Legal Action Brought Against Waterfront Construction
Posted by the Kenmore Crow | Filed under Construction | 3 Comments
I received the following bit of news a couple weeks ago from some local citizens that have partnered with Waste Action Project, a Seattle-based “environmental protection organization” to bring legal action against Waterfront Construction, Inc. for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act (pdf of full text) in their activity at the LakePointe Mixed Use Development — a 45 acre site on the shore of Lake Washington at the mouth of the Sammamish River.
The notice alleges that Waterfront Construction “has violated and continues to violate the CWA (see Sections 301, 307, and 402, of the CWA, 33 USC §§ 1311, 1317, and 1342) and its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit.
The list of offenses Waste Action Project are alleging are as follows:
- discharges of bilge water
- discharges of welding waste
- illicit and/or unauthorized discharges
- failure to monitor stormwater discharges
- failure to adopt a stormwater pollution prevention plan
Over on YouTube, user crazyhazedaze has been posting videos of some of these activities since late last year.
Waterfront Construction has 60 days from September 10th to respond to the action before they will face a citizen lawsuit.
Water pollution has been an ongoing issue around the Puget Sound. According to a recent Seattle PostGlobe story, Washington State has plenty of violators of the Clean Water Act:
Even though 195 out of the Evergreen State’s 435 regulated facilities violated the Clean Water Act between 2004 and 2007, few got in trouble for it, according to exhaustive data posted at NYTimes.com. For every 100 violations in the state, there were only 8.6 enforcement actions.
And those are just the ones that were caught.
Clearly there is still plenty of work to do to ensure the cleanliness of our natural resources. We will continue to follow this developing story for you.
Tags: Construction, environment, Lake Washington, LakePointe, legal, waterfront, Waterfront Construction
