Duwamish gets Earth Day notice

Published 9:00 pm Friday, April 21, 2006

SEATTLE – Dusty tractor-trailer rigs rumble by, a machine shop sprawls behind chain-link fencing topped with razor wire and stacks of shipping containers loom over a tiny patch of green on the Duwamish River.

On Saturday, the 36th annual Earth Day, volunteer cleanup crews will swarm over North Gateway Park and Eighth Avenue S., its forbidding access road, to tidy up before next year’s makeover – a more welcoming road design financed by a Seattle Department of Neighborhoods grant.

In the old days, Georgetown was a separate town on the banks of the river. Early last century, the town was absorbed by Seattle and the serpentine river was dredged and straightened to serve industry.

“Now the street forms a barrier between the river and the community instead of a connection. We want to restore the connection,” said B.J. Cummings of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, who has been working to restore marshes and shallows on the Duwamish since 1994.

The little street-end park, which has a fabulous view of Mount Rainier and overflows with native plants, will be a volunteer hub on Saturday as Gov. Chris Gregoire and Mayor Greg Nickels visit.

Sprucing up the park and road is one of five projects on the industrialized five-mile stretch of the river above its mouth on Elliott Bay. Free water taxis will ferry volunteers between sites.

The Duwamish projects are among scores around the state planned for Earth Day.

Along the Pacific Coast, volunteers will be scouring 140 miles of beaches for debris. They collected 37 tons of junk last year. The Student Conservation Association will spread mulch, install plants and work on a trail at Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle.

The first Earth Day in 1970 aimed at developing earth-friendly habits such as recycling household trash, properly disposing of pesticides and fighting litter.

Down by the Duwamish, cranes, barges and other industrial gear dwarf the cormorants, crows and gulls that drink and bathe in the river, not to mention the scattered riverfront homes across the water in South Park – site of South Gateway Park, soon to be expanded by the Port of Seattle.

The two parks mark the ends of a long-vanished bridge across the river that once linked the two communities.

“It’s a river, not a waterway,” said Cummings, who started 12 years ago teaching kayakers how to monitor pollution on the Duwamish.

“That’s been actually really important, because our first year was telling people we had a river. Even folks that knew there was something here didn’t realize it was a river that continued for another 30 miles.”

Before it was straightened, the river had as many twists and turns as a snake. It was deeper and faster, fed by the Black, White and Green rivers. Then the White was diverted to Tacoma and the Black vanished when the Lake Washington Ship Canal changed water levels. Only the Green River is left.

The Duwamish River bottom has been poisoned by a century of industrial waste, The final five-mile stretch is a Superfund site with seven hot spots on the Environmental Protection Agency’s fast track – one of them just north of the park near Boeing’s Plant 2.

The biggest ongoing pollution problem is from seven combined sewer and storm drain outfalls, Cummings said.

But wildlife persists.

“You’ll see harbor seals, and there are resident river otters,” Cummings said. “There’s a herring fishery, and there are still crabs and bottomfish in the river, though you wouldn’t want to eat them.”

The state Health Department cautions against eating fish and crab from the river, but it is still evaluating Puget Sound fish including early summer chinook and fall coho from the Duwamish.

Duwamish River Earth Day projects

Here are the five “Duwamish Alive” projects for Earth Day, from the mouth of the river upstream:

* Herring House Park at Terminal 107 and Puget Creek: Volunteers will pull weeds and plant native brush and trees.

* Gateway Park North in Georgetown: weeding, planting, street maintenance.

* Duwamish Waterway Park in South Park: general cleanup of the riverside park.

* West Duwamish Greenbelt: weeding one of Seattle’s biggest green spaces.

* The Turning Basin III/Kenco Marine site in South Park, once an illegal shipyard: planting.