Environmental Toxicology
The San Juan Islands are surrounded by an urban triangle with a population of several million: the Seattle-Tacoma megalopolis in Washington State and the cities of Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia. Industrial waste from these cities disperses, water borne and transported in the fatty tissues of birds, fish and marine mammals, throughout the Salish Sea, augmented by road runoff from urban streets and regional highways and agricultural chemicals from the Skagit-Samish Valleys and Lower Fraser. The regional toxic “signal” can be detected in the islands, and forms a backdrop for the management of toxic sources within the islands including leakage from automobile and boat engines, home and garden chemicals such as pesticides, and pharmaceuticals escaping household septic systems and sewage treatment facilities. The scale and nature of the local-source signal were largely unknown until Kwiaht developed an analytical laboratory at Friday Harbor under lease from the University of Washington.