People who fish or collect shellfish from the Lower Duwamish Waterway may be invited to take part in a voluntary survey to tell researchers about their fishing habits.
Starting this October through next fall, multilingual staff from ECOSS, a south Seattle nonprofit, will approach fishers along the waterway to ask questions about catching and eating fish and shellfish. The survey will take about 10-15 minutes to complete. Survey staff will not ask for fishing license information and the information gathered from fishers will remain anonymous.
King County, City of Seattle, Port of Seattle, and The Boeing Company are carrying out the survey at the direction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology.
These agencies want to learn how to better protect people who collect and eat seafood from the Duwamish Waterway. The EPA listed a five-mile segment of the river as a federal Superfund site in 2001 because of PCBs and other contaminants in the waterway sediments.
Early cleanup efforts by King County, City of Seattle, Port of Seattle and Boeing that began in 2004 are underway and expected to reduce PCB levels in the waterway sediments by 50 percent even before Superfund cleanup begins several years from now. These “early action” cleanups will be completed in 2015.
Researchers hope the survey results will support better communication with communities and guide outreach to help fishers make healthy choices about catching and eating seafood in the years leading up to, during, and following the Superfund cleanup.
Seattle-based science and engineering consulting firm Windward Environmental led the survey design, and ECOSS will conduct the survey in the field. Public Health – Seattle & King County and the Washington State Department of Health are advising on the study and survey.
Additional information about the survey and cleanup is available at http://yosemite.epa.gov/r10/cleanup.nsf/sites/lduwamish or by calling Hanady Kader with EPA Region 10 at 206-553-0454.
