Published May 2001

Superfund cleanup done; site development on hold

By John Wolcott
Herald Business Journal Editor

Finding new waste sites was a tough challenge in 1964, particularly for the more hazardous industrial wastes. So finding a giant site south of Marysville on the Tulalip Reservation seemed to be a convenient opportunity. That year, the Tulalip Tribes leased 147 acres to the Seattle Disposal Co. for a commercial dump site.

But what seemed to be a good solution to a growing waste problem then eventually became a flawed tale of toxic wastes, lawsuits and expensive remedies.

Last October, nearly four decades later, the badly contaminated Superfund site was finally capped with enough soil to protect the people and environment around it. But the $34 million cleanup project also may have capped the site's future potential. It may be destined to exist only as a costly reminder of how good intentions can go bad.

If all goes well, however, the site may some day become a gigantic outdoor recreation facility, a sports complex of ball fields and bleachers.

The story of the super landfill site that became a Superfund site began in the mid-1960s when the Seattle Disposal Co. began burying commercial and industrial wastes on the Ebey Island site leased from the Tulalip Tribes. By 1979, thousands of truckloads of commercial, industrial and hospital wastes had deposited an estimated 4 million tons of contaminated material that included such powerful toxins as aluminum, arsenic, cadmium and manganese.

Fifteen years after the landfill opened, Environmental Protection Agency inspections found so many contaminants that the agency ordered the site to be shut down and capped. But several years after the soil cap was installed, testing revealed that heavy metals and other contaminants, including ink from Seattle newspaper printing operations, were seeping into surrounding sloughs and marshes that were part of the Snohomish River wetlands.

An examination of the site found that the grading work prior to covering the area had been insufficient, allowing rainwater to collect and penetrate the landfill. The accumulation of more and more rainwater formed a pool of contaminated groundwater within the landfill, forcing the toxic leachate to seep into the wetlands surrounding Ebey Island and the sloughs leading to the Snohomish River. At that time, in the mid-1990s, nearly 8,000 people received their drinking water from private and municipal wells that were within 4 miles of the site, with the nearest drinking water source being within a mile of the site.

Potential threats to human health and the environment soon landed the Tulalip site a prominent place on the U.S. Environment Protection Agency's National Priorities (Superfund) List in 1995.

"There were health concerns raised with this," said Loren McPhillips, Manager of the Tulalip project for the EPA, but the effects of the seeping metals on marine life and ecology were the biggest concern.

It was Waste Management Inc. (WMI), one of the responsible parties, that surfaced during settlement negotiations with the EPA as the company to handle the cleanup of the site, a plan that included trucking in more than 830,000 cubic yards of soil, sand and topsoil and installing more than 21 million square feet of liners and capping materials, a project originally estimated at $20 million.

Project costs escalated to $34 million, WMI officials said, because the amount of fill dirt, sand and topsoil needed was significantly greater than originally estimated. Also, the market price for all of those materials increased sharply.

"We are pleased that the cleanup of this old site is finally done," Jerry Hardebeck, Director of Municipal Relations for Waste Management of Washington, said last fall. "Although the project ended up costing twice the original projection, the company has honored its commitment to pay its share … like our commitment to managing state-of-the-art facilities today, undertaking the remediation of the old sites like the Tulalip landfill is consistent with our commitment to the community and environment."

John McCoy, Director of Governmental Affairs for the Tulalip Tribes, said, "Members of the tribe are very pleased that the old landfill site has been capped and the contaminants have ceased leaking into Puget Sound."

The new landfill cover will be inspected and maintained for a minimum of 30 years, according to the EPA, with WMI handling the first four years of maintenance and the Tulalip Tribes managing it for the next 26 years. Although the Tulalip Tribes have no plans for the future use of the landfill site, any uses will be dependent on the long-range condition of the site and the success of the new soil cap.

EPA Regional Administrator Chuck Findley said last October, "If the saying 'All's well that ends well' has ever been appropriate for a Superfund cleanup, this is the one. The legal wrangling is over, and the environment is cleaned and protected."

However, between the years when hundreds of truckloads of wastes were dumped at the Tulalip site each month and the later years when hundreds of truckloads of capping materials were imported monthly, there were challenging times.

The contaminated water leaving the site was found to have excessive levels of arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, zinc, ammonia, heptachlor, aldrin and DDT, according to the EPA, as well as evidence of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). To find the funding for recapping the landfill, the EPA explored historical records to identify the companies that had contributed to the contaminated landfill, including the owners (the Tulalip Tribes), the operators (Seattle Disposal Co.), several waste-hauling companies and their customers who disposed of wastes at the landfill. Each group was asked to contribute proportionately for their share of the landfill use.

Establishing that funding process turned the Marysville landfill into one of the EPA's most contentious and litigious cleanup projects, McPhillips said.

Parties involved with the landfill filed five lawsuits against the EPA in an effort to avoid involvement. But by 1996, about 200 of the smaller parties had settled on their contributions to the cleanup, and by 1997, about 20 of the larger responsible parties signed their own settlements. In all, about $20 million was collected from those settlements.

Waste Management Inc. pledged another $2 million to design, oversee and construct the remedial efforts to solve the site's toxic contamination issues. Also, the Tulalip Tribes helped manage the project cleanup, even finding a bright spot in the whole situation when they were able to use much of their huge pile of excess dirt from the land-clearing for their Quil Ceda Village business park as some of the final fill for the Superfund site.

Someday, the site may be developable. Snohomish County and the cities of Everett and Marysville already have suggested building athletic fields on top of the old landfill site, a reminder that McCallum Park in south Everett has sports facilities built over an old landfill site.

But any decision on any development will need to wait until at least 2005, the five-year mark from the completion of the capping project, when the EPA is due to make a new assessment of the success of the $34 million solution to one of the Northwest's most contaminated Superfund sites.

More information about the Tulalip project is available at the EPA's Web site, www.epa.gov/r10earth/, via the site's Superfund icon and then the listing for the Tulalip project.

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