The following are excerpts from conversations between Kim Dobson, host of Parallel University, and Harry Branch, marine biologist, which were broadcast on KAOS 89.3 FM in March 2025. You can listen to Parallel University every Thursday at noon on KAOS.
On Budd Inlet – Past and Present
Kim – There’s a couple of proposals that are going on Olympia’s West Bay Drive on old industrial land, and if you would see a photo there in the 40’s, you would see industrial activity going on along the shoreline, several sawmills and other industrial fabrication areas like Reliable Steel. There were large log rafts that were tied out into the bay…mostly the West Bay, lots of tugboat activity and lots of lots of log trucks in and out of West Bay Dr., and eventually there was Hardel Plywood, which was a co-op plywood operation where people owned shares in the company and you got dividends at the end of the year. So eventually Hardel’s burnt down about …25 years ago. …The city was not willing to give them a tax break for reconstruction and really didn’t see the value of having a plywood plant down on the waterfront, and so they went down to Lewis County where they …got a tax break, and the cost of electricity, because it was a public power county, was half that of Olympia‘s rate charged by PSE.… So that’s the story. There was supposedly a cleanup on the Hardel site and the workers at the factory told me that there were cracks in the concrete on the floor in the dryer room where they used urea formaldehyde glue, and when using the hot press, the glue would overflow onto the floor and it would get washed down in the cracks in the concrete and ended up in the soil down below. There were also a lot of diesel spills. So when it burnt down the city supposedly did an investigation of the cleanup that was paid for by Hardel and they signed off on it. … Which brings us to the problem of the pollution of Budd Inlet, and the amount of creosotes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, pentachlorophenol and dioxins in the benthic zones in the runoff areas from these industrial sites and that is both in East and West Bay.
Harry – You were describing the industrial history of the waterfront and it’s ironic. If you went back to about 1980 there was still a lot of the natural environment functioning here. We had the 1980 East Bay Marina EIS and they say that ghost shrimp and mud shrimp were abundant and widely distributed. There were perch, flounder, mussels, clams, shore crabs. These were abundant as were many birds. The 1979 Black Hills Audubon Christmas bird count there were 35 species including various grebes, scoters, loons, mergansers, ducks canvasbacks, American coots. Then we move up to 1986 we’re down to 21. By the year 2000, we’re down to 168 individual birds and varying species. Today you’d be lucky to see any birds at all. So what’s really happened between 1980 and today?
You think about downtown in the past – there were dray animals pulling wagons and horses were everywhere. In the forests there were bears leaving waste, and millions of fish dying in the streams. There were lots of nutrients. Today we run the surface waters through so many miles of culvert, 160 miles of surface water in culverts in Olympia, a stream in a pipe, where there’s no sunlight. No sunlight, no phytoplankton and no phytoplankton, no dissolved oxygen. So you know there’s one explanation why the dissolved oxygen levels in Budd Inlet are so low. It’s that we run all of our surface waters through culverts. This particular development in West Bay would be pretty much on top of a 470 foot long culvert. It’s intertidal waters. We take the estuary, the most important part of the watershed, the intertidal area, and run that through a long pipe. That’s what’s happened to Budd Inlet, modifications to structure.
There is also the destruction of the beach, especially the wrack zone is all important– it’s where forage fish spawn. That linkage between land and marine environment at the upper beach has been modified throughout Budd Inlet and especially along this area that we want to develop. So if we really want to improve the water quality in Budd Inlet and bring back some species we should begin by restoring ecological function and it should be science based. How could we get this beach back? How can we get this stream out of this pipe? And then put our developments into that plan. And that doesn’t mean humans can’t be there. I was thinking as far as this building goes that’s virtually on top of Schneider Creek, let’s go ahead and do that, but daylight the stream through the building and have a glass roof. I worked years ago in place in California as a busboy where the appeal was the stream ran right through the center. So there are ways to do this. You can mimic overhanging vegetation. You can mimic a large boulder, but have salt marsh and tide flats all around that and then plant eelgrass and work your development into your restoration and begin with science. Science tells us what to do. Design and engineering tell us how to do it. Now we’re starting with design and engineering and then trying to piece our restorations into it. It’s just backwards and it doesn’t work for anybody. If we would do this correctly, we could bring in outside funding for restorations. The permitting process would be easier. You wouldn’t have opposition in court, etc. Do it right and everything would happen a lot easier. It’d be more cost-effective and a better product. I hope that we can not necessarily completely stop this process, but at least get some sense into it.
…If we go back to Budd Inlet there’s Moxlie Creek and Indian Creek. Indian Creek especially has a big salmon run and maybe they verified Coho in there. There’s a great book written by Cecilia Svinth Carpenter. She was the tribal historian from the Nisqually tribe and according to her, the people lived in the estuaries of streams…Historically there was a village of people of about 80 individuals who lived in the estuary of Schneider Creek and probably a larger population in the estuaries of Moxlie and Indian Creeks.. Each had its own separate group of people, but they all were connected. Ecologically, that was their spot and each had its own name.
…I think it would be great to really find out what these names were. I’m sure Squaxin Park was not named Squaxin park. I think we could do better than that.
…These stream estuaries were very productive and life was good there. You know you could wander and gather berries and hunt but your home was the estuary, and we seem to have lost sight of that. We’re recognizing the importance of the river estuary, but we’re kind of overlooking streams. The whole thing was one complex, all of South Budd Inlet was a combination of stream and river estuaries and it was highly productive. I’m sure the birds and the salmon migrating through, maybe they didn’t spawn, but this estuary was a great stop for them going either way.
Kim – along the subject line of why is the water more degraded and why we have seen the disappearance of salmon runs in seemingly what should be very productive small streams in Puget Sound. The Department of Ecology and fish scientists found out that this chemical that is in runoff off the freeways and roads in arterials and creeks and rivers called 6PPD-quinone is deadly to coho salmon. and because of the concentration of people and cars in Puget Sound we have lots of this chemical coming into the side streams because of storm sewers and runoff from urban areas wherever there’s cars… And like you were saying about the food chain, it goes all the way to the orcas- when you poison the salmon with all of this 6PPDD-quinone, you’re effectively poisoning all of the spawning streams for the salmon and the primary food of the Puget Sound…
Harry – I don’t know what to do with the tires. You got to have the preservative or the tires wear quicker and it’s gonna be a hard thing to get around. I think it just gets overwhelming, but I also on occasion feel kind of positive like I think that there’s a growing awareness of a lot of these things and I think I’m getting a lot of positive feedback from places that surprise me lately and I think we can do it.
I moved into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1965. I was a student at San Francisco State and it was a couple of very interesting years and I remember an event called the Human Be-In where Timothy Leary made that famous statement “Turn on, Tune In, Drop Out,” which, as I was politically active at the time, I didn’t understand. He was followed up by Lawrence Ferlingetti and Alan Ginsburg and the way they explained it is maybe you’re not gonna end the war -you can’t do it. You just don’t have the power, but what you can do is to refuse to participate in all of it, the whole corporate system under which we are now being dominated -just refuse to participate and if we all would do that, it would be a remedy. Of course there are limitations to that… I have a good friend who is the longshoreman and he’s got 5 family members that are depending on him. He can’t just quit, so we all do what we can do. That means reuse, repurpose and refuse. I don’t buy anything new try to buy local food sources on the food, and eat low on the food web and drive an efficient car and advocate for what I can.
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You can read more of Harry Branch’s thoughts at gardenbayblog.com
“We have an opportunity — and a responsibility — to advocate for viable solutions. Whether that means preserving critical habitat, creating wildlife corridors, or reevaluating development plans, we must make it clear that economic growth should never come at the expense of ecological destruction.”
Esther Kronenberg writes regularly on environmental issues.
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