The Port of Seattle filed a civil lawsuit today demanding that The Boeing Company pay its fair share of the cost of the Superfund Cleanup in the Lower Duwamish Waterway. The
Port’s litigation demands that the “polluter pay,” a core principle of Superfund law.
The litigation does not change the Port’s commitment to completing the cleanup, which just reached a major milestone this month when the Port opened a new 14-acre park and
habitat restoration site at former Terminal 117 after years of shoreline and in-water sediment cleanup.
Since 2000, the Port of Seattle, City of Seattle, King County, and Boeing have worked together as the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group to investigate the nature of the
contamination and develop cleanup plans. All partners have paid an equal share for the investigation and planning necessary to perform the Lower Duwamish Waterway cleanup,
while acknowledging it would be necessary to redistribute costs when the project advanced past investigation and design.
In its lawsuit, the Port demands that Boeing reimburse the Port for millions of dollars of response costs that the Port has paid over the last 22 years, which should have been paid by
Boeing based on its status as the largest industrial manufacturer responsible for toxic waste in the river. The litigation also asks the court to set a fair share for Boeing to pay for
future cleanup costs.
For decades, Boeing pumped polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) from numerous transformer vaults (holding leaking transformers) at its Plant 2 facility directly to the Lower Duwamish
Waterway. As late as the 1990s, PCB concentrations in vault sludge ranged up to 1 billion parts per billion, i.e., 100 percent PCB. Sediment PCB concentrations at the location
where that vault’s sump discharged to the Lower Duwamish ranged up to 890,000 parts per billion – nearly 500,000 times higher than PCB cleanup levels set by the United States
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its Superfund cleanup plan.
Boeing has also released large magnitudes of other hazardous substances to the Lower Duwamish Waterway from its 300 acres of facilities along the Waterway or draining into it,
including dioxins/furans, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (“PAHs”), phthalates, arsenic, and other metals.
By contrast, the Port’s role in the Lower Duwamish Waterway has been that of an owner/landlord, leasing facilities to tenants that primarily conduct cargo shipping and storage
activities. These operations are not comparable to those of Boeing, whose intensive manufacturing operations used and regularly released large magnitudes of PCBs and other
hazardous substances into the Lower Duwamish Waterway.
Port of Seattle cleanup work is funded by King County taxpayers. Drawing on local taxpayers to cover Boeing’s obligations is unjust and limits the availability of public funding needed
to support environmental, employment, and environmental justice initiatives in local communities.
Original source can be found here.
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