Olympic Peninsula Environmental News

Your donations to P4PS have helped get this done. This has been a pet project of mine, and others in the area for a number of years. Thanks for your support…By The Associated Press
NEAH BAY — A rescue tug is starting year-round service Tuesday at Neah Bay to help drifting ships and protect coastline from spills. A tug has been in place at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca during winter months since 1999, assisting 40 disabled ships. The Legislature approved $3.7 million for a full year of service for the first time.

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7/1 Seattle Times –By Warren Cornwall–Seattle Times staff reporter——-People drawn to the beauty of Hood Canal are helping suffocate the very waters that brought them here.

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A fascinating read on the effects of climate change on weeds. Scary, too. If you think that those weeds in your garden are growing faster every year, you’re right. Also has some interesting ramifications for our forest industry. They found that city environments with increased cars (and CO2) and heat intensified concrete and asphalt surfaces, mimick the earth as projected in the latter half of this century. A regular laboratory.

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The Olympic Environmental Council is pleased to inform you that the WA State Department of Ecology will hold two (2) public meetings on July 9 to explain their plan to sample and analyze soils around Pt Angeles for dioxins emitted from the Rayonier Pulp Mill and to sort these from possible other sources.  This action is part of the Rayonier Pulp Mill cleanup.

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NEAH BAY RESCUE TUG RETURNS TO DUTY JULY 1 ON 365-DAY CONTRACT

State oil spill prevention will mark an historic first as the tug Hunter
begins stand-by rescue tug duty at Neah Bay July 1 on a year’s contract.

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With the return of the tug, the Exxon Valdez ruling and other recent concerns, I thought it time to bring back an old favorite from the Onion, a bit of parody.

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Puget Sound needs more of the nation’s attention. The Environmental Protection Agency is a good place to begin ramping up.

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(waiting to read the whole bill and figure out how it relates to the Puget Sound Partnership- Editor) - This week marked an important milestone for the efforts to recover Puget Sound.  Congressman Norm Dicks and Senator Maria Cantwell introduced the Puget Sound Restoration Act.  The testimony panel included U.S Representative Norm Dicks, Bill Ruckelshaus, Kathy Fletcher and Ron Kreizenbeck.  Pasted below you will find the story ran by E&E as well links to the stories in the Seattle PI, Olympian, Kitsap Sun and Tacoma News Tribune.  Attached you will also find a copy of Bill’s testimony.
8. WATER: Dicks, Ruckelshaus push Puget Sound bill (06/27/2008)
Katherine Boyle, E&E Daily reporter

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Nice article on the progress being made by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe at Port Gamble. —”Step by step, we are working to restore the health of Puget Sound, the rivers and our Pacific Coast. We’re working through the Puget Sound Partnership cleanup effort and also implementing the Tribal/State Ocean Ecosystem Initiative - an ecosystem-based approach to management of our Pacific coastal waters - to make this part of the world a healthier place for all of us to call home. ”

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Well, it’s a problem,  but yet there’s no fecal coliform found. What’s next? This is a hard situation, as I am very supportive of live aboards. They almost always take better care of their surrounding environment than the casual “weekend’ boater.  What’s hard about this is that there probably are some derelict vessels there, (always seems like there were), but there also are a lot of locals who have anchored and tied up in this bay for decades. With the high cost of moorage, and the worries of environmental degradation given boats going aground, the pressure continues to mount on the boating community, which I consider myself as much as I consider myself an environmentalist.  It’s much more likely that contamination will be coming from inproper septic systems, and lawn runoff on land than a handful of live aboards. I don’t support just booting the boats out because there might be a problem, that has no foundation of fact behind it- Editor 

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