The difference between this piece and Chris Dunagan’s piece yesterday, is that this points out more issues about the septic issues. As someone who lobbied in Olympia to put the monitoring and upgrading of septic systems in place to protect against the fish kills, the *lack of definitive science studies on this issue* was the reason we were pushing to get something done immediately by making sure the septic systems weren’t root cause. As mentioned in the article below, the fish kills of the last decade were unprecedented, regardless if the Oxygen levels have been shown to be bad in the past. Now that we have the data, we can tune the regulations to match the science. It proves, once again, that while science is expensive, making assumptions based on best guesses is also expensive, and ultimately angers the voting public. There are not a lot of extensive long term studies on the Sound. The Puget Sound Partnership needs to get even more studies underway, to make sure that policy decisions are based on accurate underlying data, and not best guesses. We saw a similar situation happen because of a lack of studies of the beaches under geoduck farms. Environmental groups called for a go slow policy on geoduck farm licensing, because the data was lacking. Now that the data is in, it shows that the long term effects are not as serious as many believed. Whether the size of farms running over decades and thousands of acres can be destructive to an ecosystem is certainly a valid question, but the Sea Doc study seemed to show that concern for the beaches in smaller farms is not the issue that it once was. Or did I misread that study?
In case you missed Christopher Dunagan’s account yesterday of the Hood Canal study, here’s Craig Welch’s report: The most comprehensive review ever of existing research on Hood Canal has concluded that septic systems aren’t a leading cause of the massive fish kills that have hit the hooked fjord over the years.
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019193768_hoodcanal19m.html