SEATTLE — Wanted: a cool $5 million to help remove dozens of abandoned and derelict vessels littering the state's waterways and threatening our precious marine life. That's the pitch state lawmakers can expect when they return for the 2019 legislative session.
The Alki is one of those abandoned vessels. It is racking up a $41,000 bill in moorage fees at Fisherman's Terminal in Seattle.
The old Seattle fireboat patrolled local waters for more than 80 years. Now it's just a hulk of aging, rotting steel that has been abandoned by its owner.
From Chopper 7, it looks like three vessels are simply languishing benignly in Sinclair Inlet near Bremerton. The truth is their owners have abandoned them.
"One hundred seventy that I know of," says Troy Wood, when asked how many abandoned and derelict vessels are in the waters around the state.
Wood runs the state's Derelict Vessel Removal program. He asked to meet at Fisherman's Terminal to provide an unobstructed view of the "Alki." A YouTube video was made when the vessel was for sale in 2013. Now it's among the long list of vessels abandoned by often once-responsible boat lovers.
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"Like all our vessel owners, they have great dreams and aspirations," said Wood. "They don't always have the knowledge and the finances to deal with these vessels, so they get in over their heads. And they usually end up having to walk away from it or turn it over to the state."
Wood says it would cost about $1 million to remove the Alki.
"If we were to remove this vessel on my current budget, that would be the only vessel I could remove," said Wood. "For one biennium, I get only about $1.5 million."
A Department of Natural Resources map of the derelict vessels dotting and rotting in Puget Sound shows just how large that price tag really is.
Robb Krehbiel, with the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife, says the cost to the environment is greater still.
He stood in front of a poster showing how the toxins end up in the salmon that are the lifeblood of the endangered southern resident orcas. Their plight was on full display last summer when one orca, known as J35, wouldn't let go of her dead, newborn calf.
"Instead of drinking really nutritious milk during this extremely critical time of their lives," said Krehbiel, "calves are essentially drinking all of this sludge that is coming off of these boats and that's coming out of our storm drains."
Krehbiel says they plan to go after a major partner that's missing in all of this: the federal government.
"Right now, recreational boaters are paying into this fund," he said. "Commercial vessel owners are paying into this fund. Taxpayers who don't boat at all are paying into it. But the federal government is not providing any money into the derelict vessel or removal account. And they're one of the biggest reasons that those resources are strained so thin."
Wood says he understands the emotional pull of these old vessels.
"It's unfortunate that we're losing a piece of history," he said.
But in 2012, one of those abandoned vessels caught fire and sank off Whidbey Island. It halted, for a time, the harvest of popular Penn Cove shellfish, an unfortunate reminder of just how high a cost it is.
"Who's willing to pay that cost?" asks Wood.
Wood says they will ask the state for $5 million to remove the largest vessels; there are 24 in all. Even so, the owners are still on the hook for the cost. If they don't pay willingly, the state can, and almost certainly will, sue.
KIRO 7 will follow the issue as it goes through the Legislature.