Newspaper Article Archive of
West Seattle Herald

By Lindsay Peyton

A barge parked on the Lower Duwamish Waterway on Tuesday morning, Dec. 20, was on a special mission.

On board, an employee of environmental engineering firm Dalton, Olmsted & Fuglevand, scooped up buckets of sediment mixed with activated carbon and carefully deposited the mixture in strategically mapped spots on a chart of the waterway.

The effort marked the first step of an innovative pilot study – designed and funded by the Lower Duwamish Working Group, a collaborative effort between King County, the City of Seattle, the Port of Seattle and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Jennifer Kauffman, project manager for King County, explained that the activated carbon is meant to accelerate nature’s clean-up process.

The Lower Duwamish Working Group will run a side-by-side comparison of the effort with a control plot without activated carbon to test the material’s effectiveness.

“After three years of data collecting, we’ll be able to tell how good the technology is,” Kauffman said. “Activated carbon is used all over the U.S. and Europe, but the Duwamish is different. It’s a river, and it’s affected by tidal currents.”

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