by Claudia Finseth
It’s March 25, 2025. Those of us fighting against the destruction of the Spanaway Marsh have been at it for over two years now and spent over $140,000 dollars. Let’s take stock.
In December of 2024, the Tacoma Rescue Mission brought in massive equipment, and on the high point in the midst of the Marsh, in less than a week, clear-cut 900 trees, dug out their stumps, and razed the vegetation from those acres.
December is when black bears hibernate. Because no agency had done an honest wildlife count on the marsh, and because the black bears had all their needs met there, a lot of us who have lived here for decades didn’t know we had black bears there. But the noise and chaos of the stripping of the land woke them, confused and alarmed, and they wandered out into human neighborhoods and onto roads.
December is when bald eagles begin preparing their nests for raising eaglets later in the spring. We have at least one pair of bald eagles that have nested on Spanaway Marsh for a quarter of a century, raising over thirty offspring. We don’t know if the work on the Marsh has disrupted our eagles or not. Only time will tell. But we do know this: Testimony from the project applicants stated, “We expect them to relocate.”
Soon after the clear-cutting, heavy winter rains caused run-off of the unprotected soils. and simultaneously a massive fish die-off began Spanaway Lake, a short distance downstream. The die-off has come to encompass the whole lake. Over 500 fish have died at this point in time, the biggest fish die-off in Spanaway Lake for at least the last 75 years, and one of the biggest fish die-offs ever in Pierce County.
One suggestion is that fine colloidal iron in the soils, disrupted by the logging and scraping, ran into the lake, and bound with the water and consequently did two things: decreased the amount of free oxygen in the lake for fish to breathe, and filled the fishes’ gills with fine particles so those gills were blocked from doing their work.
As far as I know, neither the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife nor the Department of Ecology have yet tested for colloidal iron in the water. They have not examined the gills of dead fish to see if they were impacted.This is another example of the lack of enforcement of environmental issues that has plagued this development once it was given an Executive Priority by the previous County Executive.