Annie Marie Musselman
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Welcome to Lower Queen Anne, another toxic Seattle neighborhood. Don't expect belching smokestacks, mounds of junkyard scrap, or dilapidated factories. This isn't the Duwamish. The hazardous-waste site here is the local mini-mart, Manhattan Express, a boxy one-story building at the foot of Queen Anne Hill. It's a variation on the old roadside eatery that beckoned, "Eat Here and Get Gas"—except filling up wasn't necessary. Locals could get gas merely by being in the vicinity of the store's leaking underground gasoline tanks, their fumes drifting into nearby businesses and apartments and up the noses of passersby. The eye-watering emissions that date to the 1970s were sometimes so strong they drove people from their offices and rooms, while legal disputes over who did what to whom prevented a quick resolution.
The store is one of 850 places on the Washington State Department of Ecology's Hazardous Site List, an official compilation of sites that pose health threats to humans and the environment. About 160 are in King County, almost 80 in Seattle.
Fellow polluters on the list include such giants of industry as Boeing, Shell Oil, PACCAR, and ARCO. But as the mini-mart case shows, toxic sites are not limited to the usual suspects in major industrial zones. They're down the street, around the corner, part of the neighborhood—mom-and-pop businesses, the local cleaners, that old auto shop turned into a secondhand store.
An examination of stacks of public records at the DOE's regional office in Bellevue made clear that in-city toxic pollution sites lie beyond the better-known contaminated neighborhoods, such as Georgetown or South Park, where battles over toxic spills and emissions have become part of daily life.
About four dozen Seattle neighborhood business properties are on the state's Hazardous Site List. The roster of polluters includes apartment houses and private residences. One may be your next-door neighbor's home, or your own. And once a property gets on the list, getting it off can be a time-consuming, difficult, and expensive process.
William F. Arnold, Manhattan Express' elderly owner, died only a few months ago, and his wife Erma died in 1996. They, like others in similar situations, felt caught in a dispute over responsibility for cleaning up the spill as demanded by the state.
"Their family members sure believe that stress in dealing with this problem shortened their mother's life," says family attorney Mark Myers of Seattle, "and caused a great deal of problems for their father."
Even with the Arnolds gone, their toxic battle lives on. To protect taxpayer interest and recover cleanup costs, the state Department of Ecology has filed a claim on the couple's estate and has liens on the mini-mart property.
The ultimate price tag will be in the hundreds of thousands.
In a similar situation in Montlake, cleaning-business operator Jin Chong faces paying some of a $1 million state-ordered cleanup of a gas spill left by the previous land owner. "It's just very unfair," says Chong.
The Arnolds' site, three decades after complaints were first made, is still being cleansed of chemicals that saturated the soils and drainage system below. Though the gas tanks and much of the contaminated soil were removed, a vapor and petroleum recovery system is still needed to scrub fumes.
Then there's the case of Seberina Heraldo and her husband Rudy. The hazardous-waste site in their White Center neighborhood was their rental property.
"It drives me crazy to think of it," says Seberina. In 1997, she and Rudy leased their second house, a home on 16th Avenue Southwest, to a man who used the backyard to recycle heating oil tanks and auto engines. In a short time, he contaminated the yard with lead and chromium. One neighbor reported that "oil and whatever is running all over the place."
The Heraldos evicted the renter, who left owing them $9,000 in rent and other costs, says Seberina. A state ecology inspector, alerted by neighbors, found oil leaching through the garden rockery. He quickly declared the home an official state hazardous-waste site, subject to expensive, lengthy cleanup measures.
"It cost $6,000 to take away the dirt and clean up," Seberina says. "Oh, it give me headaches. We sold the house; we quit the rental business."
Told the home, nonetheless, remains on the state's toxic site list (mainly so inspectors can continue their oversight), Seberina says, "Oh, maybe my headache is coming back!"
This problem is widespread. Above the Interbay valley, between Magnolia and Queen Anne Hill, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail yard and the Port of Seattle's Terminal 91 tank farm got the worst ranking. This indicates the most serious kind of environmental threat to their surroundings and neighbors due to years of chemical spills, which are migrating through the ecosystem.
Obviously, these are industrial polluters—the usual suspects of most of America's historic toxic waste. But they are neighborhood polluters too. The sites are encircled by commercial, residential, and recreational areas, from Fisherman's Terminal to the Elliott Bay Marina at Smith Cove.
Their groundwater chemical spills, some carcinogenic, seem to be migrating toward both the bay and the Lake Washington Ship Canal. (The state's list includes at least four major polluters around the Salmon Bay/Ballard Locks area of the canal.)
