Pollution Is Draining Yacht Club -- Boaters Tire Of Paying To Dredge Waste, But Can't Find Pipe's Owner

The Duwamish Yacht Club is your modest sort of working-person's yacht club, wedged between a container storage yard and a Duwamish River boatbuilder. The containers tower over the ornamental plantings in the parking lot. The club secretary works out of a converted Airstream trailer.

Club Commodore Cecil Ayers likes it that way - workaday surroundings notwithstanding, it's only a 30-minute shot down the river to Elliott Bay. Or he did until the yacht club developed an industrial-strength pollution problem, one that could drive the yacht club right into the financial drink.

A steady stream of polluted water flows out of a gaping six-foot-wide pipe in the bank next to the club, flushing gunk from a 1,420-acre industrial area into the hapless Duwamish River.

Sometimes the pollution is invisible - heavy metals and byproducts of auto exhaust. Sometimes it's an oily sheen. And sometimes, as in March of this year, the sewer disgorges a waterfall of soapsuds. "I know they were washing out those containers," says Ayers. "But what was in those containers?"

The 105-member yacht club is in King County, just south of the Seattle city limit. The club wants King County to clean the stuff up. The county contends it doesn't even own the pipe, known as the South 96th Street storm drain, much less the pollution.

Meanwhile, the bill for dredging the polluted stuff out of the yacht basin keeps climbing.

The yacht basin fills up rapidly because the Duwamish is a silty river. In 1989, when the club dredged, some of the sediments were too polluted to dump into Elliott Bay. The club had to deposit the polluted part of the muck in an upland landfill, driving the disposal cost to $250,000.

Next time, even the landfill may not be an option. No one wants polluted dredge spoils, now classified as a hazardous waste.

"What we're doing is providing a hazardous-waste dump for this drainage basin," says Ayers. "I don't even know where it comes from. It comes from everywhere."

Which is precisely the problem.

The storm drain represents the next generation of pollution-cleanup headaches. Who is responsible for what in a storm drain is a question that defies a simple solution.

When the yacht club sued the county for damages and to halt the pollution, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Cassandra Jachman argued that the county didn't own the pipe, much less the subterranean complex of drainage pipes that feeds it.

Yacht-club attorney Benjamin Shuey retorted that if that was so, why does the county have a surface-water utility that issues permits in the basin for storm-water hookups?

Jachman had a point. The original drainage system dates from the 1800s. Over the years, many private parties and businesses have connected pipes and drains to the sewer, and many of them are dumping polluted runoff into the system.

Any number of sources could be responsible for the heavy metals and organic chemicals pouring out of the South 96th Street drain: Car exhaust. Traction sand from last year's snowstorm. An asphalt company. A boat-building company. A couple of electroplating firms. An old cement kiln with dust so alkaline "the water that perks up through there is just like Drano," says Dan Cargill of the state Department of Ecology's urban-bay action team.

While these businesses may be the pollution's source, Shuey says going after them would be a legal nightmare. And the county says pollution control is not its responsibility, in spite of the fact that the county received a $132,000 grant to design and construct a detention pond to solve the problem.

In fact, in its grant application, the county seemed to have a pretty clear grasp of what comes out the pipe.

"Without source controls . . . there is a high probability that the pond will become contaminated with heavy metals and organic toxicants and King County may be responsible for the disposal of what may be classified as hazardous waste," said the grant application.

The yacht club recently lost the first round in the courts. King County Superior Court Judge Ed Heavey ruled both the silt and the pipe were there before the yacht club was formed in 1979, and that the club should have known there would be problems.

There was no evidence the county did anything to increase the flow of sediments or pollutants, Heavey said. "I don't have anything to tell me . . . that the disposition of the pollutants on the property is anything other than a change in regulations," he said in ruling for the county.

Ayers says the change in regulations is the heart of the matter - that what was dumpable in Elliott Bay in 1978 is not dumpable now. The yacht club has appealed the decision.

Changes in disposal regulations have increased the discharge cost for thousands of cubic yards of dredge spoils from $80 to $100 per cubic yard, says Roger Lowe, a consulting engineer who has worked for the club. That's a price far out of reach of the Duwamish boaters.

"For that price, they might as well put it in suitcases and mail it to Mexico City," says Lowe.