Ecological Anxiety: How Far Does Seattle Park's Radiation Contamination Reach?

The chief concern for all parents whose children play at Magnuson Park in Seattle is whether the park’s potential radiation risk, recently brought to their attention, will shorten their children’s lives. Or their own lives, for that matter.

The answers, thus far, from state and federal officials have been unsatisfactory. In part because the radiation threat dates back to the 1940s, the uncertainty around it isn’t entirely the fault of the present day agencies involved. The problem with the park radiation can be seen as a much larger problem with radiation in public life. There are two dominant questions. Where exactly is the radiation? And how much exposure to radiation will cause serious harm? I will deal with the first in this post, the second in a later post.

Where is the radiation? The most frustrating aspect for activists – and for me – is that the U.S. Navy, the National Park Service and the City of Seattle should have known or at least could have figured out that there was radiation in the park two decades ago and pinpointed the exact locations of the contamination.

Construction for Naval Air Station Seattle (NAVSTA PS), where the park now sits, started in 1926. It became one of the air transport and ship outfitting support centers during World War II, and planes continued to fly in and out of the base until 1970.

Between 1988 and 1995, in preparation for turning the base property into another use, the Navy, working with the contractor URS Corp., studied the property. How carefully the agency studied it is now in doubt. What the Navy discovered and decided to tell the public is also in question. In May 2011, the U.S. Department of the Navy put out a report about its cleanup activities at the park, writing:

The condition of the property was described in the Environmental Baseline Survey (EBS) report (URS Consultants, Inc., 1996). The EBS described the significant operations and existing conditions at specific buildings and areas at former NAVSTA PS that were addressed in past environmental investigations. The EBS identified areas with potential environmental concern where storage or release of hazardous substances had occurred. No radiological contamination was identified in the EBS report.

And yet in 2009, the City of Seattle, which took over the site as a park in 2002, stumbled upon evidence of radiation that should have been obvious to anyone even vaguely paying attention. The Navy and the Washington Department of Ecology put out a joint fact sheet this year about the radiation in the park and said:

During planning of proposed renovations of Building 27 in 2009, the City of Seattle reviewed historical drawings and identified rooms labeled ‘Radium Room’ and ‘Instrument Shop’ in the South Shed of Building 27. Following this discovery, the City of Seattle reviewed drawings for Building 2 and identified a space labeled ‘Instrument Shop.’

How the Navy neglected to tell anyone about the “Radium Room” remains a mystery. But the city soon found out a few things, including:

From the late 1930s through the 1960s, airplane maintenance and storage activities included the use of radioluminescent (glow-in-the-dark) paint for the maintenance and repair of radioluminescent aircraft dials, gauges, and compasses. Historical Navy records confirm that the former NAVSTA PS received routine shipments of Ra-226, which was used to make the radioluminescent paint. These operations were commonly conducted in aircraft hangars, optical and instrument shops, and radium paint facilities like those identified in Buildings 2 and 27.

Glow-in-the-dark paint might sound innocuous, but then I remembered the Radium Girls. I first heard about them when reading Kurt Vonnegut’s 1979 novel Jailbird. You may have read about them in numerous other accounts. Vonnegut wrote:

It went like this: In the nineteen twenties the United States Navy awarded Wyatt Clock a contract to produce several thousand standardized ships' clocks that could be easily read in the dark. The dials were to be black. The hands and the numerals were to be hand-painted with white paint containing the radioactive element radium. About half a hundred Brockton women, most of them relatives of regular Wyatt Clock Company employees, were hired to paint the hands and numerals. … Several of the women who had young children to look after were allowed to do the work at home. Now all those women had died or were about to die most horribly with their bones crumbling, with their heads rotting off. The cause was radium poisoning. Every one of them had been told by a foreman, it had since come out in court, that she should keep a fine point on her brush by moistening it and shaping it with her lips from time to time.

Because the radiation is mixed in paint, it’s also more easily spreadable than other kinds of radiation. And when the city found the documents and the Navy decided it better take another look at the property, it found that the paint had indeed been spread. The buildings in question were contaminated with radiation. And, potentially making matters worse, the Navy found radiation in the piping and catch basins in the buildings, indicating that radiation had left the building through drains or other routes. The Navy appears to have studied at least some sections of the water system and sewer lines, but not extensively. The agency noted in the May 2011 report:

Video inspection of this line supported this identification, although the video inspection was abandoned because of an obstruction and was not completed. The obstruction appeared to be lead that had flowed into the pipeline when pipe joints were sealed.

The Navy also found radiation in the soil around the buildings, which has proved to be the part that is the most troubling to parents. Dirt in public places gets moved around a lot. And because radiation tends to linger for thousands of years, a radioactive patch of dirt next to the Radium Room theoretically could have become a soccer field decades later.

And so what if the radiation did move around? Will it really make anyone sick? I’ll explore that question in a later post.

Have your own ideas about radiation in public places? Send me a note at askantidote [at] gmail [dot] come or via Twitter @wheisel.

Image by Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Digital Collections and Content (DCC) via Flickr

Here are more of Heisel's blogs on the subject:

Ecological Anxiety: Is There Radiation Where the Children Play?

Ecological Anxiety: Radiation Fears Stoked by History, Politics, and Propaganda

Ecological Anxiety: How Much Radiation is Too Much?

Ecological Anxiety: Radiation Can Harm Drip by Drip Or With One Big Blast