Trash Transgressions
by
Gig Schlich
Traveling south on Bellingham’s Cornwall Avenue gives a brief cross section of this northwestern city’s good and bad times. Like a core sample taken from a tree, it presents lean years alongside abundance, delineating them in architecture rather than growth rings.
Beginning at Cornwall Park in the north, the avenue winds past well-kept family homes until it meets the grid of downtown. Then it shoots straight as a surveyor’s line due south, passing banks and 1950s-era glass storefronts before curving southwest to accommodate the town’s skewed orientation to Bellingham Bay.
Once it crosses Chestnut Street, a maze of warehouses and storage tanks springs up. Only a few scrawny trees give any hint of organic life. Concrete, asphalt and gravel smother the ground. And lying at the end of the road is the Cornwall Avenue landfill.
The old dump could be more accurately described as a “seafill” since the city hauled its garbage there from 1953 to 1965 and bulldozed it directly into the bay. The accumulation of Bellingham’s waste during those dozen years added a 10-acre area of household trash and pulp mill waste onto an existing shelf of sawmill refuse that had accumulated over the preceding half century.
“There was no environmental consciousness in those days,” Tom Glenn, a retired Port of Bellingham manager said. “Nobody thought much about it. The general mindset was ‘it’s waste land — dump it there.’”
Glenn, like his father and grandfather before him, worked on Bellingham’s industrial waterfront. Following his father, he worked for the Port as an engineer, then manager from 1958 to 1982. His grandfather was a dock superintendent for the now-defunct Bloedel-Donovan sawmill.
“There was a lot of environmental degradation committed — innocently — in past years by people,” Glenn said. “Today, with all the new environmental sensitivity and regulations, the city, the Port and the state are facing millions of dollars of construction work to clean up the past.”
Department of Natural Resources closed the dump in 1965, when it realized the Port was allowing the city of Bellingham to dump garbage at the site. The dumping was in violation of the lease agreement the port had with DNR, which controls state owned tidelands, said Lucy McInerney at the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Several feet of rock and soil were laid over the top of the dump, and large chunks of concrete and rock riprap were placed on its south and west sides to keep the garbage in place.
Garbage from the dump reappeared in 1992. Storms and tides had eroded the seawall, chewing away at the landfill and scattering its contents over the shallow tidelands.
In the spring of that year, a beachcomber found several plastic syringes and vials of human blood lying amongst the cobbles and broken glass of the garbage-strewn beach.
The Whatcom County Department of Health reacted by immediately closing the beach, according to newspaper articles from the time.
Although the county determined the waste contained no active pathogens and presented no immediate danger to humans, officials decided to take a closer look at the dump.
Ecology did a Site Hazard Assessment to determine the scope of the problem and ranked the site based on the potential hazards it posed to humans. Cornwall scored a two on a scale of one to five, with one being the worst. Criteria for the rating were the lack of a liner, no runoff collection and control, the toxicity of the materials, quantity of waste and its proximity to people.
Initial studies found elevated levels of copper, lead, zinc, cyanide and fecal coliform in samples of liquid seeping out of the landfill’s exposed face during low tide. They also found amounts of copper, lead, silver, bis(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate, a chemical used to soften plastic, and PCBs in the soil that exceeded state toxics standards. The various pollutants could cause a variety health effects including organ damage, illness and cancer, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
State toxics laws required cleanup of the contaminated area. Ecology named DNR, the city and the Port as potentially liable parties.
“This sort of dumping was a common practice for coastal communities of the time,” said Robyn du Pré, environmental advocate and former BayKeeper.
The reasoning behind the city’s decision to pile waste along the shoreline served two purposes, du Pré said. One was getting rid of garbage and the other was providing fill to build waterfront access for the city’s busy timber and fishing industries.
That reasoning created environmental problems for Bellingham residents.
Chip Hilarides, senior environmental engineer for Georgia-Pacific West, the site’s current lessee, toured the landfill recently and pointed out the problem areas. Bumping along the access road in his SUV, Hilarides explained the dump’s conception.
“Back then, there was no RCRA,” he said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the agency’s main tool in keeping tabs on hazardous wastes. “There were no laws about waste types, so anything a city generated went in there.”
Closer inspection of the gravel among the rocks on the eroded beach reveals a trove of oddities: soles of shoes, bicycle tires partly encrusted with barnacles, a cheap ballpoint pen, complete with cap, and everywhere, shards of glass, pottery and plastic.
The Bellingham Bay Pilot Project, a consortium of local, state and federal agencies is looking at potential solutions to the problems at the landfill.
“The ultimate plan,” Hilarides said, “is to cap the solid waste, armor this beach a little better — just try to keep the marine environment separate from the landfill.”
The Cornwall Avenue landfill is a monument to the inefficiency of a quick fix. Like the growth rings of a tree, the outcome of the clean up will be recorded as benefit or blight along the cross section of Cornwall Avenue.
