The Whatcom County Parks & Recreation department has requested more than $600,000 to clean up outdoor lead contamination at the county-operated Plantation Rifle Range.
During a public information session about the range on Wednesday, county staff answered questions and heard comments and criticism about the lead mitigation project.
According to county staff, lead has never been properly removed and disposed of at the high-power range at Plantation, which formally closed Nov. 1.
“Lead is a known issue at shooting ranges, and periodically, you go in and do lead reclamation,” said Christ Thomsen, the operations manager for the Parks & Recreation department. “We have not done that since we started operating [the site].”
Since the county took over operations in 1971, between 3–6 tons of lead accumulated across both outdoor ranges, all of which will need to be removed from the soil.
Much of the concern, Thomsen said, is about lead leaching into nearby streams and wetlands, which feed resident water wells and, eventually, Lake Samish.
“There’s concern about the potential for lead migrating into the wetlands … and the adjacent stream,” he said. “We developed a monitoring plan to monitor … potential lead in the surface.”
The county has not detected “actionable” levels of lead in the water since it began monitoring in 2020.
Monitoring the water levels is part of the county’s Expedited Settlement Agreement (ESA) with the Washington State Department of Ecology, which monitors waste and water pollution around the state.
Through the ESA, the county committed to site cleanup, and is obligated to prevent further lead deposits around the site, as well as to stop shooting over and into the creek and prevent erosion of the facility’s impact berms, according to the ESA.
The Parks & Rec department estimates the cleanup process for both outdoor ranges will be around $655,000 total, and has requested the funding from the county through the 2023-2024 budget, which will be voted on by the Whatcom County Council next week.
“That, we’re hoping, is more than enough for cleanup,” Thomsen told attendees at the information session. “It also includes any assessment work that we need to do, and we also put some funds in there to look at future operations, what improvements might we need to make for continued operation.”
Several residents of the housing developments near Plantation attended the meeting, concerned about lead contamination in their drinking water, as well as future operations at the range.
Neighbors expressed frustration with bullets leaving the range, striking trees and their homes, as well as the late-night training sessions for police officers.
Both outdoor ranges will remain closed until the environmental remediation projects are finished, which the county estimates will be in late September 2023.
Bennett Knox, the county’s parks director, anticipates the small-bore indoor range will reopen in early 2023.
