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Backgrounder: Sea-Tac Airport isn't just a government-funded business that most of us use. It's also the single biggest polluter in Washington State. Large jet airports, like Sea-Tac, generate massive amounts of air pollution, water pollution, storm water runoff, and noise pollution - pollution unmatched by any other single source. Historically, the Airport has done very little to control its pollution or to ameliorate its effects. It spends none of its profits on pollution control or cleanup. Profits are reserved to pay for expansion. If the Airport does any environmental work at all, it is work funded by the FAA, the State, King County taxpayers, or neighboring cities and school districts. In its environmental impact statement for the third runway project, the Port made it very plain that it planned to do nothing to mitigate the additional environmental effects from the third runway. The only "mitigation" in the budget was money to buy out properties needed for the runway. That is not so much mitigation as it is expansion. This touched off an impact-by-impact battle to get the Port either to halt the project or to deal fully with the impacts. The Port has vigorously avoided admitting that there are any impacts and has only been willing to mitigate them if forced to. $6 Million Dollars for an EIS That Tells Two Conflicting Stories The Port spent six million dollars writing an environmental impact statement that ran several thousand pages - assuring that few people actually would read it. But those who did noticed a large, very obvious problem. In the "benefits" section, the EIS claimed that the runway would double Sea-Tac capacity but in the "impacts" section, the EIS claimed that the runway would produce no increase in arriving air traffic (and thus, no impacts). When the Highline cities, through their Airport Communities Coalition, took the Port to court, pointing out that the runway could not both double the operations and not increase them at all, the Port simply argued that the law did not require them to tell the truth in an impact statement, just write an impact statement. In one of the worst decisions it ever made, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed with the Port. To this day, the Port maintains that the third runway will create no new significant pollution. It has never revised the EIS. Jets Don't Create Air Pollution The brown bubble you can see sitting over the Highline area from Seattle is jet plane pollution from Sea-Tac. Jets give off great amounts of pollution, including very fine particulates. Recent studies show that such particulates are more likely to penetrate deep into the lungs and are implicated in higher rates of asthma & lung cancers, so frequently observed in airport communities. Jet fuels also contain a known carcinogen (benzene), thought |