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High arsenic levels worry residents

Thursday, April 20, 2000

By GORDY HOLT Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

VASHON ISLAND -- On her hands and knees digging in the Maury Island dirt yesterday, Elizabeth Ball was enjoying the sun.

"Afraid of the arsenic? You bet!" she said. "When we moved here 11 years ago, I dug down two feet and brought in fresh topsoil. I even had our well water tested."

But Ball and her husband, Tom, a well-traveled, retired FAA electrical engineer, greeted the news of a new study showing arsenic and lead contamination on Vashon and Maury islands with restraint.

"It wasn't news to anyone out here," she said.

The Balls live in the Maury Island community of lower Gold Beach, within sight of a now-dormant gravel pit where Glacier Northwest has proposed an expansion plan that would level a large hill.

Glacier's proposal two years ago provoked a community uprising that eventually triggered the county's contamination study, which was disclosed Tuesday by King County Executive Ron Sims.

The study verified a 15-year-old report that showed high levels of arsenic and lead on the islands. Only about a dozen sites were tested in the earlier study, while the most recent effort sampled soil at 383 island locations and 49 mainland sites. Much higher levels of the toxic materials were found in some areas, with the highest concentrations on sections of Vashon and Maury islands.

In soil samples taken for the latest study, arsenic contamination was found in amounts up to 23 times the state's required residential cleanup level of 20 parts of arsenic per million parts of soil. The biggest hits were found along the eastern edges of Maury Island and in the southern-most sections of Vashon Island.

The study also found up to five times more lead than the level at which cleanup is required, 250 parts per million parts of soil.

The natural background levels of these poisonous metallic elements in the Northwest are an average of seven parts per million for arsenic and 24 parts per million for lead.

Arsenic is known to cause skin, liver, bladder, kidney and lung cancer. Lead ingested by children can slow growth and reduce a child's mental capacity causing learning difficulties.

The source of the contamination is a smelter operated for nearly 100 years in Ruston, a shoreside suburb of Tacoma just a few miles south across Dalco Passage. Asarco closed the smelter 14 years ago.

"You could see the stack from here," said Tom Ball, pointing south toward Tacoma's skyline. The stack was felled in 1993, and while the cleanup there got under way, the island communities to the north were negotiated out of the company's agreement with federal officials.

"It's still scary, very scary, especially for the children," said Betsy Moore, a 14-year Gold Beach resident out for a walk in the sun. "I'll kick the bucket before it gets to me, but it's the kids of this community I worry about."

Nancy Erskine also worries about the kids -- her grandchildren, 2-year-old Alexander (Sasha) Neumayer of Burton, and his 9-year-old cousin from Covington, Ashley Erskine. They were in Dockton Park where sailboats lay at anchor in serene Quartermaster Harbor and shorebirds skimmed the cove.

"It looks so beautiful, so pristine, so sickening," Erskine said. "Whose responsibility is this? What can be done? What can we do about it?"

Few have answers. State, county and federal officials said yesterday that other priorities and a lack of resources kept the cleanup list short.

Vashon Island Superintendent of Schools Monte Bridges also is mindful of the contamination issue. He got a heads up from county officials Tuesday, he said yesterday.

"They indicated some assistance in helping us test our playground soils," he said. "We already cover most of our bare spots with bark, but we need to review our play areas to be sure everything is covered."

For hairstylist John Jannetty, 54, the county's contamination report was unsettling. And a little ironic.

"We came here from Los Angeles four years ago to escape air pollution and now we're facing this," he said.

Now the parents of children ages 6 and 2, Jannetty and his wife, interior designer Andrea Bellon, have found trouble in a place they thought was "our island paradise."

"The old-timers around here tell us this arsenic thing is all a bunch of hooey. But we planted a garden last year and this year we won't," he said.

"It would be nice to know exactly what this means and the risks we really face."

At the county's service center just south of Vashon's business district, nurses Louise Sears and Barbara Bussman together with environmental health specialist Shauna Cartwright already had laid out copies of the health department's new study and maps that showed where the contamination was highest. They said the state Health Department's "leadmobile" will be in town April 29 and May 6 to offer blood tests to those age 6 and younger.

P-I reporter Gordy Holt can be reached at 206-448-8156 or gordyholt@seattle-pi.com

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