The Waterfront District How the City of Bellingham Reclaimed its Contaminated Waterfront
By Frederica Kolwey and Christopher Johnson
Written and designed by Christopher Johnson and Frederica Kolwey June 2017 The content showcased in this book is the product of independent student work in Western Washington University’s SMOCS class. The student work was guided by Drs. Rebekah Paci-Green and Ruth Sofield and the course was funded through a Interagency Agreement between the Department of Ecology and Huxley College of the Environment. Every effort has been made to provide accurate, engaging information about contaminated site cleanup; this content alone should not be used for legal and health decisions. The Department of Ecology is not responsible for the content of this book.
Table of Contents
1
A Brief History of the Site
2
Map of the Waterfront
3
Patience is a Virtue, or Something
4
So What’s the Problem?
5
The Best is Yet to Come
6
GP West: Legacy of the Chlor-Alkali Plant
7
Whatcom Waterway Cleanup
9
Building in Earthquake Country: Acknowledging the Risk at the Waterfront
11
Affordable Housing at the Waterfront
Change at the waterfront and how the port environmental programs manager grapples with the change and public perception.
Mercury Contamination Explained
A look at the emerging features of the downtown waterfront.
Mercury contamination on the southern half of the old mill site is proving more difficult and costly to address than people thought.
The cleanup of mercury contamination in the sediment in Bellingham Bay.
How the city and local organizations are hoping to capitalize on the waterfront district to provide new affordable housing units for Bellinham residents.
1 Despite the fact that the mill was a huge economic driver in Bellingham, it was during this decline that the idea of such heavy industrial uses blocking the city from the bay began to fall out of favor with the residents, including employees of the mill. Operations at the mill began to slow and systematically close up in the early 2000s, leaving behind a heavily polluted industrial site, many of the buildings of the former mill, and a lot of citizens and agencies worried about what would become of the site.
A Brief History of the Site The city of Bellingham sits in a region of undeniable beauty and abundant natural resources. Situated just north of the Chuckanut Mountains, the only place where the Cascade Mountains reach the ocean, and amongst rivers, streams, dense forests, and a temperate climatic zone, some of the first people to call this place home were the Lummi, Nooksack, Samish, and Semiahmoo tribes of the Coast Salish. The same natural resources that attracted the region’s indigenous inhabitants also attracted European exploration and settlement in the mid-1800s. After European settlement first began, the economy of what would soon become Whatcom County and Bellingham was fueled by extraction of these resources. For more than a century, the economy was focused on first coal mining and timber harvesting, followed by gold prospecting, fishing and canning, and farming, along with the exportation of these goods. The massive stands of Douglas fir around Bellingham Bay, which were vital in the rebuilding of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake, and the location of Whatcom Creek made this area the perfect location for a lumber mill. The first facilities for a modern pulp mill were built on Bellingham’s waterfront in 1938 by the Puget Sound Pulp & Timber Company, which was later bought by Georgia Pacific. This site grew into a 137acre industrial site between the city’s downtown and the bay. The plant was a major driver in the regional economy for the better part of a century and the city’s largest employer, once employing over 1,200 people with family wage jobs. Beginning in the year 2000, economic conditions set the mill facilities on a decline, and portions of the mill began shutting down.
The Georgia-Pacific Mill led to heavy pollution of the property, and 200 acres of the nearby Bellingham Bay and Whatcom Waterway. Industrial activities and small leaks and spills led to petroleum contamination of the soil, and acid used in the processing of pulp led to an imbalanced pH of the soils. Additionally, the most serious pollution originated from elemental mercury. Used in the production of Chlorine gas at the Chlor-Alkali plant for bleaching paper, large amounts of mercury were released contaminating soils in the southern portion of the site. This presented a real challenge because of the technical difficulty and high cost associated with mercury cleanup, compounded by the fact that the contamination was not fully discovered until the facility had shut down operations. These contaminants posed serious threats to the health of humans and animals, and had to be fully addressed before redevelopment activities could begin. In 2005, the Port of Bellingham purchased the 137 acre Georgia Pacific site for $10, with the condition that the port assume responsibility for the cleanup, along with other waterfront properties creating a total of 237 acres. This new property, referred to as the “Waterfront District”, has now been the site of intensive environmental assessments, interim action plans, thorough cleanup of the contaminated site, and planning and visioning to set the stage for a massive new mixed use neighborhood that will connect the city of Bellingham to its waterfront for the first time in almost 90 years.
2
Map of the Waterfront Site
Aerated Stabalization Basin (ASB Lagoon)
ay
m tco a h W
rw ate W
G P
Bellingham Shipping Terminal
Granary Building
Chlor-Alkali Area
We s t
3
Patience is a Virtue, or Something In a conference room on the second floor of the Port of Bellingham offices, binders of documents sit on the wood table and old maps and graphics are displayed on easels. The documents trace the history of the closure of the Georgia Pacific Paper Mill that ran on the waterfront of Bellingham, Washington for over forty years and the redevelopment plans that have slowly taken shape since the mill’s closure a decade ago.
The cleanup of the mill is carrying Bellingham into a new phase. Once largely an industrial town, the redevelopment of the waterfront includes new natural habitat along the shore and almost doubles the size of the downtown business core.
The binder containing the sale and purchase agreement for the paper mill from 2005 is about 15 centimeters thick.
Gouran still isn’t in any hurry though. The relatively slow pace of development could guard against the kind of boom in population and price places like Seattle are experiencing, and could prevent bad decisions that can occur when development needs to happen really quickly, he said.
One of the graphics shows about 30 gear-shaped icons filled with the names of different agencies and groups who have a role in the cleanup and redevelopment of the site. The message of the graphic is clear: it has taken over a decade to implement cleanup and redevelopment plans because getting all these gears to move together doesn’t happen overnight. By the spring of 2017, a number of cleanup projects have been completed or are underway, and tangible redevelopment plans are taking hold. Even so, the feeling seems to have emerged in Bellingham that nothing is actually happening along the waterfront. “Ugh I know, but there’s so much happening,” said Brian Gouran, the Environmental Site Project Manager for the Port of Bellingham. “The next year is going to be exciting.” As of the spring of 2017, the cleanup of the northern section of the old mill site is complete, and the city and Dublin-based developer Harcourt are in the first phases of redeveloping the area. Cleanup is also finished in the narrow section of water between the mill site and the boat facilities to the west. By 2018, the first roads will be constructed and residents will have access to the first shoreline parks.
It has been almost 90 years since people in Bellingham had access to this section of the waterfront.
“I think it’s going to be more of an organic growth of the community as a whole,” Gouran said. When the port acquired the property they expected the site to be redeveloped in about 10 years, but then the economy tanked in 2008. “We were able to slow everything down, recalibrate and say ok let’s be more realistic about this,” Gouran said. “And now I think it’s going to be a much slower-paced kind of growth, which is probably better.” Along the shore signs of life are returning to the rocks. As part of the cleanup, Washington State Department of Ecology and the port changed the vertical bulkhead on the shore to a softer grade of rocks and pebbles, better for fish habitat. Today they’re covered in moss; goslings roam freely elsewhere on the site. “It actually has been kind of an interesting process to see it get taken over by nature again,” Gouran said. It may seem like things are moving slowly, but life is returning and reclaiming this site once again.
4
So What’s The Problem?
RIGHT Bags of mercury from the Chlor-Alkali site await transport to the hazardous waste landfill in Arlington, Oregon. The mercury was stabilized with sulfur-dioxide and locked together with cement, then vacuumed out of the ground. These bags were transported to Oregon in 2013.
5
The Best is Yet to Come
The shoreline park will only be accessible on foot. It’s possible food trucks will be able to park along the pedestrian-access entrance.
At the shoreline, pedestrians and kayakers will have direct access to the water.
Along the new roads, the city will build Bellingham’s first separated bike lane.
The contamination in this half of the site was mostly petroleum and acidic soil from the acid ball. The risk to humans and animals from these chemicals comes from directly ingesting the soil, so capping the area with gravel qualified as a sufficient cleanup method.
Inside the old Granary Building, local businesses will be setting up shop. Brian Gouran, the Environmental Site Project Manager for the Port of Bellingham, envisions patio seating at restuarants that overlook the waterfront.
The City of Bellingham is builidng two main roads in this area of the waterfront. The roads will provide the first means of connectivity on the site, and then future developers will be responsible for building smaller roads as the rest of the site is developed.
LEFT An expansive, two foot deep environmental cap covers the majority of the northern portion of the site. Underneath the cap, a bright orange layer of fabric indicates where the cap ends and the original site begins. The contamination left over in this portion of the site is less concentrated and harmful than the southern portion, but the cap is there to prevent humans and animals from ingesting soil. The cap will exist in perpetuity on the site. Future buildings, roads and landscaping will provide an additional layer between the surface and the contamination.
6
GP West: Legacy of the Chlor-Alkali Plant Unlike the northern area of the old mill site, the southern half still has a long way to go. The southern part of the site is where the Chlor-Alkali Plant once stood, a chemical plant built in the 1960s that used liquid elemental mercury to power two large batteries, the electricity from which was used to make chlorine gas and caustic soda. The plant had two long troughs set at an angle, the mercury ran along the bottom and salt water sat on top. Anodes went into the mercury to create the charge that separated the chlorine from the salt and made the gas. The chlorine gas was then used to bleach the paper white, and the caustic soda created as a byproduct of the same process was used to dissolve some of the paper pulp. The mercury was pumped through the troughs with the idea that none of it would ever spill, Gouran said. “Obviously that’s not what happened,” Gouran said. Liquid elemental mercury from the Chlor-Alkali Plant ended up dripping into the soil in the southern half of the mill site. The port and Ecology collected over 1,000
samples from the site and found beads of mercury in much of the soil. Wastewater from the Chlor-Alkali Plant was discharged directly into the bay before a wastewater treatment facility was built on the site, leading to much of the mercury contamination in the bay today. The thing is, the liquid mercury that got into the soil is heavier than the surrounding rocks, so when the port started trying to dig it up, it just sank lower, Gouran said. They ended up using a huge vacuum to suck a lot of the mercury out from the soil next to the plant site where the samples showed much of the elemental mercury was. Then, they mixed the mercury-contaminated soil with sulfur to bind it together and then cement, to lock it up, Gouran said. The vacuum hole was supposed to be about the size of Gouran’s office, he said. But the contamination was more widespread than they expected. The port and Ecology have had to go back to the drawing board to determine the best way to remove the rest of the contaminated soils. Today, the former plant site is covered by a white plastic tarp. “We call it the burrito bag,” Gouran said. The burrito bag sits on top of where the old Chlor-Alkali Plant was. Despite the financial cost and the fact there is still probably more mercury outside of where the burrito bag is and the previous vacuum hole, the port will be going through the same process of vacuuming up the elemental mercury, binding it with sulfur and locking it together with cement that they did before. The treated soil will then be sent to a hazardous waste landfill. The port plans to address the contaminated soils in the burrito bag over the summer of 2017. No one wants to let it keep sitting there, Gouran said. LEFT Plastic tarping covers the site of the former Chlor-Alkali Plant. Known as the burrito bag, the mercury contamination under the ground here is scheduled to be contained and removed during the summer of 2017. The port estimates cleaning up the area under the site will cost somewere between $500,000 and $1 million.
7
Whatcom Waterway Cleanup LEFT The new stretch of shoreline is the most visible result of a $35 million cleanup of the Whatcom Waterway that restored sensitive habitat to support native species.
In the spring of 2017, Phase I of the cleanup of the Whatcom Waterway was completed. This portion of the cleanup cost $35 million and involved dredging contaminated sediments and then capping the sediment in the northern area of the waterway between the granary building and the boat yards. Prior to the construction of a wastewater treatment facility on the site in 1979, the Georgia Pacific Paper Mill discharged mercury-contaminated water directly into Bellingham Bay. The mercury then settled into the sediment, leaving behind a toxic legacy that remains today.
2008
Before the cleanup project, sediment in the bay was contaminated with mercury from the paper mill that was discharged into the bay before the wastewater treatment facility was built on the site in 1979. The now-clean inner waterway will continue to be monitored by Ecology to make sure the cleanup was effective and remains effective into the foreseable future. From the shoreline, it’s hard to tell anything happened. “We do get some heat you know about oh you’re just capping and containing stuff. All you care about is redevelopment, and it’s like this was a $35 million
2010
8 cleanup that nobody but the fish and the seals and the critters are going to ever see,� said Brian Gouran, the Environmental Site Project Manager for the Port of Bellingham. Phase I dredged and removed 10,000 dump trucks worth of contaminated sediment, Gouran said. The sediment was drained of its water in Bellingham and then taken by train to a hazardous waste landfill in Oregon. Phase II of the Whatcom Waterway cleanup will address the sediment contamination in the rest of the approximately 200-acre area of Bellingham Bay where mercury contamination has been measured. The cleanup will involve additional dredging in the area west of the shipping terminal and the removal of contaminated sludges from the aerated stabilization basin, where the wastewater treatment process was located at the mill, said Lucy McInerney, the Department of Ecology project manager for the Whatcom Waterway cleanup.
can still stir up the sediments and release mercury from the contaminated layers. Organisms living on the floor of the bay are affected by contaminated sediments up to 12 centimeters below the surface of the sediment, McInerney said. Phytoplankton ingest the contamination, which then bioaccumulates up the food chain, making the toxicity to a sea mammal higher up the food chain greater than what the phytoplankton initally consumed. As of April 2017, Ecology is still in the process of finalizing the cleanup plan for Phase II. Those plans are partly dependent on how successful Phase I ends up being, McInerney said. The plan design probably won’t be done for at least another year, she said. Phase II is estimated to cost $90 million.
Until Phase II begins, contaminated material in the aerated stabilization basin is contained in the now-decomissioned frame of the old treatmet facility, posing no new threat to the bay around it, Gouran said. In the almost 200-acre area of the bay where mercury contamination was measured, clean sediment flowing into the bay from the Nooksack River has covered up much of the contaminated sediments, but ship traffic
2013
ABOVE A newly restored shoreline stretches in front of the Granary Building and will accompany a new waterfront park, providing some of the first public uses at the new waterfront.
2016
9
Building in Earthquake Country: Acknowledging the Risk at the Waterfront As the city and port move forward with their redevelopment plans, a murmur of hesitation remains in the background. The murmur is the low rumble of an earthquake, the after-effects of which could plunge much of the waterfront area into the bay. “I wouldn’t put my office there,” said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, geology professor at Western Washington University. The concern for the waterfront is due to a process called liquefaction, which can occur in the event of an earthquake. Liquefaction describes the process of sediment or saturated sand and gravel essentially turning to liquid under the shaking that occurs in an earthquake. On a normal day, someone standing on the beach with her feet in the sand would feel as though she was standing on solid ground, Caplan-Auerbach said. But if that person were to start wiggling her toes into the sand, suddenly water rushes in to fill all the empty
spaces, and the once-stable ground turns to unsupportive liquid. That’s similar to what happens in the case of an earthquake, Caplan-Auerbach said. The shaking from the shock waves causes water to fill in all the spaces between the sand and gravel, and suddenly there is no solid ground of which to speak. “It is risky but people around here are aware,” said Brian Gouran, the Environmental Site Project Manager for the Port of Bellingham. “I mean the engineers and the city planners and the geotechnical folks. You know, you can never prepare for everything, but it’s definitely not being ignored.” Some things can be done to limit the risk at the waterfront. For one thing, if there aren’t any buildings right on the shore, there won’t be any buildings to sink into the water in the case of a large quake causing liquefaction on the site. “The entire shoreline has been reserved for open space
LEFT The massive digester tanks and acid ball from the Georgia Pacific Mill operation have been saved from demolition. These structures will be integrated into the new waterfront district, adding a unique charactertotheneighborhood. Artists submitted proposals to repurpose the acid ball. It will be painted with a reflective paint and moved to the entrance of the shoreline park.
10 and parks,” Gouran said. “All the buildings will be built in a way that encourages mitigating the liquefaction through ground improvements, but the shoreline parks act as a bit of a buffer too, so that if there is an event that results in some lateral spreading, then it’s a public open space you can repair.” Reserving the shoreline for parks and public spaces was also to plan ahead for sea level rise, Gouran said. It is more feasible to adapt a park to changes in sea level over time, than a building. Depending on what the area will be used for, different building codes exist to address seismic risks. For residential buildings, where people may be inside at any time of day, the codes are higher, Caplan-Auerbach said. For commercial buildings where people will not be inside 24-hours a day, the codes are less strict, but the risk is also much lower. The biggest thing, according to Caplan-Auerbach, is to understand the potential hazards really well. “People who are considering building buildings there should know what it’s going to take to make it safe. Are we carefully monitoring what the hazards are?” Caplan-Auerbach said.
the sediment at the waterfront, they slow down and increase in amplitude, making the effect of the earthquake stronger. Caplan-Auerbach agrees there are ways to mitigate risk at the waterfront. Development at the waterfront that does not include residential buildings people would inhabit 24 hours a day would decrease the risk, she said. New architecture and engineering techniques to mitigate the effects of liquefaction on buildings are also always being developed, but it can be a slow process. “I always say that seismology and engineering advance one earthquake at a time,” Caplan-Auerbach said. Planning for earthquakes approaches a philosophical kind of conversation, Caplan-Auerbach said. No way exists to predict when an earthquake will occur, so the question becomes how paranoid a person should be, she said. “This kind of thing takes long-term planning,” Caplan-Auerbach said. “It becomes a question of how many resources to put toward something you’ll never see.”
The waterfront is susceptible to tsunamis as well as seismic wave amplification. As the seismic waves hit
ABOVE Old industrial relics have also been saved from demolition activities on the Georgia Pacific site. These relics will be integrated into the new waterfront district as art installations, preserving Bellingham’s history and harkening back to the industrial past that fueled the city’s beginnings.
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Affordable Housing at the Waterfront
In 2017, the Washington state Department of Ecology and Port of Bellingham finished cleaning up the the northern part of the old Georgia Pacific mill site. The area of the site doubles the current downtown core of Bellingham. In this area, the city and port have agreed to make 10 percent of the residential development affordable housing units, said Brien Thane, the director of asset development for the Bellingham Housing Authority. The units could either be for rent or for sale, he said. Bellingham Housing Authority, a local government entity kind of like the port or fire district, is one of the agencies that works on affordable housing projects in the city. The housing authority might end up being responsible for designing affordable housing units in the waterfront site. “The city said we just can’t miss out on this opportunity,” Thane said. In order for the new waterfront to be more easily accessible, the port has asked the city to build a bridge connecting Commercial Street to the waterfront. The city agreed, but on one condition: they will foot the bill for the bridge if the port’s redevelopment plans can comply with their 10-percent goal.
LEFT One of two main arterial roads planned by the city connecting the downtown waterfront to the rest of Bellingham will be Granary Avenue, running north to south towards the Granary Building in the background. It will contain on street parking, wide pedestrian friendly sidewalks, and the city’s first separated bike traffic lanes.
The Port of Bellingham asked the Bellingham Housing Authority to submit a proposal for the redevelopment. The expertise of the housing authority is not in largescale redevelopment projects like what will ocur at the waterfront, but the port wanted to see their perspective anyway, Thane said. “The port asked us to put in a proposal and we said we’re not a master developer and they said, we get it, that’s ok. Put in a proposal for what you would want your part of it to be. So we did,” Thane said. The plan the housing authority drew up proposed 50 units each of family and elderly affordable housing, similar to the units they built at Walton Place on the corner of North State and York streets in Bellingham. For every one square foot of affordable housing a developer commits to build, the City of Bellingham grants them four square feet of extra building area, according to Bellingham city code. Developers are not required to include affordable housing units, but they are incentivized to do so by the opporunity to build more units alltogether. Tara Sundeen, the Community and Economic Development Manager for the City of Bellingham, worked
12 with the Bellingham Housing Authority to come up with the 10 percent goal for the waterfront. “Tara has been with the city for quite a number of years now and she makes stuff happen,” Thane said. In the spring of 2017, redevelopment of the waterfront is still in the very early stages, but proposals for residential areas are underway. The Dublin-based development company, Harcourt, which won the bid to design the redevelopment of the GP West site, has proposed building three waterfront condominiums of three to four stories each. The buildings would be tiered so the shoreline isn’t blocked by a wall of housing. In Harcourt’s application to be develop the waterfront, they stated they would include affordable housing units in the condominiums to meet the city’s 10 percent goal. For now, Harcourt is the only developer that has signed a contract with the port to build on the site, but other developers, such as the housing authority, could be involved in building other residential units in the future. Even if that is not the case, the Bellingham Housing Authority is excited about the opportunity the waterfront site poses to the city.
ABOVE The tile tanks are another relic left over from the form Georgia Pacific mill. While they used to be used for storing liquid pulp, they will be repurposed in the new waterfront district. Nothing is set in stone, but using the tanks to store rainwater is one idea being thrown around. The Granary Building can be seen in the distance in the center of the frame background, which will be the first building in the redevelopment open to the public.
ABOVE Western Washington University sits high atop Sehome Hill with the Georgia Pacific site sprawling towards the bay at its base. Current plans include six acres of land in the new waterfront district to house institutional buildings for the University.
13
Written Sources Green, Sara Jean. (2007, December 21). Tissue Mill’s Closing Ends Era for Bellingham. The Seattle Times. http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/tissue-mills-closing-ends-era-for-bellingham/ http://www.portofbellingham.com/documentcenter/view/2606 https://www.cob.org/documents/planning/urban-villages/waterfront/waterfront-interlocal-agreement.pdf https://www.cob.org/documents/planning/urban-villages/waterfront/waterfront-develop-agree.pdf Lehman, Eben. (2012, June 7). On the Waterfront: Pulp Company Photos Document Bellingham’s Past. https://fhsarchives.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/bellingham-washington-waterfront-pulp-mill-historic-photos/ Port of Bellingham. 2013. The Waterfront District: Sub-Area Plan. http://www.portofbellingham.com/DocumentCenter/View/2796 Whatcom County Website. Local Information: History. http://www.whatcomcounty.us/1270/History
Human Sources Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, Geology Professor at Western Washington University Steve Germiat, Principal Hydrogeologist for Aspect Consulting Brian Gouran, Environmental Site Project Manager for the Port of Bellingham Lucy McInerney, Department of Ecology Tara Sundin, Community and Economic Development Manager Steve Sundin, Senior Planner for the City of Bellingham Brien Thane, Director of Asset Development for the Department of Ecology Matt Woltman, Engineer for Anchor QEA
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