Northwest Environmental Advocates--Channel Deepening

Columbia and Willamette Channel Deepening Project, cont.

Channel Deepening's New Ocean Dump Site

The Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are in the process of designating an ocean disposal site for sediments removed from the Mouth of the Columbia River and the estuary. This site is called the Deep Water Site. It is located in waters 200-300 feet deep and is 5,500 acres in size, and would join site previously designated as A, B, E, and F, as the fifth ocean disposal site off the Mouth of the Columbia River.

Without any explanation, the Corps added a 3,000 foot buffer zone that more than doubles the size of the site itself. The buffer's unprecedented size dramatically increases the potential for loss of prime marine habitat and mortality to commercial resources like crab and bottom fish. The total volume of material dredged from the Mouth of the Columbia River between 1904 and 1998 is estimated to be 208 million cubic yards. The new ocean disposal site will be used for 225 million cubic yards of sediment that will be dredged in half that time.

Although ocean disposal sites are generally designated for disposal of sediments dredged from the Mouth of the Columbia River only, the Final EIS includes language that would allow sediments from the entire channel and future channel projects, including the Willamette, to be disposed of in the Deep Water Site. Once this site is designated by EPA, it will be available for use in perpetuity.

The location of the site itself, but not the buffer zone, were conditionally agreed to by the Ocean Disposal Working Group, a collection of stakeholders in the region. The agreement was contingent upon adequate mitigation for unavoidable losses to natural resources, adequate biological and bathymetric monitoring, baseline studies conducted before use, and a taskforce formed to influence site management. Currently, there is no biological monitoring or mitigation plan and the Corps has stated that it may need to use portions of the site prior to baseline studies to characterize it.

The Corps has stated that there will be no significant impact on the ocean environment, commercial crabbing and fishing industries, and coastal communities. However, it is unable to defend this finding of no significant impact with any scientifically defensible studies and admits that little is known about the biological resources of the Deep Water Site. Instead, the Corps argues that the size of the site is small relative to the entire coast, without an analysis of the role this area plays in relationship to the Columbia River.

A key issue is how ocean dumping will affect Dungeness Crab. There has been no independent economic review and analysis of the impacts to the local crab fleet and coastal communities over the 50 year life of the project. The biology of the site will be forever altered when coarse grain river sediments are dumped atop the finer-grained ocean sediments. Disposal of sediments in the past have voided the site area of crab production for years after the dumping event. The soft-shell crab studies used by the Corps to assess death rates of crab caught under disposal operations stretch the truth beyond scientifically defensible limits. Furthermore, the studies leave out the impacts of food and habitat loss.

The use of the Deep Water Site will permanently alter a site of unique and highly productive habitat that is not found elsewhere along the entire Pacific Coast.

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