ECOLOGY

THE SOLUTION

With the highway gone, we get to rebuild Seattle's connection to the Elliott Bay shore. We have world leaders in sustainable building strategies and technologies working within our City. We have experts in Elliott Bay ecology who have already identified what needs to be done. We have foundations and institutions already focused on implementation. And we have the opportunity of 335 acres of public land along the shore.

MAKING SALMON AT HOME

When we rebuild the seawall, we can implement several ways of addressing the problems associated with hard armoring of shorelines:

• Salmon shelves along vertical portions of the seawall, providing shallow water habitat at varying tidal depths, necessary for juvenile salmon migration
• Three new intertidal beaches, creating high-quality shallow water habitat for feeding, resting, and nesting in this part of Elliott Bay
• Small, planted breakwater islands along the most exposed parts of the shore, and planters attached to the seawall, to provide protected areas and bugs for food sources
• Gangplanks linking some piers to the new seawall, to allow light to get to the shoreline and help juvenile salmon see predators lurking in the shadows.

CLEANING THE AIR, CLEANING THE WATER

When we rebuild the landscape between the water and the edge of existing buildings, we have the opportunity to implement a large-scale, state-of-the-art sustainable, low-tech stormwater management system which:

• Collects rain into surface streams to slowly flow to the shore, feeding intertidal beaches
• Gathers and stores stormwater for later release, preventing overload of the combined sewage / stormwater system which now floods sewage into the bay during heavy rains
• Collects and filters runoff from the new street (Alaskan Way) before slowly releasing it to the Bay, reducing contamination from exhaust, oil, gasoline, brake and hydraulic fluid and antifreeze which greatly harm salmon
• Uses green building techniques along the shore, especially for water management, to reduce potable water usage and strain on sewage treatment, cheaper upfront and long-term than installing stormwater and sewage infrastructure.

Building a functional surface stormwater system is cheaper to install than the typical underground pipe system, and is cheaper to operate in the long term.