- July 1, 1998
By Ryan Teague Beckwith - Daily World Writer, Aberdeen Daily World
JUNCTION CITY - Around the 214-acre site, 58 drums are filled with the remainders of a polluted past. Deep beneath the soil, eight 2,000-gallon tanks sit empty.
Scraps of wood and bark, cast aside years ago, slowly rot in mountains so large they could fill a football field nearly 100 feet deep.
But out of this jumble of waste and pollution, the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport hopes to spin gold.
Executive Director Les Bolton told the City Council last week that he hopes to make it the new home of the Seaport's education programs.
The dozens of kids who learn boat building - and, Bolton says, attention to detail and patience - have been thrust into limbo by a tourism and retail complex put together by the Port.
By mid-September, the Seaport has to be out of the 10,000-square-foot shipyard building that it currently uses for the education programs and to store equipment for repair of the Lady Washington.
Bolton hopes it will be just a short trip up the Chehalis River to the former site of the Roderick Timber Co. The Seaport has a few legal hurdles to clear before it can take control, and several plans to use the land have gone nowhere in the past few years.
But the greatest danger - and some say potential - of the site lies entangled within the vagaries of state policy on polluted land.
Contaminated industrial properties are so common in Washington state that the Department of Ecology has a special word for them - brown fields.
"With a moderate amount of effort, (a brown field) can be turned back into a useful piece of property," says Michael Spencer, environmental specialist for the agency. "It doesn't have to be cleaned right down to the bare bones."
Unfortunately, large corporations often steer clear of brown fields because they fear that they might turn into severely polluted tar babies that tap their resources with endless cleanup.
And smaller companies often avoid the sites because they don't have pockets deep enough to pay for decontamination.
In the I-5 corridor, where land is a hot commodity and businesses stand to gain from spending some time on key pieces of real estate, brown fields aren't as much of a problem, Spencer says.
But in rural Washington, he says, they can sometimes lay fallow for years as local government and big business focus on less complicated sites.
The Department of Ecology hopes to turn that around with the help of some state money.
"Hopefully there will be some economic incentive to reuse these properties," Spencer says. "Rather than leaving them idle and going five miles down the road and putting a factory on somebody's farm."
Further tests needed
The Roderick site is a classic example of a brown field, officials say.
In the 1950s, the land was home to a municipal dump operated by the City of Aberdeen. It was abandoned for several years until Phil Roderick bought the land in 1974 for use by his timber company.
The landfill area, once a wetland, was filled with dredge spoils and crushed rock, and Roderick then put several buildings on top for use by his trucks.
Over the years, the truck repair buildings added some more waste of their own - including the eight underground gas tanks and a moderate-sized spill of an industrial degreaser.
Before going bankrupt in 1987, the timber company also left behind 175,000 cubic yards of chips of bark and wood leftover during the log processing.
The Department of Ecology cleaned up some of the waste, putting contaminated soil into large drums and pumping the gasoline from the tanks.
Although the site is ranked among the most polluted of brown fields, Ecology site manager Dom Reale says most of the problems are not serious.
The degreaser spill has been mostly cleaned up, though some may be left in the nearby soil. "It's not a healthful thing to have in your drinking water," he says. "But walking around on top of it, you're probably OK."
Both the gasoline tanks and the rotting wood, which are likely aversely affecting local ground water, should not cause any major problems for people walking around the surface.
"I think if it were to be reranked, now that some of the cleanups have been done there, it would probably be ranked quite a bit lower," Reale says.
Ecology plans to spend $50,000 checking out the site as well as getting rid of the drummed waste sitting there. Down the road, they hope to pay about $30,000 to have the gasoline tanks excavated.
"I could not give Mr. Bolton a carte blanche that this is going to be no problem until I get the results back," Reale says. "There is a finite risk. We could find something nasty when we do our ground water test."
Council jittery about sale
Contamination on the site has made it a bit of a pariah in the real estate market. Seafirst Bank, which could claim the properties because of money owed on a decade-old loan, has no desire for it.
"Because of the contamination issues, the bank is really gun-shy about coming into possession of any of these properties," said Seafirst credit officer Mike Lazenby.
And the possibility of discovering some unknown pollution on the land has some on the City Council jittery about letting the Seaport acquire the site.
Although they are an independent organization within Grays Harbor County, the Seaport's jurisdiction evaporates just over the city limits.
To buy the Roderick property, the Seaport would need to amend its charter - which it can only do with the help of the Council. And the city would need to sign an interlocal agreement with the county.
During last week's meeting, Council member Rhonda Steinman worried about the city's liability.
If the Seaport went defunct, the city would not be responsible for its debts. Under the agreement that created the group, however, the Seaport's assets revert to the city.
Steinman envisioned a nightmare scenario where the city became the owner of a piece of severely polluted land - and the Department of Ecology came after them for cleanup costs.
Reale says his agency would not single out the city in that event. "We would look into all the liable parties," he said. "We wouldn't be likely to drop it in their lap."
And if the contaminant turned out to be related to the municipal dump, he said, the city might be culpable anyway.
'Assurances in writing'
But City Attorney Eric Nelson says he's leery of accepting oral assurances of state officials after several years of dealing with state government.
"In dealing with state agencies before, I've seen them change position rather suddenly on long-standing policies," he says. "At a minimum, I would want to have their assurances in writing before going forward with a site."
Nelson says the last-minute rush to acquire the land may be dangerous if the agency turns around later, and he warns that the whole deal could be a legal headache.
Ecology's Reale, though, says the hassle is worth it if it cleans up a polluted site. "It seems like the Historic Seaport's mission there and what there hoping to do with the site seem really worthwhile," he says. "That really motivated us to want to help."
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