The Superfund Bay: Commencement Bay's Industrial Legacy
Near Tacoma, Washington
Commencement Bay is a working harbor. It has been a working harbor since the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived in the eighteen-eighties and the tideflats south of downtown were filled and developed into one of the most active industrial waterfronts on the Pacific Coast. For most of the twentieth century, that work left the water in a condition that environmental regulators eventually classified as a federal Superfund site.
The contamination had multiple sources. The ASARCO smelter, which operated from its purchase by the American Smelting and Refining Company in nineteen hundred and five through most of the twentieth century, discharged heavy metals into the bay over decades of operation. The smelter processed copper ore and in doing so released arsenic, lead, and other metals into the surrounding soil, water, and air.
Neighborhoods near the smelter, the company town of Ruston, to which the smokestack was attached, and the surrounding Tacoma residential areas, received elevated arsenic deposition over generations. The Thea Foss Waterway, the inlet that runs north-south along the eastern edge of downtown Tacoma, was designated a Superfund site in nineteen eighty-three, among the first marine Superfund sites in the nation. Cleanup of the St.
Paul Waterway, one of the bay's industrial channels, was completed by nineteen ninety-one, making it the first marine Superfund site in the country to be declared clean. Other portions of the bay required longer remediation timelines. The ASARCO smelter ultimately closed.
The company went through bankruptcy in two thousand and five, with environmental liabilities at twenty Superfund sites across the country among the factors that drove it into insolvency. In Tacoma, the former smelter site required extensive remediation before it could be repurposed. The Dune Peninsula at Point Defiance Park, which opened in two thousand and nineteen, occupies land that was once part of that contaminated zone.
The bay today supports an active shipping port, recreational boating, and recovered fish and wildlife populations that biologists consider a genuine environmental success story, though the sediment record of the industrial era remains in the bottom of the bay, a legible archive of what was put there.
