BELFAIR – Scuba diver Jerry Ehrlich saw the signs of something ominous in Hood Canal starting the summer of 2002. The blunt-nosed six-gill sharks swimming in the shallows caught his attention first.
“You never see that,” he thought.
Such sharks, which have a strong aversion to light, almost never leave deep water. There were other deep water-dwellers – dogfish, octopuses, shrimp – squirming in the shallows, as if trying to escape to shore.
Deeper down, Ehrlich spotted wolf eels, which usually stay close to their dens, meandering in open water. He saw rockfish that couldn’t swim straight. He found abandoned octopus dens full of rotting eggs and sea anemones, normally bright and erect, slumped flaccidly against hard ground.
In 2003, fish began to die. Ehrlich, along with residents and scientists, witnessed three major fish kills. Tens of thousands of surf perch, greenlings and 25 other species washed up onto rocky beaches.
The state closed fishing in the canal for the first time, and tests were conducted. The results corroborated what Ehrlich, who has explored these waters for three decades, and others suspected: Hood Canal, a scenic deep-water arm of Puget Sound and once a glimmering symbol of Washington’s natural bounty, was choking to death.
Pollution brought on by rapid population growth and development has caused oxygen levels in the water to drop, rendering one large section of the canal a “dead zone” – an oxygen-depleted area devoid of fish and sea plants.
The scene “is pretty frightening,” said Ehrlich, 56.
High stakes
The growing dead zone threatens not just sea life – Hood Canal has one of the richest shellfish beds in Puget Sound – but the entire ecosystem, which encompasses a panoply of birds and mammals, surrounding forests, and a vast network of salmon-rich rivers and streams.
Also at stake is the canal’s image as a pristine outpost and the last natural barrier protecting the Olympic Peninsula from the plagues of urban sprawl. The canal makes up the peninsula’s still-wild eastern edge, a watery shield against the westward push of people and machines.
Gov. Gary Locke warned recently the canal could turn into a “dead sea.” If that happens, Washington would not only lose “one of its great jewels,” said state fishery biologist Duane Fagergren, it could someday see the effluence of sprawl trickle into the peninsula, one of the last great unspoiled areas in the West.
Dead zones widespread
Dead zones are created by large concentrations of people and the pollution they generate. Researchers have identified dead zones in Los Angeles Harbor, Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
The concept of dead zones has been known for years by environmental scientists but is only now getting widespread attention. The United Nations in March identified coastal dead zones as the most serious emerging environmental problem in the oceans today.
The problem, called eutrophication, comes from people doing everyday things like flushing toilets, driving cars and taking care of lawns.
Auto emissions (washed down by rain), lawn fertilizers, sewage and storm water runoff all feed nitrogen and other nutrients into the water. The nutrients generate plankton blooms, which die after a few days, sinking to the bottom, where decomposition uses up oxygen. The lack of oxygen kills fish and sea plants, which decompose and use up most of the remaining oxygen.
A tougher opponent
The result of this cycle over many years is what’s found in Hood Canal today. Now the people whose lives touch the canal – residents, weekenders, bureaucrats and scientists – face a problem that promises to defy easy solutions.
Unlike the water-fouling associated with industry in the 1960s and ’70s, where the solution was purifying the discharges or closing off the drains, the causes of the Hood Canal dead zone are harder to isolate because there are so many potential sources.
“This kind of pollution doesn’t come from the end of a pipe,” says Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland oceanographer who conducted a 2003 study of dead zones for the Pew Oceans Commission. There are no factories to blame, no oily slicks to clean up. This kind of pollution, unless one knows what to look for, is hard to see.
Like most of Puget Sound, the waters of Hood Canal are a dark green, turning gray on cloudy days.
On maps, the canal looks like an elongated fishhook, stretching 62 miles north to south, with the curve of the hook curling east. On average the canal is about 1 1/2 miles wide. It’s surrounded on all sides by lush forests. To the west tower the Olympic Mountains, to the east, Seattle, and beyond that, the Cascade Range.
At the top of the hook, there’s the Naval Submarine Base Bangor, home port for the Pacific fleet of eight Trident nuclear submarines.
The dead zone lies in the lower third of the canal, comprising the entire hook area, from Belfair to Hamma Hamma. It’s the most densely populated section of the canal. Cabins and vacation homes line the shore on both sides. New houses sit in the hills above the canal.
The canal stretches through three counties: Mason, Kitsap and Jefferson. Since 1980, the population in those counties has grown by nearly 120,000 to a total of 310,000. An estimated 54,000 people live in the Hood Canal watershed, about 20,000 in the Belfair area.
Flushing the canal
The region’s infrastructure has not kept pace with the population. Belfair, once a quaint tourist stop, has grown into a full-fledged town with supermarkets, video stores and strip malls – all without a sewer system. Nearly all cabins and homes on lower Hood Canal are on septic systems, many of them decades old.
“Flushing” is a theme that comes up often in discussions about the low-oxygen problem.
Researchers theorize that at least some of the nitrogen fed into the canal comes from residents flushing toilets that drain into failed septic systems, which leach sewage and waste through the soil and into the canal’s waters. Because of its geography, the canal doesn’t circulate water as well as the rest of Puget Sound, where pollutants are flushed away by tides, waves and rivers.
Hood Canal actually isn’t a canal, which implies openings on both ends; it’s a fjord, closed on one end. Capt. George Vancouver, in 1792, named it after a British lord, but the name he chose was Hood Channel. The body of water was mistakenly called Hood Canal on maps, and the name stuck.
Hood Canal, as deep as 600 feet in some places and only a few feet deep in others, takes as long as a year to clean itself out, with rivers such as the Skokomish being the main source of fresh water. River flows have been impeded by dams and development.
There has always been a small area of low oxygen in the hook portion, but the condition was seasonal, lasting only a few weeks or months. In the last two years, the dead zone has grown dramatically and lasted year-round, said Jan Newton, senior oceanographer for the state Department of Ecology.
Fish and sea plants need between 5 and 20 parts per million of dissolved oxygen to survive. Below 5 ppm, fish begin to stress, and below 3 ppm, most sea life can’t survive. For much of the last two years, a huge section of the lower canal – from Belfair to Hamma Hamma – has measured below 2 ppm of dissolved oxygen.
Recovery plan
Locke and U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., who owns a house on the canal, announced an aggressive recovery plan in February that would include federal, state and local efforts, setting aside millions of dollars on the project. Both the governor and congressman acknowledged the problem would take years to study and address.
A preliminary plan released last week proposed immediate action, such as educating canal residents about servicing their septic tanks, avoiding lawn fertilizers and not dumping any waste along the shorelines. Long-term solutions will be more difficult, said Jay Watson, director of the council in charge of coordinating all the agencies.
Take the problem of septic tanks, Watson said. There are an estimated 5,500 septic systems in the lower canal. Nobody knows how much of the dead zone is caused by sewage from failed septic tanks. But even if it were determined to be a major cause, the ruling jurisdiction, Mason County, doesn’t have the money to do anything about it.
The county has one part-time employee assigned to regulate septic tanks but no ordinance requiring homeowners to allow the inspector onto their property. “It takes a full search warrant issued by a judge,” said Watson.
A warrant requires probable cause, which is difficult to determine because septic tanks are underground. Replacing failed septic systems would cost $3,000 to $10,000, and many property owners would resist spending money on a problem that wasn’t visible, Watson says.
Any solution would almost certainly mean an increase in local taxes. Says Watson: “You say ‘tax increase’ around here and the people will run you out on a rail.”
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