Skykomish: The Town They Lifted to Clean the Ground
Near Stevens Pass Area, Washington
The small town of Skykomish began as a railroad camp. In eighteen ninety two a guide named John Maloney, who had scouted for the Great Northern survey crews, settled here, and the spot was first called Maloney's Siding. When the railroad was completed and a post office opened, it took the name Skykomish.
Soon it became a division point, where crews changed and the helper locomotives that pushed trains up to Stevens Pass were based, and for decades the whole town lived and breathed by the railroad. That intimacy came at a price. From the eighteen nineties until the nineteen seventies, the railyard here served as a fueling and maintenance station, and oil and heavy metals soaked into the ground and seeped toward the river.
Cleaning it up became one of the largest environmental projects in the state. In the two thousands the railroad, by then Burlington Northern Santa Fe, agreed to a plan that eventually cost well over one hundred million dollars. To reach the contaminated soil, crews physically lifted twenty-two homes and businesses, moved the buildings aside, dug out the poisoned earth beneath them, and then set the buildings back down again.
