Partnership leads new idea to clean Puget Sound
As a 25-gallon aquarium is lowered upside-down onto the bottom of an inlet in Puget Sound, Mindy Roberts watches as two other environmental scientists draw water samples up a long, clear tube.
On this particular day, the Department of Ecology is testing for dissolved oxygen in the water, data that will be used to figure out how human factors such as stormwater runoff negatively impact the levels of oxygen in the water.
Roberts, a project manager at the agency, said the information will help create the equivalent of a flight simulator, a program that would let scientists test out how different things – like a projected population boom – will impact the Sound.
“It’s not just studying it for studying’s sake, it’s studying it to understand who’s contributing what,” she said. “Once we do that, we can then do different what-if scenarios.”
Research like this and hundreds of other studies being done by various agencies and local governments are meant to be the answer on how best clean up the troubled waters of Puget Sound. While research has been ongoing for decades, a cohesive, organized plan to reverse the decline of the state’s famous body of water has been more evasive.
Now the Puget Sound Partnership, created by lawmakers this year, hopes to succeed where others have failed.
“We know a lot about the problems in a lot of parts of Puget Sound,” said David Dicks, the executive director of the new agency. “What’s never really happened is somebody standing above it all and rolling that all together.”
The agency is responsible for determining the health of the Sound, and setting priorities so that the state can meet the goal of a healthy Sound by 2020. A preliminary report is due to lawmakers by next September.
The partnership named a nine-member independent science panel that will offer advice and help measure progress.
“What does a healthy Puget Sound by 2020 mean?” Dicks asked. “We’ve got to define that term in a very meaningful, objective way.”
Continue reading this article from the Tacoma News Tribune:
New idea to clean Sound
