A Victory for Puget Sound... nearly 20 Years in the making!

In the early 1990’s, The City of Bremerton’s combined sewer system discharged an unhealthy mixture of untreated sewage and stormwater 600-800 times per year at its 15 outfalls.  Hundreds of millions of gallons were discharged annually. Driven by rainfall overwhelming an inadequate system, these combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, had been the primary cause for the rich shellfish beds in Dye’s Inlet being closed to harvest since the 1960’s.

This problem was not and is not unique. According to the EPA there are 772 CSO communities around the country that include discharges from a combined population of 40 million people. Most are not even close to achieving “control” of the problem, which still closes more swimming beaches in Washington state than any other source, according to a recent NRDC report.  But the solution achieved through determined citizen action and this one municipality’s dedication has achieved remarkable results.                             

In 1993 a still-young Puget Soundkeeper Alliance settled the first citizen Clean Water Act case in Washington State with the City of Bremerton, setting wheels in motion through a federal Consent Decree. The decree called for a series of retrofit projects to be completed over the next 18 years. The projects included new and upgraded treatment facilities, stormwater and sanitary sewer separations (to reduce inflow), residential downspout disconnections, capacity improvements and even low impact Development (LID) projects designed to infiltrate stormwater and keep it out of the sewers. The city even tacked on projects like adding sewer service to surrounding communities. On June 29, 2011 the city celebrated completion of its CSO control project on schedule at a total cost of $50 million. According to Department of Ecology, Bremerton is the first “complex CSO community” in Washington to achieve the regulatory goal of one or less overflow events per year, on average.  In contrast, the City of Seattle is targeting 2025 and King County the year 2030 through their consent decrees negotiated with Ecology and the EPA. 

In Bremerton, the project is apparently working. The flow and the number of CSO events are both down by 99%. Water quality has been steadily improving over the past decade.  In 2003, the shellfish beds in Dye’s inlet were open to harvest for the first time in nearly 40 years.  This has been hugely important both culturally and economically for the Suquamish Tribe which notes these as the richest waters for shellfish in their ancestral fishing grounds, according to tribal chairman Leonard Forsman. It also means that it is safe to swim in Dye’s inlet and Port Washington Narrows on most days (short term closures are still occasionally ordered as a precaution- remember the one or less overflow event per year on average).

At the celebration event Bremerton Mayor Patty Lent presented Puget Soundkeeper Alliance with an award, thanking us for our “vision and partnership” in helping them achieve this goal of water quality protection. Did I mention we were in litigation?  Not anymore. Soundkeeper verified their milestones and monitoring and released them of their reporting obligations under the decree. (They are still regulated by an NPDES permit of course).  However, achieving this goal ahead of so many other municipalities has made the city quite proud. At recent stakeholder meeting for Municipal Stormwater  General Permit language where various municipalities presented various reasons for not implementing LID in various situations, Larry Matel, Managing Engineer, City of Bremerton stood up and asked the others in the room what the wait was for. They were already doing it with great success in Bremerton.

On June 29, I accepted the award on behalf of Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, but this actual project spanned nearly our entire period as an active Waterkeeper organization and I had the easiest part by far. There were four Puget Soundkeepers before me, going back to our first, Ken Moser, who filed the original papers on behalf of the organization and its members, including a Bremerton-area shellfish grower. Ken was followed by three other Soundkeepers, BJ Cummings Sue Joerger and Bob Beckman who assisted and monitored the city’s progress throughout the project, pressing them occasionally when needed.

I was asked to speak to the audience in the Norm Dicks Government Center (Rep. Dicks was kind enough to attend and gave a nice plug to Soundkeeper in his talk).  I thanked the city for their efforts and reminded the attendees about the importance of the Clean Water Act and its promise of swimmable, fishable and drinkable waters. We face a lot of problems in the fight to recover Puget Sound, some of them quite large and daunting, including toxic sediments in areas such as Bremerton’s Naval Shipyard. But when we celebrate a victory, especially one that has not been accomplished elsewhere in our area, it gives momentum to the effort and shows that even large problems without apparent solutions are only temporary if we devote our resources effectively.