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OR&R Assists EPA at Wyckoff Co./Eagle Harbor Restoration Site
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Oily, creosote sheen
seeping from the restoration beach.
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Standing along the waters of Eagle Harbor, you have a stunning view of downtown Seattle just across Puget Sound, Mount Rainier, the Cascade Mountains to the east, and the Olympic Mountains to the west. Unfortunately, you could also see an oily sheen on the harbor's waters, and toxic chemicals seeping from its beaches.
Over eighty years of wood treatment at the Wyckoff Company facility, combined with shipyard operations, had turned the Harbor into a "cesspool" of chemical contamination. In 1987, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed the Wyckoff Company/Eagle Harbor site (Wyckoff site) on its Superfund list of hazardous waste sites needing cleanup. As part of the cleanup at the Wyckoff site, the EPA constructed an underground wall around the former Wyckoff wood treatment facility to contain soil and groundwater contaminated with the wood treatment chemical, creosote.
One portion of the site outside this enclosure, originally thought to be clean, had been restored as intertidal habitat for fish. Recently, however, a sheen has been spotted there, indicating a previously unknown contamination source seeping from this public beach.
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NOAA Engineer Jim Wright (right) operates
Geoprobe controls to drive a core tube into
beach sediments.
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Supporting the EPA Sampling
Collecting samples is critical to locating a contaminant source and, in the case of the Wyckoff site, required special equipment that could travel over the soft sand and mud in the intertidal zone, equipment which EPA did not have. NOAA owns and operates just such a piece of equipment--a sampling unit known as a track-mounted "Geoprobe." The Geoprobe is capable of driving a 2-1/8 inch sample coring tool to depths of 20 feet or more, extracting 1.5-inch diameter, 4-foot long soil core samples. To address the newly discovered contamination source at the Wyckoff site, scientists and engineers from NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) assisted the EPA and their contractors to use NOAA's Geoprobe to collect sediment samples.
Before sampling can occur, sampling locations must be carefully identified to ensure that the entire site is thoroughly investigated and the contamination source can be identified. NOAA also owns and operates highly precise global positioning system (GPS) equipment for surveying purposes, and offered the use of this equipment to assist the EPA in staking out sampling locations.
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NOAA staff await a sediment sample, while
EPA contractors extract the Geoprobe core tube.
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A Collaborative Effort
After the EPA prepared a sampling and analysis plan, NOAA transported the GPS and Geoprobe equipment to the site. NOAA staff used the GPS surveying equipment to conduct an initial survey of the site, and to stake over 100 proposed sample locations along the beach in about four hours. Using this newly collected data, they created a detailed contour model for the beach and intertidal zone.
Collecting the sediment samples was truly a team effort. An EPA contractor who was experienced in using Geoprobes did the drilling, while NOAA staff and another EPA contractor assisted with the processing of core samples. This team cut open plastic core sleeves; packaged the sediment into jars, according to depth; and sent the samples off for analysis. Because much of the investigative area was subtidal, collecting samples was always a race against the tide. While the tide was out and coring was going on, OR&R staff were also able to help by collecting several surface samples.
| The Geoprobe collects core samples in clear plastic sleeves, which are cut open to remove samples. The samples are then packaged into jars that are labeled according to the depth from which the sediment was collected. The image at right shows an opened sample sleeve, with coarse surface gravel (on the left of the core) blending into finer, silty sand deeper (toward the right of the core). The upper layer was the special gravel material placed on the beach for fish habitat. | 
An opened plastic core tube showing the sediment sample within. |
After the samples were analyzed and the data was combined with the contour map produced by NOAA staff, a complicated picture of several areas of underground contamination emerged. There were some surprises, such as creosote contaminated sediments underlying the beach in places with no apparent surface contamination. There was no clear single source. This information is now being used by NOAA and the EPA to decide how to address the chemicals leaching from these sediments, prevent further environmental injury, and restore Puget Sound habitats.
The use of NOAA equipment and staff helped the EPA to characterize the nature of the Wyckoff site, while saving scarce EPA funding. The exprienced NOAA staff, plus the ability of the track-mounted Geoprobe to move on the soft beach sand and mud without getting stuck, allowed the sampling to be completed a full week ahead of schedule.
The efforts at the Wyckoff Company/Eagle Harbor Superfund site are just one example of a NOAA program involved in restoring resources by providing necessary data, science, staff, and tools. Through collaborative efforts such as those at Eagle Harbor, OR&R is helping agencies like the EPA and surrounding communities to protect and restore valuable natural resources while reducing risk to human health as well.
About OR&R's Protection and Restoration Efforts
As a natural resource trustee under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), OR&R scientists and a multidisciplinary team of technical experts participate in the remedial process, to ensure that selected remedies are protective and that appropriate measures are implemented to restore resources. This team helps the EPA and other cleanup and trustee agencies to accurately evaluate contaminated coastal sites, quantify injury to aquatic organisms and the health risk to people who eat seafood or use the coastal area, and provide recommendations to remedy such risks and injuries. OR&R involvement leads to more environmentally protective remediation of hazardous waste sites, resulting in cleaner coastal habitats and healthier commercial and recreational fish stocks.
OR&R scientists and engineers provide a variety of important services to protect and restore coastal resources. For the Wyckoff site, staff from OR&R's Assessment and Restoration Division (ARD) review biological and engineering plans and studies prepared by the EPA to address the site. An engineer from the OR&R's Pribilof Project Office (PPO) has been providing engineering support on many of these reviews for the past year. Recently, the PPO offered the EPA the use of valuable tools needed to address the previously unknown contamination source at the site.
Image Gallery
This photo series illustrates the creosote sheen seeping from the restoration beach, as well as NOAA's assistance to EPA in the investigation of sources of the sheen. |
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