In a cascade of noise,
a landscape is reborn.
The setting of Vigor’s Shipyard
on Seattle's Harbor Island is far from untouched wilderness.
Here they work on everything from Navy vessels to the Washington State
Ferries fleet.
But this effort
is not about constructions of steel.
This is about softening a section of riverbank
for some of its oldest residents:
migrating salmon.
So we're dredging here to generate the clean fill
that we're going to place up here and build up the shallow water habitat.
That'll be about two and a half acres in size when it's done.
Alan Sprott is VP of Environmental Services at Vigor
and says when the company bought the site in 2011,
it inherited a legacy of contamination issues dating back to World War One.
Remnants of times when the environment was not always prioritized
in the quest for progress.
But much like in nearby Longfellow Creek,
salmon still returned to the Duwamish River every year to spawn and their young face
new hurdles returning to the sea like destroyed salt marshes
that provide a gradual transition from fresh water to the salty ocean
and food to grow. Vigor agreed to improve that journey as a condition
of a consent decree with federal and state governments and tribes
to settle historic environmental damage to the lower Duwamish.
And so our our solution to that problem was to take a really an underutilized
portion of the shipyard and create the shallow water habitat
that is at the mouth of the Duwamish river.
To that end, they removed an old wooden build way for ship construction
and with it, more than 5000 pilings coated with toxic creosote.
They took out two other piers and have removed silt laden with PCBs
and heavy metals.
With that contamination gone, the clean material
they take from the bottom now will be used to build up the shallow fish habitat.
They've partnered with Salmon nonprofit
Long Live The Kings and University of Washington
researchers for the project.
Salmon are incredibly resilient.
They will figure out a way to try to make a go of it.
And so what we're trying to do, again, is give them
give them a little bit of a boost.
Emily McCartan of Long Live The Kings describes this as a rest stop;
a relatively sheltered section of healthy, functioning estuary
that will let young salmon gather themselves on the way out to sea.
Shallow water will support vegetation, which attracts
insects for salmon to feed on.
So as their migrating out of the river and starting to hit the saltwater
for the first time,
they have a place where they can find food sources, they can gather energy,
and hopefully we'll see that eventually translate
into better survival.
Before work began, researchers sampled water and the diet of salmon
passing through here and across the river at Jack Block Park.
They will continue to monitor after completion to gauge success
and hope this can be the first step in a chain of industrial projects
to assist fish.
When you imagine healthy habitat for salmon, you would imagine
a really pristine flowing river with trees on either side
and, you know, really clean, clear water.
They need all of those things.
What we also know is that Seattle is not going anywhere
and we need to be able to figure out ways that the systems that work for humans
are also working for the environment and for the fish and wildlife
that also depend on them.
We're all interconnected.
Certainly salmon need all the help they can get.
Chinook spawning in the rivers of Puget Sound are listed as threatened
under the Endangered Species Act, and runs have been declining for decades.
You know, the expression goes, you know, the victim died of a thousand small cuts.
You look at Puget Sound as a whole.
You've hardened the shoreline.
We've reduced the grass beds and so forth.
No, we're not going to put Harbor Island back into
mudflats anytime soon.
But the small benefits that we can achieve
will pay off.
Back at Vigor, in-water
work is slated to wrap up in February and they'll also improve stormwater
controls to reduce runoff.
Then researchers will return over time to study how the fish are doing.
Hopefully, there will be more of them to follow.
For me personally, it's a really rewarding project to have been involved with it
from start to finish.
And like I said, it's something that's going to be on the landscape forever.
Long past
anybody that's involved in it is on the planet that will still be here.
Fish returning to a more natural setting in the heart of a forest of steel.
It’ll be exciting. That's what we're looking forward to.
More like what they knew for the many years before humans changed this place.
Hope is not lost when we have the opportunity to say there are salmon here,
we know that if we give them a chance, they will figure out how to survive.
We owe it to them and to ourselves to give them that chance.