I’m talking about Brightwater.

Environment groups regularly intervene to keep cows away from stream banks, but acquiesced to Ron Sims over building a 36- million-gallon-a-day sewage treatment plant on top of a sole-source aquifer serving more than 10,000 customers and adjacent to an important salmon-bearing stream.

It’s argued Brightwater is needed to accommodate growth in our region, but we should not abandon common-sense environmental protections in the process. And that’s what we appear to be doing.

Kobe can happen here

Brightwater is wedged between major branches of the South Whidbey Island Fault, on a site prone to liquefaction. Other potential plant sites were rejected because of proximity to faults that were much farther away.

King County did seismic trenching to confirm the fault location at the north end of Brightwater, and moved structures south as a result. However, it has refused to trench the potential fault to the south. Why is that?

Because the county knows that if that fault were confirmed, it would become illegal to build Brightwater on that site.

International Building Codes, now state law, don’t permit any structure, including sewage tunnels, to be built across known surface faults.

The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, showed why that’s good policy. In that disaster, sewage lines like Brightwater’s ruptured where they crossed a surface fault. The entire contents of Kobe’s sewage system – over 100 million gallons – emptied into Osaka Bay.

If that happened here, where would all the sewage and toxic chemicals go? Directly into the aquifer, polluting it for decades. Erupting to the surface, millions of gallons of raw sewage would devastate Little Bear Creek, flow through downtown Woodinville, down the Sammamish River, and into Lake Washington.

King County claims it can shut off the pumps and stop that from happening. But in a major earthquake, would human operators remember to, or be able to, turn off the pumps and valves?

They also say such an earthquake is unlikely during the plant’s 50-year design lifetime. Are you willing to take that bet?

King County is now determined to make it impossible to find the fault at the south end of the site. Claiming it’s doing “grading,” it’s about to dig a hole 90 feet long, 24 feet wide and 54 feet deep for a conveyance tunnel portal. Such deep soil disturbance would prevent seismic trenching from verifying faults on the site.

Why the rush to dig this hole? When the evidence is unfavorable, bury it.

After the Katrina disaster, you’d think we’d have learned to be more careful about siting and designing public facilities involving great risk to people and property, and to listen to the USGS and internationally recognized geology experts like Dr. Robert Yeats who has repeatedly warned against this Brightwater site.

Nope.

Instead, King County wants to terminate public review of Brightwater. It recently changed the rules to end appeals of its flawed and incomplete environmental impact statements.

Under the new rules, such appeals can’t occur in King County because the project is being built in Snohomish County. But the appeals can’t occur in Snohomish, because King paid Snohomish $70 million in exchange for an agreement to rubber-stamp the EIS and declare it adequate.

Something smells, and it’s not the sewage.

There are better alternatives

There’s no need to rush ahead with Brightwater anyway.

King County’s own figures show that average daily flows into existing sewage plants are trending downward as people conserve more water.

They also show that the main problem is stormwater getting into the sewage system. King County’s plan for reducing inflow and infiltration indicates that up to 22 million gallons per day could be kept out of the system by spending less than $100 million on fixes. We can free up existing capacity equivalent to 60 percent of Brightwater for less than 7 percent of the cost.

Even if we agree that more sewage treatment capacity is needed, why build one huge plant with long conveyance lines vulnerable to earthquakes, when we could build compact plants and distribute them around the area? Such plants built with the latest technology are relatively inexpensive, don’t stink, wouldn’t need long conveyance lines that cross faults, and wouldn’t be a single point of failure.

We stopped the monorail when we decided it didn’t make sense. It’s not too late to do the same with Brightwater.

State Representative Toby Nixon (R-Kirkland) represents the 45th Legislative District, which includes Woodinville, Duvall, Carnation, and parts of Kirkland, Bothell, Redmond, and Sammamish. He also serves on the executive committee of the Washington state chapter of Republicans for Environmental Protection.