Sunlight shafted through the water, jade green and clear. Baby salmon swam past, shining silver glitter amid waving fronds of bull kelp.
Right overhead, people were walking, passing over glass blocks set in the concrete of the seawall to allow light to pass into the waters of Elliott Bay.
While it is right up against a city of hundreds of thousands of people, the bay, in one of the most urban areas of Puget Sound, is alive.
Seattle’s new Waterfront Park development — a decade and a half and $800 million in the making — includes a rebuilt seawall. It works to reconnect the city to the glittering water of Puget Sound. For the first time in more than a century, people can dip their toes in the saltwater of the bay at pocket beaches. And an invitation to linger along the waters of Elliott Bay is repeated on benches, overlooks, tables and a grand promenade with resplendent plantings, public art — even swings.
The whole waterfront is a window into an underwater world. So just how is that underwater world doing? Snorkeling here is a surprise.
So much life is going about its saltwater day, right here. Snails no bigger than your pinkie nail trundle up blades of eelgrass. A crab, well, crabs along, its sideways scuttle across the bottom headed toward a tasty morsel known only to it. A moon jelly pulses ghostly white and graceful, no brain, no heart, no spine, no problem. Its tentacles adrift in the current, it is an ancient life-form carrying on just fine in this urban bay.
None of these wonders are visible from above the water’s gleaming surface. Ah, but poke your head beneath, and another world is right there to be seen living with us — and dependent on our accommodation and care.
The $330 million replacement seawall was completed in 2017 and has helped accommodate salmon and other aquatic life. Glass blocks and grating in the seawall are a way to be a bit more fish-friendly. Shallowing up the bottom and adding complexity and unevenness to the seawall also provides a place for sea life to grow, rest and feed. It’s a step up, ecologically, from the deep, dark, concrete wall that used to be there, said Jason Toft, principal research scientist at the Wetland Ecosystem Team at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington.
Monitoring surveys have shown that the design has improved the distribution and foraging by fish, Toft and his colleagues have reported in scientific papers published in 2020 and in 2022. All amid the people, the ferries slinking to and from the dock, the oil tankers brooding at anchor, and the container ships lumbering into port.
A YouTube highlights video of the UW team’s monitoring work at the seawall includes salmon, adult and juvenile (by the thousands), perch, sand lance, jellyfish, three species of crabs, green urchin, lingcod, healthy abundant underwater plants, on and on.
“Not many people give this a second look,” but it’s very much alive, Toft said of the community on the other side of the seawall. “It’s a whole habitat corridor that didn’t used to exist.”
The modified seawall doesn’t, of course, restore the Elliott Bay shoreline that used to be, Toft acknowledged, but the seawall project incorporated ecological benefits into necessary human infrastructure.
That is quite a triumph in so urban a setting. This bay was once so filthy that Namu, the world’s first captive killer whale, died in 1966 after just a year in the waters of Elliott Bay. The cause was infection from untreated sewage.
Voters paid to build modern sewage treatment beginning with the West Point plant that same year.
The bay and its estuary where it meets the Duwamish River are highly urbanized and industrialized. With steam shovel and suction dredge, the bay and its juicy, abundant landscape of mud flats, wetlands, marshes and estuary were diked, drained, filled, straightened, channelized, hardened and paved. By the 1940s, the estuary had been transformed to an industrial waterway. More than 97% of the estuary was eliminated and Elliott Bay, into which the river flows, is now basically a bathtub with a hard rim.
Before the beginning of modern water quality regulations, culminating in the passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972, industries also discharged a witch’s brew of contaminants directly into the bay. Some of that pollution is still with us — along with chemicals of emerging concern. It’s not enough to work at restoring the physical habitat; chemical pollution has to be cleaned up too, or the improved habitat just lures fish to a contaminated soup.
Sampling the sole
The research vessel Chasina dropped anchor in Elliott Bay, right at the heart of downtown Seattle. It was time to see just what some of the bottom fish of the bay, English sole, could reveal about the water quality and sediments. That is where some of what we think we have flushed or rinsed or washed away can be found: Pharmaceuticals. Flame retardants. Pesticides. Herbicides. Poisons. Pollutants.
Scientists from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife regularly trawl the bottom of the bay and bring up English sole, which they sample for toxic substances. After one quick trawl this spring, the crew had their quota: 70 sole. It was time to clear off the galley table and get to dissecting the catch.
One by one, a team of scientists took the fish, cut into them with scissors and scalpels and sucked out samples of blood, liver tissue, and bile — so very dark green! — for laboratory analysis.
English sole are a good candidate species for study of the benthic community because they’re bottom-feeders and can live 20 years.
The Puget Sound English sole sampling work has been revealing. Male fish are showing female characteristics, probably because of exposure to pollution, such as estrogens in the water — residue from birth control pills in wastewater, which is not removed by sewage treatment. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and other long-outlawed pollutants also still show up in these fish, because they are in sediments and washing into the water from other sources, including stormwater and the Duwamish River, which flows into the bay.
PCBs are increasing or remaining at high levels in English sole here, and the monitoring team sees high PCB levels in other species as well: juvenile Chinook, plankton and mussels.
“The contaminants are just not declining at the rate you would expect or want,” said Louisa Harding, research scientist with WDFW.
This pollution could be having broader impacts; the team detects high levels of PCBs in the food web. Combinations of pollutants in the water, from personal care products to residue from tires, pharmaceuticals and more might also be affecting species in ways not yet understood, Harding noted.
A Superfund cleanup is underway in the Duwamish to address the legacy of decades of industrial pollution.
Data shows that where big cleanup efforts are made, it can make a difference. Sinclair Inlet, which underwent an intensive cleanup, is showing an improvement in meeting targets for toxics in aquatic life, set as part of the data gathered by a suite of partners to track the health of Puget Sound. Other areas, including the Seattle waterfront and the Duwamish, are not meeting targets.
Harding hopes that the Duwamish cleanup and other efforts to lessen human impacts on the water will make improvements in the health of aquatic life in the bay. “That is the hope we have,” Harding said, “that the species and the habitat will find a way if we let it, and get out of the way.”
Still here
The Lower Duwamish Waterway and Harbor Island are as urbanized as it gets: These are places completely altered for industry. And yet, even here, a bit of restoration work is underway.
Vigor Shipyard in 2024 completed a $30 million project undertaken as part of the company’s responsibility in the Harbor Island Superfund Site cleanup. The company over two years tore out two derelict piers and a wooden shipbuilding dock and modified just under 3 acres to create habitat for native plants, insects and salmon. It was a big cleanup, too: including removal of about 4,000 pilings, imbued with creosote, a toxic wood preservative, and 10,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment. Gone.
After tearing out the bad, the goal was to construct some good: a pocket estuary, intended to be a kind of salmon rest stop. Crews shaped an embankment to create an intertidal mud flat area and adjacent marsh that floods at high tide. On the upland backshore, plantings of native vegetation were selected to attract insects, which can provide higher quality food for juvenile salmon as they migrate to the ocean.
Alan Sprott, vice president for environmental services at Vigor, said it was gratifying to see salmon come back to the restoration site already.
“This will be on the landscape long after we are gone and that is something that is rewarding,” Sprott said.
On a spring morning, Toft and the UW Wetland Ecosystem Team and staff from the nonprofit Long Live the Kings were at the site to see if fish are using the habitat.
What an intensely industrial place: As the sampling team worked, a truck was delivering fuel to Vigor by the tractor-trailer load. A C-130 transport plane on its way to somewhere rumbled low over the Duwamish. Shipping containers bright as children’s building blocks crowded the river’s opposite shore.
But life finds a way. A goose fenced out of the new plantings settled on eggs on her nest of sticks, nonchalantly fluffing her feathers. A harbor seal cruised and a fish jumped. New plantings of alder, Douglas fir, salmonberry, snowberry, shore pine and more were thriving on the upper banks of the restoration. Lower and in the water, large, woody debris was placed to help add some of the natural complexity that would normally be found in a side channel.
With a net cast from shore, the monitoring team hauled in a leaping catch.
The crew put the fish in buckets with aerators, and identified, weighed and measured each fish. Toft also poked a syringe full of water in each fish’s mouth, gently pushing the water down its gullet to force up its stomach contents, to see what the fish were eating.
“Wild coho! Looks like a pretty healthy fish!” Toft said, palming the silvery coho, with glints of aquamarine, just a little over 4 inches long. Bits of partially digested crustacean, a fly or two; at least some of these fish were eating, the team determined as they upchucked their charges’ breakfast.
While this environment will not be as it was before, Toft and the lab are monitoring what these sorts of efforts at the urban waterfront’s edge can do to restore a bit of its original ecological function and condition. Even here, in a manufactured pocket estuary, constructed on a human-made island, in a channelized river, where it meets the hardened banks of Elliott Bay.
“To me it’s fascinating that there are salmon here,” Toft said. “You can find some hope in it.”