Commentary: Refinery expansion poses threat to North Cascades

By Ed Gastellum

When I was young, I watched my father head off to work every day for the National Park Service, a career I admired from an early age.

I followed in my father’s footprints and spent my career with the Park Service and raised my own children in and around national parks, to pass along the joys that come from fresh mountain air and old-growth forests. However, if British Petroleum has its way, this air, and those forests, may not be the same for their children.

I served as the assistant superintendent for North Cascades National Park for more than 12 years, where I oversaw all functions of park operations including infrastructure maintenance, park law enforcement, search and rescue, and resource management and interpretation. I spent extensive amounts of time in the backcountry of the park that few folks get to see, and I was always struck by the beauty of its glaciers and high mountain lakes.

Now that I’m retired, I am still drawn to the North Cascades. A little over two hours from my home in Anacortes is one of my absolute favorite places in the park: Copper Ridge. From the ridge, I can sometimes see as far away as 100 miles in all directions across the mountain tops of the North Cascades. It is simply breathtaking.

But the oil refineries in the north of Puget Sound pollute the air, causing hazy skies and amplifying the harmful effects of climate change on the ecological balance in North Cascades National Park and in surrounding communities. From that vantage point atop Copper Ridge, the beautiful vistas are sometimes obscured by haze on days with particularly bad air quality. And now, British Petroleum (BP) plans to expand its Cherry Point refinery so it can increase processing of dirtier tar-sands crude oil.

The Skagit River thrives on four of the 312 total glaciers in North Cascades — all of which are rapidly melting because of warmer temperatures from climate change, a process that is sped up by the pollutants released by these refineries. The shrinking glaciers are contributing less runoff in the summer, leading to warmer water temperatures that are harmful to salmon. Also downstream, air pollution contributes to increasingly hostile waterways for spawning fish and other aquatic wildlife as nitrogen deposition builds, throwing off delicate balances necessary for these species to thrive.

In this fragile ecosystem, it is irresponsible to expand any of the several existing refineries in the area; yet, the state Department of Ecology granted permission for BP to do just that. The air permit approved by Ecology allows for an unacceptable increase in air pollution and does not require adequate controls to address BP’s plans to refine more dirty crude oil. Their failure to act puts this special place, visitors, surrounding communities and wildlife at risk. National Park Service experts anticipate that BP’s expansion at the Cherry Point facility will harm the North Cascades, making bad air days more likely and worse when they happen; the expanded refinery would increase the number of hazy days in the park from 38 to 54 days a year.

I applaud National Parks Conservation Association for challenging the permit for BP’s expanded Cherry Point refinery. More stringent pollution controls should be required as part of a revised permit to address the many anticipated adverse effects on the park and at least neutralize or mitigate for the increased air pollution expected from BP’s expansion. BP has modern controls on other similar facilities — surely our wild part of Washington deserves the same considerations.

I’ve seen the positive effects the Clean Air Act has had in cleaning up hazy, unhealthy pollution in places like Grand Canyon National Park. I cannot sit by while my home is needlessly harmed. Haze pollution and unchecked climate change are an unacceptablefor a place as wild and wonderful as the North Cascades.

Ed Gastellum is retired from the National Park Service. He lives in Anacortes.