How far will we sprawl? Answer unknown because of lots subdivided decades ago

By Robert McClure
January 12, 2011

By Robert McClure

InvestigateWest

In addition to letting modern-day developers skirt the Growth Management Act and other laws, Washington’s provisions for vesting development rights over years and even decades pose a potentially ruinous development problem: thousands of building lots established before the growth law was passed in 1990.

For those lots, the vested building rights never expire. The same goes for small subdivisions — up to nine homes in areas designated for urban growth, and four houses otherwise.

Add courts' reading of the U.S. Constitution as prohibiting government from taking private property without just compensation, and you have a recipe, growth planners fear, for suburban sprawl that overtaxes roads and water supplies and other services in what are supposed to be rural areas.

Vesting protects thousands of building lots subdivided decades ago, many far too small to support a house under current codes. Statewide, there could be tens of thousands. But no one knows how many there are, or where.

Generally, county governments allow a single house to be built on any lot, no matter how small. (The exception comes when it would be unhealthy, such as a lot so small that drinking water would have to be drawn from near a septic tank. Some builders, though, try to find ways to use even these tiny lots. One in Kitsap County proposed to serve 78 homes on 12 acres with a small sewage treatment plant.)

In 2008 alone in just two counties — Pierce and Snohomish — building permits for more than 800 homes were issued for old lots established before the state Growth Management Act took effect, research by the Puget Sound Regional Council indicates.

Byline: 
Robert McClure
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State board limits developers' ability to avoid water rules; appeal expected

By Robert McClure
January 12, 2011

By Robert McClure

InvestigateWest

Far from the shores of Puget Sound lurks an under-the-radar environmental legal case that holds the potential to significantly set back efforts to protect the Sound from its largest source of toxic pollution.

Closely watched by builders and environmentalists, the case focuses on what happens when rainwater drains off roofs, streets, parking lots and other hard surfaces: It streams into nearby waterways carrying pesticides, fertilizer, oil, transmission fluid, dog poop and innumerable other residues of modern urban life.

The polluted water’s result: Poisoned oyster beds. Dangerous flooding.And the biggest  source of toxic pollution for Puget Sound. Even a threat to drinking-water supplies in Bellingham. 

In the case just ruled on by the Washington Pollution Control Hearings Board, environmental activists are challenging how the state Ecology Department is allowing Clark County, population 432,000 in southwest Washington, to comply with recently beefed-up rules to protect waterways from stormwater.

One aspect of the enormously complicated case is vesting. Clark County and the Building Industry Association of Clark County contend stormwater-control rules adopted by the county in April of 2009 don’t apply to developments approved earlier. The county and the builders contend that stormwater-control regulations are subject to vesting — that is, that they lock in as soon as the builder drops off development plans at city hall.

But, ruling from its offices in Tumwater, the pollution board last week rejected that notion, saying Clark County first dragged its feet in adopting new stormwater rules and then “unlawfully exempted” developers whose building plans were filed during an eight-month period.

Byline: 
Robert McClure
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Court backs strong Washington rules to rein in polluted rainwater runoff

By Robert McClure
January 7, 2011
in

In a ruling with statewide implications that hands a victory to environmentalists, the Washington Pollution Control Hearings Board rejected a system to control polluted rainwater runoff in Clark County that partially shifted the financial burden from developers to the public.

The board’s multi-pronged 2-1 decision shot down a special deal cut by the Department of Ecology for Clark County, saying Ecology punted on its responsibilities to rein in the fast-growing pollution source, instead allowing the county so much leeway that it amounts to “an impermissible self-regulatory program” when Ecology is supposed to be in charge. The board’s ruling holds that the resulting system violates the federal Clean Water Act and state law.

It’s unclear for now whether the state, Clark County or developers will appeal. The case is focused on rainwater runoff, known as “stormwater,” which is Puget Sound’s largest source of toxic pollutants and is a major factor in the decline of waterways statewide.

The pollution starts when raindrops hit hard surfaces – parking lots, roofs, streets, and so forth. That water coalesces into rivulets that run downhill toward the nearest river, lake, stream or bay, picking up pollution that transforms the water into a bouillabaisse of tainted substances including oil, gas, animal excrement, fertilizers and pesticides.

The board had previously ruled that southwestern Washington's Clark County and a handful of other large cities and counties must begin to require a set of building techniques known as “low impact development” to control the polluted rainwater runoff.

Byline: 
Robert McClure
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InvestigateWest's reporting brings health-care worker safety focus in Legislature

By Carol Smith
January 5, 2011
in
Byline: 
Carol Smith

Washington legislators plan to push this session to strengthen worker safety protections for health-care workers who handle chemotherapy drugs on the job, and to provide better tracking of cancers that develop from occupational exposures.

On Jan. 17, Sen. Karen Keiser introduced the first of the bills, SB 5149, which would require that the state cancer registry capture occupational data from cancer patients.

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, chair of the Labor, Commerce & Consumer Protection Committee, has drafted legislation that will create an occupational safety standard for oncology clinics and other places where chemo is used.

Both bills were developed in response to InvestigateWest’s investigation last year exposing the ongoing risk to health-care workers who handle chemotherapy for their jobs. The story appeared on our Web site, and in The Seattle Times, on MSNBC.com, and in an investigative report co-produced with KCTS 9 in Seattle.

“Chemotherapy drugs have been classified as hazardous by the Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA) since the mid-1980s, yet we still do not have adequate workplace safety protections in place for health-care workers who handle these powerful drugs on a daily basis,” Kohl-Welles said.  “This important legislation addresses the problem by establishing occupational safety standards that are specific to chemo-containing drugs.”

Such a standard, which does not exist at the federal level, would give state regulators the legal authority to crack down on lax safety practices, she said.

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Lawmakers to take up health-care worker safety following InvestigateWest reporting

By Carol Smith
January 5, 2011

Washington legislators plan to introduce two bills this session to strengthen worker safety protections for health-care workers who handle chemotherapy drugs on the job, and to provide better tracking of cancers that develop from occupational exposures.

Sen. Karen Keiser plans to introduce legislation to mandate that the state cancer registry capture occupational data from cancer patients.

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, chair of the Labor, Commerce & Consumer Protection Committee, is introducing legislation that will create an occupational safety standard for oncology clinics and other places where chemo is used.

Both bills were developed in response to InvestigateWest’s investigation last year exposing the ongoing risk to health-care workers who handle chemotherapy for their jobs.

“Chemotherapy drugs have been classified as hazardous by the Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA) since the mid-1980s, yet we still do not have adequate workplace safety protections in place for health-care workers who handle these powerful drugs on a daily basis,” Kohl-Welles said.  “This important legislation addresses the problem by establishing occupational safety standards that are specific to chemo-containing drugs.”

Such a standard, which does not exist at the federal level, would give state regulators the legal authority to crack down on lax safety practices, she said.

Kohl-Welles said that since InvestigateWest's series she has had several meetings with Department of Health as well as the Department of Labor & Industries representatives to discuss chemo safety issues and was not satisfied with the worker protections they described. "Specifically, according to their presentations, there’s nothing in place to ensure as best as possible protections for workers other than following federal guidelines which don’t have teeth in them."

Byline: 
Carol Smith
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How a new generation of rat poisons menaces children

By Robert McClure
December 13, 2010
in

Part 2 of 2

A 1-year-old boy starts vomiting and experiencing diarrhea. Later, ripped-up remains of a container that held rat poison are found behind the family’s television.

A mother puts out two green blocks of rat poison and they disappear. Her 2-year-old son breaks out in a fever. His stool is colored bright green.

A 2-year-old boy walks into a room carrying rat poison. Seeing blisters, his parents whisk him to the hospital emergency room, where he is hooked up to a cardiac monitor for several hours

Scenes like these – which were documented in a government report – have been playing out routinely in American homes for decades. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has known for a generation that kids have too-easy access to these super-toxic rat poisons.

Every year, more than 10,000 kids are getting hold of them, and virtually all of these calls to U.S. poison control centers concern children under the age of 3.

Black and Hispanic children living below the poverty line are disproportionately affected. For example, a study in New York found that 57 percent of children hospitalized for eating rat poison from 1990 to 1997 were African-American and 26 percent were Latino.

EPA reported that these rat poisons “are, by far, the leading cause of [pesticide-related] visits to health care facilities in children under the age of six years and the second leading cause of hospitalization.”

Poisoned children can suffer internal bleeding, coma, anemia, nosebleeds, bleeding gums, bloody urine and bloody stools. Authorities have known for decades that thousands of children each year are exposed – although, fortunately, most are not seriously injured.

Known as anti-coagulants, the chemicals prevent blood from clotting or coagulating. One is known as warfarin – the same chemical sold to people as Coumadin, a prescription blood thinner.

Byline: 
Robert McClure
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Super-toxic rat poisons mysteriously seep into our world

By Robert McClure
December 12, 2010
in

Part 1 of 2

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – With the spooky glow of his headlamp illuminating an antenna in his hand, Paul Levesque stalks one of Canada’s last remaining barn owls.


“Are you getting anything?” research team leader Sofi Hindmarch asks over a walkie-talkie.

“I got it!” Levesque responds. Then a few seconds later, dejected, he radios back: “No. I lost the signal.”

Working in darkness, with the quarter-moon obscured by clouds, these two scientists are trying to figure out what an elusive, radio-collared owl is eating along this country road just beyond the suburbs that ring Vancouver. Their mission is to determine whether the decline of Canada’s barn owl is tied, in part, to super-toxic rat poisons.

Scientists know that at least some owls are dying under gruesome circumstances, bleeding to death from stomach hemorrhages in an agonizing and days-long decline. The culprit: An extra-potent class of rat poisons that has flooded the market in recent decades, designed to more effectively kill rats, a food source for the owls.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Scientist Paul Levesque tries to locate a radio-collared barn owl. Photo by Paul Joseph Brown, www.ecosystemphoto.com

Six of 164 dead barn owls, barred owls and great horned owls in a 2009 western Canada study had rodenticide levels high enough to kill them outright, causing the fatal stomach hemorrhages. Pesticide readings in 15 percent to 30 percent of the others appeared toxic and seem likely to handicap owls in a variety of ways, scientists say.

Byline: 
Robert McClure
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Duwamish River: Have a say in cleaning up Seattle's biggest toxic waste dump

By Robert McClure
December 7, 2010
in
Byline: 
Robert McClure

Picture 12,000 dump-truck loads of dirt – enough to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools. This dirt contains some pollution -- but no one is really sure how much.

Swept downstream each year into Seattle’s biggest toxic-waste site, the Duwamish River – this mountain of dirt looms large as the public gets a chance this week to weigh in on how to clean up the part of the river set to be rehabilitated under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program.

 

 

Photo by Paul Joseph Brown

To see more photos of the Duwamish,go to www.ecosystemphoto.com

Seattle, King County, The Boeing Co. and the Port of Seattle – all major polluters of the Duwamish over the years – have laid out 11 plans that aim to clean up decades of accumulated toxic goop in the river. To scoop out some of the mess and bury at least some of the rest beneath clean sand, gravel and rock, the pricetags range from spending $230 million over 24 years to expending $1.3 billion over 43 years. 

The most controversial issues are related: Does the river need to be so clean that people can eat seafood from it regularly? And if so, does that mean polluted rainwater runoff flowing off a massive area of south King County – and bringing with it at least some of those 12,000 truckloads of dirt – must be cleaned up at an even higher price?

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