The Council President seemed to be defending the placement of an asphalt plant in this sensitive natural area next to the Cedar River and over Renton’s sole-source aquifer

A reader wrote to me and said their friend wrote to City Council about the asphalt plant. Their friend got a lengthy response from the Council President, and they asked for my thoughts on this letter.  I said it had some similarities to the message that the Public Works Director had put out a few days earlier, but no longer had the sections that I had easily debunked in this blog post.  This letter offered a new set of arguments, probably also promulgated by Renton’s Public Works Director.  These argument are equally wrong.

The note the reader sent from the Council President is shown in sections in red below, and my responses are in green.  My responses are not copyrighted so, please feel free to send them back in response to his letter.

Council President: As part of the internal environmental review, the Public Works Department evaluated the potential contamination risk to the city’s drinking water sources by the proposed site activities and determined the risk should not cause concern for the following reasons:

The city’s Maplewood Wells do not pump from the shallow Cedar Valley Aquifer. The Maplewood Wellfield is drilled into the deep production aquifer (confined aquifer) that is encountered from approximately 135 to 345 feet below ground surface. The Maplewood Wells are located approximately 3.2 miles from the proposed Asphalt Plant .

Randy’s response:  Renton’s wellfield monitoring study makes it clear that the aquifer is an underground river that  flows from Cedar Valley recharge areas (including near the Asphalt plant) to the Maplewood Golf Course wellfield area, and then to the areas near our downtown wells.  Water can easily move underground, and the dissolved contaminants like benzene and heavy metals will not be completely filtered out.

We’re not pumping fossil water out of our aquifer.  We’re pumping water that has accumulated in the aquifer recharge zone during the last decade or so.  The water is not sealed off from the surface, or else the aquifer would be empty.  Renton is pumping billions of gallons per year from the aquifer.  We don’t need to intentionally introduce heavy metals and other contaminants from new and recycled asphalt into it. We should remain assertive about protecting our recharge zones with whatever means we have available.

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