state. Harbor seals, curious as cocker spaniels, peek around, then dip beneath the ripples in search of something to eat.
A few paddle strokes away, an inlet ebbs with greasy gray foam. Slimed tires and rusting metal jut from the mud. It's so toxic here that the tiny slip of water shows hot-zone red on pollution charts. It's only the beginning.
From here to the bay, the river is a 500-foot-wide Superfund site, cutting a permanent scar on eco-friendly Seattle's history of growth and prosperity.
Tens of millions will be invested in this five miles from the Turning Basin to the bay, and the final cost is anyone's guess. The pollution problems are so severe that few people think it will ever fully recover. When all is said and done, environmentalists can realistically hope to reclaim only a fraction of the waterway.
After all, the Duwamish was industrial Seattle's sewer, largely hidden from public view, created over a century after city fathers decided to steal it from Mother Nature and fill, dike and channel it in service to commerce. The lower course of the Duwamish once was wide and healthy, meandering through marshes, mud flats and swamps from the base of Beacon Hill to West Seattle. Before humans changed it to fit their needs, it carried water from four rivers spanning 1,643 square miles of watershed. The Black River flowed from Lake Washington, and the Cedar River joined it. The White and Green rivers added to the flow.
It was a life force for the Indians of the area, and for the first white settlers, who erected homes and businesses on its banks.
After the filling and diking began in response to a flood in 1906, the river's inconvenient natural curves were straightened, the basin was dredged to accommodate ships, and the fill was used to build Harbor Island in the middle of the old river's mouth. When the Lake Washington Ship Canal was opened, the Black River all but dried up; the White was diverted south to supply water to Tacoma. The last reaches of the Duwamish were forever altered.
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The Road Back