Backgrounder:
Environmental Reasons Why This Is a Bad Project

Sea-Tac Airport isn't just a government-funded business that most of us use. It's also the single biggest polluter in Washington State. Large jet airports, like Sea-Tac, generate massive amounts of air pollution, water pollution, storm water runoff, and noise pollution - pollution unmatched by any other single source.

Historically, the Airport has done very little to control its pollution or to ameliorate its effects. It spends none of its profits on pollution control or cleanup. Profits are reserved to pay for expansion. If the Airport does any environmental work at all, it is work funded by the FAA, the State, King County taxpayers, or neighboring cities and school districts.

In its environmental impact statement for the third runway project, the Port made it very plain that it planned to do nothing to mitigate the additional environmental effects from the third runway. The only "mitigation" in the budget was money to buy out properties needed for the runway. That is not so much mitigation as it is expansion.

This touched off an impact-by-impact battle to get the Port either to halt the project or to deal fully with the impacts. The Port has vigorously avoided admitting that there are any impacts and has only been willing to mitigate them if forced to.

$6 Million Dollars for an EIS That Tells Two Conflicting Stories

The Port spent six million dollars writing an environmental impact statement that ran several thousand pages - assuring that few people actually would read it. But those who did noticed a large, very obvious problem. In the "benefits" section, the EIS claimed that the runway would double Sea-Tac capacity but in the "impacts" section, the EIS claimed that the runway would produce no increase in arriving air traffic (and thus, no impacts).

When the Highline cities, through their Airport Communities Coalition, took the Port to court, pointing out that the runway could not both double the operations and not increase them at all, the Port simply argued that the law did not require them to tell the truth in an impact statement, just write an impact statement. In one of the worst decisions it ever made, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed with the Port.

To this day, the Port maintains that the third runway will create no new significant pollution. It has never revised the EIS.

Jets Don't Create Air Pollution

The brown bubble you can see sitting over the Highline area from Seattle is jet plane pollution from Sea-Tac. Jets give off great amounts of pollution, including very fine particulates. Recent studies show that such particulates are more likely to penetrate deep into the lungs and are implicated in higher rates of asthma & lung cancers, so frequently observed in airport communities. Jet fuels also contain a known carcinogen (benzene), thought to be a source of unusual hot spots of brain cancers near airports.

But no federal agency monitors or measure jet particulate pollution. The Federal Clean Air Act only covers large particle particulate pollution of 10 microns or greater, much larger that the fine particles of jet pollution. It also doesn't cover toxic substances like benzene.

In the 1990s the U.S. EPA attempted to issue a new rule requiring monitoring of particles down to 2.5 microns in diameter, but the EPA was unable to overcome the pressure from special interests opposing the rule. So, the primary pollution from jet engines around airports is not measured, is not known. Sea-Tac Airport has vigorously resisted monitoring jet-plane air pollution. Neither the Airport, the EPA, or the State's Puget Sound Air Pollution Control Agency is interested in the highly volatile benzenes that fall on our neighborhoods when fuel is dumped over urban areas. Because it is not measured, it doesn't exist!

Well, serious air pollution from jet planes does exist. It is a health issue, and some day our society will have to deal with it. In the mean time, people fall ill, children develop asthma, and older folks die too soon – off the official radar screen.

Jets Are Silent

Jet-plane noise is a particularly intrusive, annoying type of noise. It causes health problems, has a severe effect on classroom learning, and results in serious depression of property values – which in turn harms individual residents, the social fabric of communities, & the viability of local governments. One study shows that residents within one quarter mile of the flightlines lose 20% of the value of their homes to airport noise.

The Port provides little mitigation for noise impacts – most of it too little & too late. The basic two programs are home insulation & buy-outs. The buy-outs do not lessen noise – they simply displace the neighbors. Each round of buy-outs has been followed by expansion of activities or of the campus, or both – leading to a new round of buy-outs. The Port demands that homeowners receiving insulation for second-runway noise agree not to sue over third-runway noise.

The Port uses noise-measurement & reporting methods that seriously underestimate the true noise impacts, & that rely on inaccurate computer modelling. Real-world monitoring is carefully avoided. Listening to the complaints from the public is not a serious concern. Port noise maps are based on annual averages of noise, rather than on individual events, & such maps do not report the full impact of past, present, or future Sea-Tac noise. According to its website, the Port continues to rely on its 1990 Noise Program which was found to be wholly inadequate by an independent panel of experts in 1993.

Although noise-reduction studies are supposed to be done fairly frequently, the Port vetoes most of the effective recommendations such studies produce.

Weirdly, the EIS for the third runway shows noise only for the highest impact area of 65DNL. ("65DNL") is a average noise level for twenty four hours: 200 jets an hour at an earsplitting 80 decibels creates approximately 65 DNL average.) According to the Port's EIS, jets are silent the instant they pass 65DNL line. In the fairyland of the third runway EIS, jets that make enough noise on one side of the street to increase the rates of miscarriage, deafness in children, high blood pressure and a host of other illness, make no noise across the street. And no noise in Seattle, Federal Way, Mercer Island, or Bellevue.

What Water Pollution?

Construction of the runway embankment requires filling in or otherwise damaging more than 20 acres of wetlands, a stream relocation, & creation of a great amount of new impermeable surfaces. All of this does harm to local streams, ponds, & the wetlands that clean & nourish the streams. A new runway would be a new source of pollutants, which need to diverted or removed from Airport run-off. At present, the Port's run-off all finds its way, mostly untreated, into Puget Sound.

The Port has consistently understated the scope of these problems, starting with its runway EIS, & carrying through in its three different applications to the Department of Ecology for construction approval, & in its pending general water-pollution permit. The neighbors are not fooled. They know that Miller, Walker, & Des Moines Creeks are sometimes toxic to the fish that use them. They see local ponds turn vile green with scum. They see mounds of foam in local creeks. They see the creeks running opaque with silt from construction work. These problems – minimized, unaddressed by the Port – will continue to drive local opposition to the runway & other Airport expansion projects. The true costs of curing these problems have yet to be disclosed

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