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Aggregating Environmental Reparations: Remediating Maury Island
Maury Island, WA
Speculative Design Studio
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Autumn 2018, Year 3
Professor: Sara Jacobs
Duration: 5 weeks
A Collaboration with Matthew Grosser
A design exploration motivated by the notion of ‘ecological reparations’, the proposed interventions are intended to address the industrial legacy of Maury Island through environmental remediation and augmentation of natural processes and existing landforms. Maury Island has been dramatically impacted by two extractive industries – gravel mining that carved into its seaside cliffs, and metal processing to the south that showered the island in heavy metals for nearly 100 years, leaving it with hazarous levels of Arsenic in its topsoil. While many areas of Maury Island have been remediated, the former mining sites that are now utilized as open space still have dangerous levels of pollutants, necessitating further intervention.
Arsenic and Aggregate
LEGEND
Arsenic Levels over 100 ppm
Arsenic Levels 40 - 100 ppm
Arsenic Levels 20 - 40 ppm
(20 ppm: considered contaminated) Marine Protected Shoreline
Littoral Drift Cell Direction
Concept and Phasing
Inspired by the rich but imperiled ecology of Puget Sound, this intervention leverages the scar of Maury’s industrial legacy - a former gravel pit on the shoreline - to create a series of terraced spaces in which to collect polluted stormwater and remediate it, utilizing the unique capacity of the local aggregating anenome to metabolize arsenic. Over time, cultivation and proliferation of aggregating anenomes at this site would allow for their deployment to other impacted areas in a remedial network that also supports habitat regeneration along shorelines across the Lower Puget Sound.
SITE DESIGN: Terracing in the upland portion of the site allows for stormwater to be channeled through traditional phytoremediation plantings and into a central basin. Water is released from a multipurpose floodable space into remedial tidepools, where runoff mixed with salt water creates aggregating anenome habitat. The anenomes metabolize the arsenic, rendering it inert while also serving as a cornerstone species in this novel ecosystem. The anenomes are clonal and can be harvested and deployed to other sites impacted by arsenic pollution from the smelter plume.
Situated offshore are sediment building reef structures, which seek to replicate the sedimentary actions of the feeder bluffs that were destroyed by the gravel mine. This sediment is vital to the establishment of eelgrass habitat that shelters salmonids and feeder fish.
Floodable Space
