Kaiser Shipyard debris to remain buried

An underground stash of World War II Kaiser shipyard debris has been discovered near the Marine Park boat landing, and after a bit of study, city of Vancouver officials and the state Department of Ecology have decided the best thing to do is to just leave it there.

The debris — made up of old timbers, buckets and steel — includes materials that are contaminated at levels that are required to be cleaned up under the state Model Toxics Control Act, investigation by city staff and an environmental geochemist consultant found.

But the trash has spent the past 60 years without contaminating the groundwater. So the city and the Department of Ecology decided that it could remain, and groundwater would be monitored.

“Sometimes you can potentially do more environmental damage to the site by taking it out than leaving it in place,” Vancouver General Services Manager Tim Haldeman said Friday. “We’ll monitor wells around the property, and if for some reason it does decide to move (into the groundwater,) we’ll know that.”

The city council on Monday will vote on whether to accept a restrictive covenant on the property, meaning that the area will not be disturbed in the future.

The site near the boat landing was paved in the 1980s, and at the time, it wasn’t known the trash was down there, Haldeman said. But the lot has the unintentional consequence of providing an impermeable cap to the soil below.

“Whenever they put that parking lot in 20 years ago, it actually was the right thing to do, without knowing it,” he said. “As long as there’s a cap on it, we don’t take the cap off.”

Groundwater monitoring wells have been placed all around the site, which includes the city-owned property at the boat landing, and some privately owned land to the north, Haldeman said.

The debris was first discovered in June 2008. Just how much is down there isn’t known, Haldeman said, because all the city has to go on are sketchy aerial photos from the 1940s of the original trash pits.

In the 1940s, the site was a busy shipyard, where thousands of Kaiser workers toiled around the clock building warships, freighters and tankers for the war effort.

Leaving potentially toxic materials in the ground, rather than requiring an expensive cleanup, is not a new tactic: state environmental regulators in October proposed allowing Alcoa to monitor pollution leaching from an old landfill on the site of its former Vancouver aluminum smelter.

The Vancouver Downtown Redevelopment Authority has a similar restrictive covenant with the Department of Ecology for WWII shipyard debris that’s underneath the Hilton Vancouver Washington.

Andrea Damewood: 360-735-4542 or andrea.damewood@columbian.com.