Letters to the Editor: Mason County Journal

Letters to the Editor: Mason County Journal.

Apparently, Mason County thinks that it is okay to subject its residents to potential disaster, a disaster that which if unfolded, would render a significant chunk of Mason County entirely unlivable. Recently, the residents of the Lake Limerick community have been learning of a planned 18-million-gallon septic lagoon which would be built on Webb Hill. The fact that a Determination of Non-Significance was filed shows that the county put its bottom line and the almighty dollar above its residents. In what world, is this acceptable?

For one, the emergency contingency plans for the septic lagoon are outright disastrous. According to files available publicly through the county website, the emergency spillway (and failure mechanism itself) calls for the release of the contents of that lagoon to be directed straight into Cranberry Lake.

It might be pertinent here, to discuss the significance of Cranberry Lake, and more importantly, the Lake Limerick area for which Cranberry Lake serves. In 1966, engineers with the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a dam on Cranberry Creek, an outflow of Cranberry Lake. Within a year of that dam’s construction and completion, the Lake Limerick community was established, and soon after, a nine-hole golf course constructed around the lake’s western end. In fact, the Lake Limerick Clubhouse sits just one quarter mile from where Cranberry Creek’s original path widens to become Lake Limerick.

Today, there are over 1,000 homes, over a dozen home-based businesses (including my own), a golf course, plus a grocery store, two restaurants and a firehouse that are all dependent on the water that flows out of Cranberry Lake and into Lake Limerick.

It doesn’t end there. The potential for unmitigated disaster - the likes of which we haven’t seen since Love Canal or the Hinkley, California environmental disaster which made Erin Brockovich a household name – are far too great to bear.

The climate of the Pacific Northwest in recent years, has seen rainfall events occurring on a more severe and more frequent basis. What used to be “100-year-floods” are occurring on an average of every fifteen to twenty years now. As a case example, on December 3, 2007, the Pacific Northwest was besieged with record-breaking rainfall after two days of intense snowfall which measured over three feet deep in parts of Mason County. Early on the morning of December 3, temperatures skyrocketed from just below freezing to well above 60 degrees – temperatures which are otherwise outright unheard of anywhere in the month of December.

The resulting rapid rise in temperature, combined with over seven inches of rain which fell in a 24-hour period, pushed the Skokomish River out of its banks to a record-shattering flow which actually broke the USGS flood gauge which sits on the south end of the Highway 101 crossing. Every mountain-fed river in the state saw similar records shatter that day. Down in Chehalis, the Chehalis River flooded and subsequently closed Interstate 5 for over a week, while engineers waited for the water to recede and to repair the damage.

It stands to reason, that the planners of this septic lagoon plan to have it at maximum capacity during the winter months, which is the reason I write this letter. Had that septic lagoon been in operation in December, 2007, it would have been overtopped and we would have been witness to an environmental and potential economic disaster that would’ve likely spelled the end of the Lake Limerick community.

And as we’ve been witnessing, climate change has been occurring at a much more rapid rate in recent years. As a former KOMO-TV WeatherWatcher for the Shelton area (and owner of my own observatory in Mason County for which I’ve been a NASA contributor), I’ve kept weather records on file for the last two and a half decades for Mason County. The incidents of rainfall which would push that lagoon over its design capacity aren’t far from becoming 10-year events. Since the Skokomish River shattered records in 2007, it has flooded significantly four times since then. In fact, the Skokomish River came close to tying that record in a 2009 event, and even later, in a 2012 event. Each of those flooding events would’ve spelled disaster for that lagoon, and all of us who happen to be downstream of it.

What’s infuriating about all of this, is that per the county’s own files, we are on our own if that disaster were to unfold. That’s what makes it even more unacceptable is the fact that the county seems to have “fast-tracked” the approval and application process on this. Again, I ask, in what world is this ever acceptable? When you have the potential to place a significant chunk of Mason County under an environmental and economic threat, the residents have a right to have their say in what goes on. They have a constitutional right to have their voices heard in this.

Furthermore, they have a right to have their say in telling the county “Not here!”

This septic lagoon is a bad idea, one in which must be stopped.

Signed

Steve Rosenow
Lake Limerick, Washington.