October 15, 2002

Environmental Watch: Ecobuilding Guild teaches rain harvesting

SEATTLE -- Reusing rainwater will be the subject of a Northwest Ecobuilding Guild presentation next week.

Topics will include systems to collect rainwater for toilet flushing and irrigation in existing and new homes.

Tim Pope, president of Northwest Water Source of San Juan Island, will discuss his experience with reclaiming rainwater as well.

Northwest Water Source is the single largest provider of rainfall catchment systems in the nation. It is the North American distributor for several major European suppliers of rainwater harvesting equipment. In the last four years the company has installed over 60 systems in San Juan County, with over 70 percent of the systems for potable use.

The presentation will be held Wednesday, Oct. 23, in the basement of the brick building at the Phinney Neighborhood Center, 6532 Phinney Ave. N. The program begins at 7 p.m. A $5 donation is requested for non-guild members.

Big Finn Hill Park gets $145,000 fish ladder

SEATTLE -- King County and the Denny Creek Neighborhood Alliance will dedicate a new fish ladder at 10 a.m. Oct. 18 at Big Finn Hill Park.

The project involved converting 230 feet of creek from a sediment-filled waterway under an eight-foot waterfall into what now looks like a naturally sloping stream through the woods, with large boulders, stream cobbles and large woody debris.

Work consisted of installing 16 weirs to create pools for fish. Volunteers planted native trees and shrubs. The volunteer group completed construction documents, biological assessments and obtained funding for the $145,000 project from the county, private and federal sources. Parks employees did the construction, using clay from a landslide to seal the bottom of the creek and woody debris from park storm damage.

1,000th business gets city lighting rebate

SEATTLE -- Interlake Childcare Center is the 1,000th business in the city to join the Smart Business lighting rebate program. The center near Greenlake will save $650 on its heating bills and more than 9,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year because of lighting improvements.

The owners were reimbursed $775, 42 percent of the total job cost, to replace 31 incandescent fixtures with compact fluorescent fixtures.

Information is available by calling the Conservation Help Line at (206) 684-3800.

PGE to remove 2 Sandy River dams

PORTLAND (AP) -- Portland General Electric will remove two dams in the Sandy River basin, an action that will improve conditions for salmon and steelhead.

The Marmot Dam, on the Sandy River, will go in 2007, and the Little Sandy Dam, on the Little Sandy River, will go in 2008. The dams lie just outside the western edge of the Mount Hood National Forest.

A settlement agreement detailing removal of the dams is to be signed Oct. 24 by PGE, four federal agencies, four state agencies, four conservation groups and others. Details of the plan were made public Friday at a meeting of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Besides improving conditions for salmon, the removal will relieve PGE, which owns the dams, of maintaining a low-output generating system at high cost.

The utility also will transfer 1,500 acres of lands near the dams to a nonprofit organization toward the creation of a 5,000-acre nature reserve.

The dams produce about 10 megawatts of electricity, less than 1 percent of the 2,000 megawatts of electricity PGE generates.

State task force seeks park funding

OLYMPIA (AP) -- Faced with the potential closure of more parks, a state task force is looking into ways to come up with more money to keep parks and other public lands open.

It's not an easy proposition.

With dwindling state funding amid a downturn in the economy, parks have become an easy target for budget cutters.

The state already has closed five parks. Tacoma's Metropolitan Park District is talking of "mothballing" more than a dozen parks, and King County is looking to shut down parks if it can't turn them over to cities.

Doubling the state tax on water and selling parking passes to outdoors enthusiasts are among the options under consideration.

Natural gas vehicles will fuel up at home

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Trips to the gas station could become obsolete for owners of an at-home fueling appliance for natural gas vehicles demonstrated for the first time last week.

Toronto-based FuelMaker Corp. said it will be the first company to mass-market a system that connects to a home's natural gas supply line to allow owners of natural gas vehicles to fuel up at home.

American Honda Motor Co., which owns a 20 percent stake in FuelMaker, hopes it will help expand the retail market of its Civic GX natural gas car beyond government fleet sales.

Natural gas vehicles have very low pollutant emissions and can help reduce global warming because the fuel burns less carbon. But their specialized tanks are more expensive and have shorter range than traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. They also lack a nationwide network of refueling stations.

FuelMaker's pump, called Phill, is about the size of a pay phone and can be installed in a garage or outdoors using a home's existing natural gas supply line. Drivers would leave the pump in the car overnight and have a full tank that could take them up to 220 miles in the morning.

FuelMaker President John Lyon said the system will go on sale next October for up to $2,000.

Natural gas vehicles are becoming increasingly popular for government buyers and public transportation because of their low emissions. A quarter of all transit bus orders made last year were for natural gas buses, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

Cracks delay test burns at Umatilla depot

UMATILLA, Ore. (AP) -- Test burns at the Umatilla Chemical Depot will not resume before November because of problems with the incinerator, environmental regulators said.

A recent Army inspection of the facility built to burn chemical weapons revealed cracks in the refractory bricks in the furnace, broken seals, cracked pipes and some areas that need recaulking, said Wayne Thomas, project manager with the Department of Environmental Quality.

The test burns were stopped last week because heavy metals emissions were exceeding allowable levels, state officials said.

Army officials were testing the incinerator's capacity, efficiency and the ability of its scrubbers to remove hazardous materials before they go out the incinerator's stack.

Levels of chromium and lead released from the stack surpassed the amount determined by the regulatory agency to be safe for the public. The lead values were only slightly more than the allowable limit. The chromium levels were double what's allowed.

Now, no one is sure when the destruction of mortar rounds, GB rockets, and artillery shells filled with deadly nerve agent will begin.