Radiation Danger in Seattle’s Magnuson Park, Part 1 of 4
I attended a Navy “Open House” at the Mountaineers building in Magnuson Park in northeast Seattle last night. It was a very interesting and somewhat contentious evening. The gathering was called so that the Navy, the Washington State Department of Health, the Washington State Department of Ecology and other officials could present the story of the radioactive contamination of Magnuson Park and the plan that the Navy had for cleaning it up.
To start at the beginning of this story, it is necessary to go back to World War II when Magnuson Park was a U.S. Naval Air Base. Planes were repaired at the base. Part of the repair process was to refurbish the dials of instruments that were painted with radium paint so they could be seen in the dark. The old radium paint had to be stripped off and disposed of so the new radium paint could be applied. There were dedicated rooms in a couple of the base buildings for dealing with the preparation, application and disposal of radium paint. The old paint was flushed out of the buildings and into the drain system by piping. Radium is highly radioactive and highly toxic.
After the war, the base was repurposed several times and ultimately closed in the 1990s. There was a cleanup of toxic waste in the 1970s but apparently the radium pollution was not part of the cleanup. The base was decommissioned and sections were turned over to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration as well as the City of Seattle. In 2009, the Navy did an assessment of old base buildings that were going to Seattle with respect to any lingering contamination and concluded that there was nothing to be concerned about.
When the city of Seattle decided to renovate some of the base buildings in 2010, they went over old plans for the buildings and found that some of the rooms were labeled as radium painting and handling areas. When the Navy was called back in to test for radiation, they found hot spots of gamma radiation in several sections of the old buildings and nearby grounds. Gamma radiation can penetrate walls, floors and soil. In addition of the presence of radium, cesium-137 and strontium-90 were found. These are both serious health hazards. The contaminated areas were promptly boarded up and removed from public use. Fences were put up around areas where the soil outside of the buildings showed signs of contamination. However, there was no attempt to make the situation known to the public at large beyond some signage on the walls of the contaminated rooms and on the fences around the contaminated soil.
The situation at Magnuson Park began to seep into public awareness in March of 2013, nearly four years after officials of various agencies knew about the problem. But the problem was not officially presented to the public before the meeting last night. What the public found was that the various agencies had decided that the Navy had a good plan to deal with the problem as quickly as possible under a designation known as “Time Critical Removal Action.” Unfortunately, what the public also found out at the Open House was that this process circumvents the normal review and clean up of hazard waste sites with little opportunity for the community to express their concerns and recommendations.
