Tainted shoreline, tepid response

Ten years after discovering seriously contaminated sediment along the Columbia in Vancouver, the polluter and the state have yet to begin cleanup

Acarcinogenic pollutant dumped by an aluminum smelter has tainted a stretch of Columbia River shoreline in Vancouver for at least a decade.

The polluter - Alcoa - knows it.

So does the state Department of Ecology.

Nevertheless, 10 years after the pollution was identified, not one shovelful of polluted sediment has been removed. And cleanup is still years away.

Meanwhile, there's a good chance that people have been eating tiny clams growing in a toxic stew of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Researchers happened across the PCB-tainted clams near the old Alcoa smelter, which closed seven years ago, as part of a larger study involving a common Asian bivalve.

What they found was startling enough to prompt a public health advisory.

The level of pollution in the tissue of clams living in the Columbia shoreline near Alcoa is higher than any discovered in a similar study in the notoriously polluted Portland Harbor - a federal Superfund cleanup site also laden with PCBs.

A decade of bureaucratic paper-shuffling and corporate foot-dragging delayed what should have been a straight-forward cleanup. The case belies the ambitious goal of reducing toxic pollution in the Columbia River, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year named a national priority.

"It is difficult to understand why, 10 years later, it hasn't been dealt with," said Brent Foster, director of the environmental group Columbia Riverkeeper.
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