Boat sales during the first quarter of this year were strong enough to make brokers tentatively optimistic that the region’s marine industry was finally heading upward.

But sales took an alarming plunge during the second quarter, underscoring the slow economy recovery being felt nationwide.

The drop was a surprise to industry insiders, particularly after boat sales statewide increased 27 percent during the first quarter.

Full story...

ALSO AT THREE SHEETS NORTHWEST

Boat washes ashore at Discovery Park

Association targets pocketbook issues for boaters

Despite a set of loud booms that rattled Puget Sound just after 1:30 PM, President Barack Obama's motorcade ventured on and delivered the president to the shores of Lake Washington Tuesday afternoon. With no official announcement of the motorcade route, we ventured off Hill to the intersection of McGilvra and Lake Washington Blvd that was most likely to afford a view of the presidential entourage as it arrived in Madrona for an exclusive luncheon.

The booms were confirmed to have been caused by military aircraft scrambled because of a breach of the airspace above Seattle while the president traveled below:

A pair of loud sonic booms heard around the Seattle area shortly before 2 p.m. Tuesday were caused by two F-16 jets, according to Allen Kenitzer, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Via Facebook, NORAD released the following statement:

SONIC BOOMS over Seattle: NORAD responded to an aircraft violating a VIP Temporary Flight Restricted Area near Seattle at approximately 1:35...

Here's a case for saving Puget Sound that you can take to the bank.

The Sound and the land, rivers, and lakes surrounding it provide benefits worth between $9.7 billion and $83 billion every year, according to a new study called "Valuing the Puget Sound Basin" from Earth Economics, a local nonprofit. The overall worth of the region is pegged at $305 billion and $2.6 trillion. How does this hardworking watershed do it?

In the West, snow melt provides approximately 70 percent of the drinking water, which if habitat was destroyed and snow fall diminished, would have to be replaced with the construction of costly reservoirs. Or take the region's Pacific yew trees, a source of the cancer-treating drug Taxol.

“In the past we’ve treated our natural assets as though the value is zero,” said Maya Kocian, one authors of the report. (more)

more at Sightline (more)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today it's awarding $30 million to efforts to restore Puget Sound. Sounds like great news -- except that it was completely overshadowed by extraordinarily sobering new science unveiled today: Acidity levels in the Sound, driven by the same processes that are unnaturally warming the planet, appear to be dissolving the shells of oyster larvae. And the weak acid is killing plankton at the base of the food chain -- the one that provides sustenance for creatures all the way up to orcas. And people. 

Imagine a world without oysters. It means a lot more than just forgetting about oysters Rockefeller. Oysters are a basic part of the ecosystem, a big part of the processes that make the ocean what it is.

And then, given the news about the plankton, start considering a world without most forms of sea life that we currently know. It's not a big leap. Even for someone who has chronicled bad environmental news for more than... (more)

In conjunction with KBCS, we're posting a transcript of Martha Baskin's latest story. Listen to her radio story here.

Some 43,500 plastic tubes covered with nets and staked with rebar may seem like an unusual site on a Puget Sound beach. But South Puget Sound citizens and environmentalists are calling the alarm. The plastic tubes are used by Washington’s shellfish industry to plant geoducks for the Asian market. Martha Baskin checks in with industrial farms on beaches and intertidal estuaries.

Narration: The waters at Puget Sound’s southern edge, near Olympia and Shelton, ripple like fingers into slender inlets with names like Totten, Eld and Budd. The inlets are inter-tidal, rich nursery grounds for salmon, and nesting grounds for heron and eagles. For hundreds of years they’ve also been harvesting grounds for shellfish, clams and oysters. But the industrial harvesting of a new type of clam, geoduck, primarily for the Asian market, has citizens and environmental groups crying foul.... (more)

Remember that ongoing campaign that urges us all to pick up dog poop and go to commercial car washes to help save Puget Sound, given the governor's instituted deadline of cleaning up the  imperiled waterway by 2020? Well, get this: King County has been fine $47,000 for not doing its part to help protect the Sound--specifically, for sending too much treated sewage and stormwater into waterways, violating water-quality permits. (At least it's not all raw sewage this time.)

 Here's the press release issued today by the state Department of Ecology:

King County fined for combined sewer overflow violations

BELLEVUE – The Department of Ecology has fined King County $46,000 for violating water-quality permit requirements at four combined sewer overflow (CSO) treatment plants that discharge a combination of treated sewage and stormwater from heavy precipitation.

The plants are located in Seattle at Carkeek Park, Elliott Bay at the foot of Denny Street, Martin Luther King Jr. Way and South...

In conjunction with KBCS, we're posting a transcript of Martha Baskin's latest story. Listen to her radio story here.

 Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been embroiled in controversy since it was revealed on May 5 that he allowed the Minerals Management Service to exempt BP’s offshore drilling plan from environmental review. This week the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit against Salazar for approving 300 drilling operations without permits required by the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Drilling opponents in Alaska would like to see a moratorium on drilling in their state, while fishermen in the Puget Sound say all fisheries are at risk if we don’t get control of our carbon emissions.

This week the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for ignoring environmental reviews when approving offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The suit follows on the heels of a second suit, filed last Friday,... (more)

In the past few years, myself and hundreds of other journalists in the Puget Sound area have left the newsroom behind. And oddly enough, we’re pretty happy with the life change.

Many of us did not choose this career shift, but instead were the victims of layoffs triggered by the nationwide implosion of the print news industry. I’d worked at the Puget Sound Business Journal for the past seven years when I found myself laid off from the paper last May. I didn’t expect it and had no immediate answer for what I wanted to do next.

Once I moved beyond the initial loss, however, I embraced the chance to try something new. The past year has been one of the most interesting, unstable, and enjoyable since I left journalism graduate school in 2002. I’m not sorry I’m no longer in the Puget Sound Business Journal newsroom.

By and large, the journalists I reached out to echo these sentiments. We don’t mourn the careers we left behind. We all miss elements of a newsroom –... (more)

It’s been a tough few years for boat sales in Washington state, which were hammered first by a spike in fuel prices and then followed by an economic recession and credit crunch that brought some parts of the market to a virtual standstill. 

But just-released sales numbers for the first three months of this year — for both new and used  boats — are finally pointing in a positive direction, the first time that has happened since 2007. (more)

more at Three Sheets Northwest

The news from the Gulf Coast just seems to get worse, with the out-of-control oil rig explosion spurting 210,000 gallons a day, the oil slick taking over beaches, the dome device that was supposed to contain the oil not working at all, and the possibility of continued oil eruption from the ocean floor for another three months. This would result in a 20 million-gallon oil spill.

I have noticed a lot of sympathy here in Washington about this disaster, but, in reality, there is not a lot we can do.

What we can do is make sure we’re prepared to prevent a similar disaster in Puget Sound and, in the meantime, clean up Puget Sound.

With population growth, increasing traffic and residential, commercial and industrial development, stormwater run-off is flooding the sound. Each day 140,000 pounds of toxic chemicals — including petroleum, copper, lead, zinc and PCBs — enter Puget Sound via our roads, driveways and parking lots. It’s our very own endless hazardous waste spill.

In 1988, the people... (more)

When news that a dead gray whale had washed up on the shores of Puget Sound in West Seattle recently, its stomach full of human trash, I immediately thought of a series of stunning but horrific photographs I had recently experienced -- Seattle photographer Chris Jordan's work on the albatrosses of Midway Island who unintentionally kill their newborns feeding them our brightly colored garbage.

The gray whale was dead, but had been in good health. A bottom feeder, it had ingested about 20 plastic bags, surgical gloves, plastic pieces, a pair of sweat pants, a golf ball, and other cast-off bits of our lives. It was the fifth dead gray whale to be found in two weeks on Puget Sound, according to the Cascadia Research Collective.  Several of those whales were malnourished. The photo above, by Cascadia Research of Olympia, WA,  shows researchers near the whale.

Jordan's photographs show image after image of albatross chicks who have died after their parents have flown out over the ocean, bringing... (more)

It’s a familiar and unpleasant scenario — you’re out on your boat enjoying the beautiful waters of Puget Sound and discover that the holding tank is full.

Is it such a big deal to pump out overboard? you wonder. After all, Puget Sound is a big body of water. One holding tank worth of sewage won’t really hurt, will it?

In a word, yes. Raw sewage from boats can contaminate shellfish beds, spread disease and cause aquatic “dead zones,” largely lifeless areas resulting from pollution-related oxygen depletion.

“Boat discharges, even small ones, can be significant,” says Scott Meschke, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Washington. (more)

Folks, it had been my intention to write tonight about the challenge to the feds' plans for Snake-Columbia river operations filed today by salmon advocates. But instead I got wrapped up in a discussion on the Society of Environmental Journalists' listserv about what sociologists should be studying in our realm. Here's what I told my fellow SEJers:

"Sewage disposal: What is our big hangup with composting toilets? Think of the infrastucture repair and construction costs we could save merely by figuring out what to do with our pee and our poop. Night soils were the answer in ancient China -- why not today, here?"

 

"Stormwater (Our #1 water pollution source! You people listening? Hello? Hello? Is this microphone working?): 1) What is the deal with lawns? Why do we have to have these green expanses surrounding our little castles-sans-moats-and-palace-walls? 2) And why will we not require Low Impact Development, which controls stormwater, costs about the same as regular development, and...

Is it time for straight talk to fix Puget Sound? In a report by John Ryan of KUOW, David Troutt of the Nisqually tribe provides a hearty dose.

 As Ryan reports, tribal officials say whatever the political difficulties, restoring Puget Sound shorelines and the fish that depend on them isn't a choice. It's an obligation under treaties signed before Washington was a state. Troutt directed the following remarks to government officials at the recent Puget Sound Partnership meeting:

"Part of the deal is we wouldn't shoot all of you, and we'd be able to fish. We haven't shot a lot of you in a long time, and we're not fishing, so our end of the deal isn't being held up here. We need to have that deal recognized, that this really is something that you guaranteed us, and we need to see that guarantee fulfilled."

Read the full story here

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Copper in brakes to be banned, eventually

WA approves first copper brake pad ban

Progress slow in Puget Sound cleanup

Reports: Puget Sound getting sicker;... (more)

  (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Environmentalists are urging people to call their legislators in Olympia in a last-minute push to clean up the No. 1 pollution threat to Puget Sound: stormwater pollution. A plan to tax petroleum and other hazardous substances to raise money toward Puget Sound restoration is being fought hard by the oil industry, as well as agricultural interests who don't want to pay higher taxes on pesticides and fertilizer.

Enviros say they need a flood of last-minute calls from constituents to prod legislators into action before they adjourn their annual session in Olympia Thursday night.

Oil industry: "We are in complete and total opposition. …" (more)

The recent death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau  has focused attention once again on the issue of whales in captivity.

Many Washington residents don’t know the happy ending to the tragic story of whaling captures in Puget Sound that once netted dozens of whales for SeaWorld performances.

It was the intervention of former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro, then aide to Republican Gov. Dan Evans, that helped put a stop to the brutal captures that split apart whale families and pods and resulted in the collateral damage deaths of dozens of marine animals. Munro witnessed one of the captures in which aircraft and explosives were used... (more)

Killer whale Tilikum during a 2009 performance at Seaworld in Orlando. (Photo courtesy Loadmaster, a.k.a. David R. Tribble, via Wikimedia Commons)

MORE INFO

To The Point: Should Whales and Dolphins Be in Aquatic Parks or the Open Ocean?

It's a little tough to tell, but it sounds like the idea of raising taxes on petroleum products and other toxic materials to pay for cleaning up stormwater runoff could have trouble getting through the recession-battered Washington Legislature this year. Taxing pollutants to pay for pollution cleanup may be too simple an idea, I suppose.

Today enviros are calling for green-minded citizens to e-mail their representatives in Olympia in support of what they’re calling the Clean Water Act of 2008 (HB 3181/SB 6851). It would raise taxes on petroleum and other toxic products that represent the biggest single environmental threat to Puget Sound -- not to mention putting a whole bunch of other Washington waterways into violation of the federal Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act passed in 1972. The one that was supposed to control water pollution by 1985. (more)

  (more)

The House Capital Budget committee yesterday held a contentious hearing on raising a tax on toxic substances to help keep polluted stormwater out of pretty polluted Puget Sound. But as John Ryan reports for KUOW, for the first five years, more than half the money would reduce the state's budget deficit -- not clean up Puget Sound.

"Critics and even the agency's own board members are growing impatient for the Puget Sound Partnership to take action," he reports.

Read his story on the state of the Puget Sound cleanup here

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Further reading:

Reports: Puget Sound getting sicker; Obama budget slashes money for Sound cleanup by 60%

Last month we reported on a bill that would expand a successful coastal derelict fishing gear removal program into Puget Sound. Currently, there are thousands upon thousands of pounds of derelict fishing gear sitting on the bottom of Puget Sound. Among the gear are lost recreational and commercial crab pots. These unclaimed crab pots continue to fish for up to two years, killing as many as a million crabs per year. By law, crab pots are required to be equipped with a release cord, but even lawful crab pots can continue to catch crabs after they are lost. Supporters argue that removal of lost gear is another step towards reclaiming Puget Sound.

Since the bill’s proposal, primary sponsor Rep. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island, has been working with groups to address some of the issues with House bill 2593.

A major change to the bill are the penalties... (more)

   Eight indicators show a continuing decline in Puget Sound, while seven other indicators show evidence of improvement, suggesting that on balance there's a slippage in the health of the waterway that sustains orcas, salmon and people, according to our interpretation of the findings in the first new biennial report by Puget Sound Partnership. The Olympian calls it "a mixed bag of improvement and continued decline." 

  However, Partnership executive director David Dicks sees it another way -- "we are making progress."

  Meanwhile, President Obama's proposed budget slashes money for Sound cleanup from this fiscal year's $50 million to just $20 million -- a 60 percent drop.

  That's despite the fact that Puget Sound in July gained the status of national treasures like Chesapeake Bay and the Everglades in the eyes of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The new status was thought to pave the way for substantially more millions in federal dollars to flow here to try... (more)

A proposal to increase the tax on petroleum, pesticides and other chemicals is being floated in Olympia as a way to raise as much as $250 million to clean up polluted stormwater. But so far, support the for the idea among leading lawmakers appears lukewarm at best.

Environmentalists are pushing the idea, which would mostly tax oil refineries to clean up stormwater runoff, the largest source of pollution to Puget Sound and other waterways in the state. The measure would sink money into the general fund initially to help meet the state’s $2.6 billion budget shortfall, with stormwater pollution getting a bigger share in future years.

As key as stormwater cleanup is to the health of Puget Sound, the measure faces an uncertain future. Business groups think the tax is anti-jobs and business. (more)

Totally preventable -- that's the conclusion investigators drew about the 8.7 million gallons of raw sewage that spilled into Elliott Bay from King County's West Point wastewater treatment plant last month, prompting a four-day closure of the North Beach recreation area near Discovery Park. On Wednesday, the state Department of Ecology announced it fined the county $24,000 for three violations, including violating the state's Clean Water Act.

  “King County has taken this incident very seriously, but significant errors led to the spill and made what could have been a small release much larger,” said Ecology’s Water Quality Section manager Kevin Fitzpatrick in a press release.  “The backup system was tested and ready, but inexplicably not used

during the very time for which it is designed.”

  “I’ve made it clear, and our wastewater managers agree, that this incident was unnecessary and unacceptable, and that the division must be accountable,”... (more)

Sitting on the floor of Puget Sound are thousands of pounds of derelict fishing gear. Lost fishing gear in a large body of water doesn’t really sound like a big deal at first, but when looked at a bit more closely the effects can be shocking.

“Derelict fishing gear in Puget Sound is a problem. There is an estimated – maybe – 15,000 crab pots that have been lost in the last 5 years in Puget Sound,”  Rep. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island, told the Agriculture and Natural Resources committee earlier this week, in support of House Bill 2593.

If passed, the measure would direct the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to solicit a $2 donation every time a recreational fishing license is purchased.

Read more here at InvestigateWest

We begin 2010 with a pretty severe hangover from 2009. The national economy is bouncing along the bottom, unemployment continues at record high levels, consumption is down, tax receipts are dwindling, and public services have been pulled back just when we need them the most. In short, all the “hope” of the 2008 elections has been dissipated in the economic implosion brought to us by Wall Street.

In our state, and especially in Everett, the Chicago-based Boeing Co. continues to play us for suckers. While congratulating Washington Machinists and engineers for the successful launch of the 787, Boeing is developing a second 787 assembly line in South Carolina. Aaron Reardon, the Snohomish County executive, couldn't help piling on. In a recent op-ed, Reardon wrote “Washington is a very high-cost state and is not competitive.”

It is odd when a leading politician publicly declares that his state is not competitive, especially when that state, our Washington, is ranked by Forbes magazine as the... (more)