BUSINESS | Fair Isle Animal Clinic changes hands. [4] COMMUNITY | Chamber preps for Strawberry Festival. [5] ARTS | Lelavision shows off its favorite contraptions . [10]
CREW SEASON BEGINS A race on Quartermaster marks the start. Page 14
STRUTTING THEIR STUFF Reviewer says VHS musical is a must-see. Page 10
BEACHCOMBER VASHON-MAURY ISLAND
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2013
Vol. 58, No. 11
www.vashonbeachcomber.com
75¢
Oil globs from Tacoma spill wash ashore on Maury Impact from
arsenic-laced plume not as extensive, state says
State agency responds quickly, sending crews to clean up the mess By NATALIE JOHNSON Staff Writer
Some called them orange globs. Others called them grease balls. At first no one knew exactly what they were. But almost as soon as the sticky, orange balls that washed up on the southeastern shore of Maury Island were reported to the state, officials were on the ferry to investigate. And within two days, the grease balls — which were eventually linked to a lubricant spill in Tacoma — were cleaned off the popular stretch of beach between Point Robinson and the Maury Island Marine Park. “It was a really phenomenal effort that they got it cleaned up so quickly,” said Amy Carey, a local environmentalist and director of Preserve Our Islands who first reported the incident to the state. The globs, which ranged from an inch across to the size of a Nerf football, were spotted last week by an islander walking on the beach on Maury. The man posted an inquiry on the Facebook
By LESLIE BROWN Staff Writer
Natalie Johnson/Staff Photo
Crews patrol the beach on Friday, removing the last of the orange globs that washed ashore. page for Orca Network, a regional whale advocacy group, and Orca Network contacted Carey, who then reported the globs to the state Department of Ecology (DOE) on Wednesday. “I would bet they were on the
island within two hours of me calling them,” Carey said. DOE not only sent a crew to investigate the report but also set up a website advising people not to touch the orange balls and to contact the state if they discov-
ered balls along other stretches of shoreline. “It’s not a material we’ve had a tremendous amount of experience with,” said Larry Altose, a SEE CLEANUP, 11
Vashon nursery loses trees, shrubs in a huge heist By LESLIE BROWN Staff Writer
Leslie Brown/Staff Photo
Kathy Wheaton stands at the end of a row of maples. Until she was burglarized last week, the row was full of trees.
A customer last Friday afternoon told Kathy Wheaton, owner of Kathy’s Corner, that he was interested in one of several Japanese maples she had for sale. When he came back Saturday morning and found that the one he’d had his eye on was gone, he asked her why she had sold it. “I didn’t,” she answered, puzzled. That’s when she discovered that once again — the sixth time in eight months, in fact — her small nursery on the southern edge of town had been burglarized. The Japanese maple wasn’t the only item snatched, however. Also taken were several other Japanese maples, three magnolias, three dogwoods, several birches, dozens of pots of hydrangeas, pots of japonicas and more — all told, an estimated $10,000 worth of inventory. SEE NURSERY, 19
Far fewer homes on Vashon and Maury island will be eligible for a publicly funded yard cleanup program after a new state analysis indicated arsenic contamination in the region is not nearly as extensive as officials originally believed. The state Department of Ecology announced in 2011 that it would undertake a neighborhoodby-neighborhood sampling effort to find and remove arsenic-laced soil from those areas most contaminated by Asarco’s industrial plume, which cast a shadow over the region for decades. The first iteration of the state’s map included approximately 2,400 residences on the island — all of Maury and the southern half of Vashon as far north as S.W. 204th Street — as well as another 15,000 properties in other parts of the region. But over the last several months, state officials have worked to create a new version of the map, based on far more data and selected soil samples throughout the region. As a result, only about 720 parcels on Vashon and Maury are now included in the state’s yard program service area — the southern third of Maury Island (a swath that extends as far north as S.W. 260th Street) and the southern tip of Vashon. Throughout the region, the service area now takes in around 7,000 parcels, down from an initial estimate of 17,000, according to Hannah Aoyagi, an outreach and education specialist in the Ecology Department’s Toxics Cleanup Program. The first map, she said, “was a pretty rough estimate.” The state’s SEE PLUME, 12