Washing All the Dirt Away (and straight into the Sound)

Behind our couch lives what we refer to as our "third cat." Much more well-behaved and definitely lower-maintenance, petting-wise, than the two actual cats from whence it came, but more or less inert unless there's a breeze. When we sweep behind the couch every three or four years we generally don't carry the third cat down to the Sound and chuck him in, but that's what storm runoff is doing right now to a lot of people.

Storm runoff is problematic for the Sound at the best of times. Right now it's kind of a secondary concern and a lot of people we know and work with would much rather have storm runoff in the Sound than on I-5 or in their basements and garages where it currently sits, but eventually all that water is going to make its way to the Sound carrying with it all the dirt, oil, third cats and various urban crap that lays around our paved and developed environment. What goes into the Sound gets ingested by fish, which get ingested by bigger fish, which get ingested by huge fish that, in an ideal situation to us localvores (uhg), find their way to our dinner plates. We don't want to eat our third cat. Not even second or third hand.

Global Warming, Global Weirding, Climate Change, a run of shit luck; whatever you want to call it, our November's have been packed with 100-year weather events recently that are dumping a lot of toxins into the Sound. The Department of Ecology released a report on storm runoff on the 30th of November that indicates runoff related to weather events isn't the huge problem we think it is, but day-to-day runoff "is like a slow-moving oil spill."

One finding of the report is that “surface-water runoff” from land is generally the largest contributor of toxic chemicals to the Sound.

Surface-water runoff, according to the report, includes stormwater, groundwater that discharges into rivers and streams, and many different hard-to-trace sources of pollution from the land with no obvious points of discharge.

“This report makes it clear there is much more to learn, and these preliminary findings are not surprising,” said Josh Baldi, who is Ecology Director Jay Manning’s special assistant for Puget Sound.

Ah, yes...preliminary findings. The full text of the report is here.