Navy placing 10,000 yards of sand on Puget Sound seafloor as part of legal settlement

BREMERTON — The Navy is placing about 10,000 cubic yards of sand onto the seafloor of Sinclair Inlet as part of a legal settlement with the state, the Suquamish Tribe, and environmental groups.

A contractor's sand-filled barge currently rests above the former site of the USS Independence, a retired aircraft carrier whose hull was scraped for marine life in 2017 before it was sent to a Texas scrapyard for dismantling. But the tribe, along with other groups, alleged in a lawsuit the hull-scraping actually released copper, zinc and other pollutants into the Puget Sound inlet. 

The work, at a cost of $2.4 million, is known as the "Thin Layer Placement (TLP) project," according to Joe Kubistek, a spokesman for Naval Base Kitsap. The Navy completed a test plot prior to the heart of the work, which began on Aug. 15. 

Catch up:Navy, Suquamish reach settlement over aircraft carrier hull-scraping in Sinclair Inlet

The Navy notified the EPA and the state's Department of Ecology "that no water quality issues have been observed" during the work so far, Kubistek said.

The settlement requires the Navy to place sand at a depth of 4 to 9 inches over 8 total acres on the seafloor. 

"The actual volume of sand being placed will be determined by the requirement to achieve the prescribed layer thickness of coverage over the entire area, but is estimated to be around 10,000 cubic yards," Kubistek said. 

The Navy scraped the hull of the Independence, in mothballs at Naval Base Kitsap, "in order to minimize the risk of invasive species transfer," and it said it consulted with the National Marine Fisheries Service as part of the Endangered Species Act. The Navy cast said the work was a "gentl(e) scrub" of the marine growth, consisting mainly of kelp and barnacles.

But environmental advocates said the Navy should've obtained special permitting to do the work under the Clean Water Act or not do it at all because of the environmental shape of Sinclair Inlet — it has been targeted for cleanup by the EPA for three decades. The state attorney general's office, which joined the suit after the tribe and environmental groups, alleged "truckloads of solid materials, including copper and zinc," were released into Puget Sound.

"The Navy's decision to dump pollution into Sinclair Inlet without a permit was particularly egregious because of the waterway's already impaired state, and the vital need to focus on its recovery," Katelyn Kinn, attorney for the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, said at the time of the settlement. 

The agreement, reached in early 2020, also called for a decade moratorium for such hull-scrapings of Navy vessels in Puget Sound. As such, the USS Kitty Hawk, another former aircraft carrier within the mothball fleet of Puget Sound, had its hull scraped at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in one of only two dry docks in the Navy that can fit an aircraft carrier. The Kitty Hawk was also towed to Texas, where it's being dismantled at International Shipbreaking in Brownsville. 

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The project, completed by contractor McLean, Virginia-based Contrack Watts, will be completed by the end of October, Kubistek said. The settlement ordered the work to be done by the end of 2022.