Rayonier—Cleanup or Coverup?

The October 23, 2019 edition of the Peninsula Daily News featured the following Letter to the Editor from PPF board member, Darlene Schanfald:

RAYONIER WORK

Is this what we waited two decades for—a coverup of Rayonier’s hazardous waste rather than a cleanup?!

When EPA was set to start the cleanup at the end of the last century, the local powers-that-be—city, port, chamber and others—decried how having a site listed on the federal Superfund Priority Cleanup list would hurt Rayonier’s bottom line and the area’s reputation.

So they worked with then-Governor Gary Locke and Ecology to insist Ecology could do the cleanup in seven years.

Seven years later, Ecology admitted that the department with cleanup oversight hadn’t the muscle.

It was handed off to the agency’s Toxics Cleanup Program, where it should have gone seven years earlier.

The new team came and re-assessed the water-sediment toxin loads, as well as upland soils around the town for dioxin. Now, 11 years later, Ecology has no plan in place to remove the dioxin—one of the worst contaminants—from residential yards.

Recently, Ecology informed us, 19 years after Ecology was put in charge of the cleanup, that it will not tax Rayonier (which is paying all cleanup costs, by the way) to clean up much.

Ecology’s preferred option—and no doubt Rayonier’s—is to minimize the company’s cost and let them cover up the hazardous wastes in the sediment with sand, and leave in place the toxins on the mill site.

Ecology needs to stand up for this community’s future and safety.

It should have the mill contaminants removed and the original nearshore restored.

Darlene Schanfald,
Sequim