CAMANO ISLAND — Wanda and Jerry Booth walked Tyee Beach on the breezy day after Christmas. Out in the middle of Port Susan they saw something bobbing and moving toward them from the south.
“At first, we thought it was a huge ancient cedar tree. But it was floating so high we realized it must be some sort of plastic,” Wanda Booth said. “When we came back a week later, it was on the beach.”
The Booths own a cabin on the south end of Camano Island, where they spend about half their time.
For most of January, Wanda Booth, 53, has worked to alert government agencies and nonprofit environmental groups to the presence of what is likely an old barge or dock.
Decaying, barnacle-encrusted wood, rusting steel, electrical wires and disintegrating shells of old barrels filled with urethane foam. That’s what makes up the old debris, and the urethane is breaking apart all over the beach where more than 100 families own cabins or homes. The mess might have spread even farther north by now, she said.
Booth is afraid that when Tyee comes alive in the summer, the community’s beach fires, built on sand mixed with the foam particles, could make people sick.
“The gas from burning urethane evidently is very toxic,” Booth said.
Island County public health officer Aaron Henderson agreed that the urethane does present a possible health risk.
Booth is also concerned that shellfish, birds, fish and even marine mammals could ingest bits of the urethane. Chunks of the stuff look like orange-tinted bread. With each windstorm, more urethane particles litter the beach, she said.
“As far as the foam getting into the food chain, humans would be less likely to get sick because we don’t eat the internal organs such as the stomachs of the animals,” Henderson said.
The Booths’ neighbors, Howard Strong and Ed Herring, who each have lived about a dozen years on the beach, say they have never seen anything like the urethane dock.
“That thing could have come from 100 miles away,” Herring said. “We don’t know much about it except that it’s sure ugly. And now the foam is all over the place in a billion pieces. How do you clean all that up?”
The Army Corps of Engineers is coming to the rescue, at least to get the biggest pieces off Tyee Beach, Booth said.
Skip Green, captain of the Corps’ Seattle-based debris boat, plans to pick up the urethane debris sometime next week.
“That crap is everywhere, and believe me there’s a lot worse out there in Puget Sound,” Green said. “At least it’s on a beach now and away from navigational traffic. If we stopped for every piece of plastic in the water, we would never get anywhere.”
Booth optimistically plans to organize a clean-up party to help return Tyee to its former healthier state. Puget Soundkeeper Alliance is planning to help, she said.
Still, Booth finds herself wanting to blame someone for the trash on her beach.
“I think fear of the unknown — fear of not knowing what the urethane could mean here — makes me angry,” she said. “But that junk out on the beach is so old, it probably just got away from somebody.”
For the Booths, the alarm over the urethane is heightened because they love Port Susan.
“We see gray whales, orcas, harbor seals, sea lions, porpoises, herons and eagles,” Booth said. “It’s worth it to keep it clean.”
Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com.
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