Crews contain diesel spill that caused sheen on Lake Washington
Published 11:11 am Monday, October 10, 2011
Investigators still are trying to determine the source of a small petroleum spill that caused a sheen on Lake Washington Sunday.
The spill was reported about 10 a.m. Sunday near David E. Brink Park, 555 Lake St. South, just south of downtown.
The state Department of Ecology, the Kirkland Fire Department and the King County Sheriff’s Office responded to the report of the sheen, estimated at 100 feet by 30 feet by the DOE.
About 900 feet of oil-containment boom was spread around the sheen to absorb the petroleum on Monday.
The cause of the sheen was traced to the Shumway Condominiums, which are directly east of the park along Lake Street South, said Bobbi Wallace, city waste-and-storm-water manager.
The Shumway condo association is hiring an environmental-research group to try to determine the cause of the sheen, said Wallace.
“We’re still baffled,” she said.
Several storm drains on the condo property were plugged to prevent possible future leaks, she said, but it hadn’t been determined whether such drains were involved in the leak at all.
It’s possible the leak could have developed behind retaining walls at the condo development or even in an older fuel-storage tank that may have been improperly decommissioned, she added.
The size of the spill was unknown, said Wallace, but a small amount of petroleum can cause such a sheen. The DOE estimates that a quart of oil can foul more than 100,000 gallons of water.
The property where the condos now stand formerly was the site of one of the most renowned buildings in Kirkland, the Shumway mansion, built on seven acres in 1909 for a prominent family from Massachusetts.
It later became a nursing home and in 1985 was the center of a community spectacle as it was moved through downtown and north along Market Street to the Juanita area, where it became a bed-and-breakfast inn; in a footnote to history, it was at a 1994 retreat at the Shumway that Microsoft first became involved in what became known as the `”browser wars,” involving Internet search processes.
In 2008, the Shumway became an adult-family home.
