Concerns raised about beach debris and erosion at Blaine Marine Park

On the 21st of each month, Blaine resident Laura Friend visits the beach at Blaine Marine Park in order to collect data on marine debris. She is a volunteer with the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a citizen science project housed at the University of Washington. Her role is to keep track of large marine debris – any garbage bigger than half a meter – on the beaches of Blaine Marine Park, a park she chose to focus on back in 2016 when she first joined COASST.

Lately, however, Friend has been having second thoughts about her choice of Blaine Marine Park as her area of study. This is because she has noticed a significant increase in the amount of garbage on the park’s beaches. It has gotten so bad that she no longer enjoys going there to collect her data, which now takes twice as long as it did before.

“I’m sick of seeing the trash,” she said. “I want to quit Marine Park because it’s so disgusting with all the trash.”

Blaine Marine Park was built on top of a landfill, and Friend believes that with recent high tides and wind events, the beach is becoming increasingly damaged and eroded. She believes this erosion has caused the historic landfill to become exposed in certain areas of the beach. “It is dumping trash into the ocean,” she said. “Every month that I go down there, it’s trash, trash, trash.”

The city of Blaine is aware of this problem. In 2011, a Bellingham-based company, Element Solutions, prepared a report for the city regarding the Marine Park shoreline. Element was commissioned to come up with a Marine Park Shoreline Restoration Plan. The plan, conceptual in nature, lays out restoration concepts for the entire park and identifies grant funding that the city could pursue in order to help carry out the project.

A description of the project appears on the city website, and part of it notes that historic landfill material is a source of pollution into nearby marine waters. “In addition to the habitat and recreational improvements, the project will correct a recently exposed source of historic landfill,” reads the online description of the shoreline restoration plan. “Exposed household pollution is now exposed to Boundary Bay and nearby Drayton Harbor.”

The description continues: “During the King Tide storm on December 17, 2012, high wave action eroded the shoreline bank that contained a historic dump site. Material from the historic private dump (now owned by the city and contained in Marine Park) is exposed and garbage is falling onto the beach.”

Friend believes a more recent storm event, the December 20, 2018 storm that resulted in costly damage throughout Whatcom County, only exacerbated the problem. During the December 20 storm, gusts peaked at 60 mph and sustained winds reached 50 mph, causing storm surges to lift tall waves into Blaine and Birch Bay shorelines. She believes that such weather events will only become more frequent and intense with climate change.

According to city planner Alex Wenger, the Marine Park shoreline restoration project has already addressed one segment of the beach, near the apple tree and the picnic shelter. This was done using $50,000 of unmatched grant funds combined with another $40,000 of city contributions. “We were able to clean that garbage debris, remove it from the shoreline, cap it and bring in native materials such as rocks, boulders and logs to rebuild that headland,” he said.

However, Wenger said that much work remains, and that the project will require a large amount of funding which has not yet materialized. “The project is rather expensive,” he said. “We don’t have funding identified yet to do the full beach restoration work.” He said that the project is likely to exceed $750,000, and that the city may have to apply for grants from a number of different sources, including state agencies.

“I can’t really say what council is going to fund,” he said. “This one is a pretty big ask. It might take some other creative sources of funding to pull off this project.” Wenger said another option is to break the project up into phases.

Fortunately, the project “checks many boxes” and so there is a wide variety of grants that the city plans to apply for. This includes Puget Sound restoration funds, salmon enhancement funds and water quality improvement funds, as well as funding related to public access, recreation and the natural habitat.

The city is waiting on a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, which would allow the city to do restoration work in waters of the United States. “We’re not actually working in the water,” explained Wenger, “but when the tide’s out, the permit will allow us to do work at that level. It will allow us to rebuild the beach.” He said that the city expects to receive the permit soon, which will be one more step in the right direction, allowing the project to become “shovel ready.”

In the meantime, Friend will continue to keep an eye on the marine debris accumulating on the beaches of the park. “Coastlines are my field of study,” said Friend, a middle school science teacher in Ferndale who holds a master’s degree in coastal geology. “Collecting data is my passion, and citizen science is the way things need to go.”