Gregoire orders faster cleanup at Vancouver site
Thursday, November 08, 2007
By ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian Staff WriterGov. Chris Gregoire will push for a faster cleanup of a highly polluted stretch of Columbia River shoreline, a decade after carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls were first discovered.
The state Department of Ecology has been aware of the pollution since 1997, but has spent a decade wrangling with the polluter over the appropriate cleanup standard. The delay was publicized in recent Columbian stories and editorials.
Gregoire announced Thursday that she has asked Ecology Director Jay Manning to immediately develop and implement a strategy for accelerating cleanup of the shoreline near the old Alcoa aluminum smelter.
"The work in the river must take place as soon as it is legally possible," Gregoire said in a prepared statement. "I have asked Ecology to develop immediately a schedule for significant cleanup milestones that can be published and which can track progress."
The matter came to light this year, when researchers released test results of clams collected from a 110-mile stretch of the Columbia and the lower Willamette River. Researchers with the Army Corps of Engineers found PCBs in the tissue of a common Asian bivalve at a level of 3,500 parts per billion in the shoreline near Alcoa — greater than clams collected in Portland's notoriously polluted lower Willamette River.
Previous tests of sediment in the shoreline revealed PCBs at a level as high as 28,000 parts per billion.
The upland area of the Alcoa site was put on the federal Superfund list in 1988, placing it among the nation's worst environmental messes. The agency deleted the site from the list in 1996 after deciding the company had adequately removed or contained industrial pollution at the 1940s-era smelter.
Then, in 1997, Clark Public Utilities discovered PCBs in the Columbia's shoreline while preparing to lay a discharge pipe from its new natural gas-fired River Road Generating Plant. | 
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