TOPPENISH -- It's a nice drive down East Branch Road, where towering cottonwoods lining the Yakima River serve as a backdrop to the rural homes that dot the area.
But if you hang a right at Wierman Road and follow it through the trees to the river's edge, you'll get a firsthand glimpse of the blight this rural area on the Yakama reservation has suffered for years from illegal dumping.
Household trash is strewn across a roughly 100-yard area, where a pile of tires, a broken toilet and beer bottles have been dumped. There are rusted appliances, such as a clothes dryer, a freezer, microwave ovens and several car bumpers. Plastic grocery bags cling to shrubs and wild grass.
Travel the bumpy dirt road west and you'll see similar piles of trash clear to Wapato: dumped roofing shingles, rotten couches and mattresses, plastic containers, countless beer bottles and tin cans.
Treasured by sportsmen and tribal members alike, the more remote sections of the Yakima River harbor a dirty little secret: they're used as a quick escape from landfill fees by folks who dump their trash and other junk. Out of sight and mind. It's a problem not only on the reservation, but across Yakima County.
"I wouldn't say it's any worse than it has been the past few years," said Dennis Doescher, environmental health specialist with the Yakima Health District. "It's kind of a steady problem."
He said he tracks about 200 illegal dumping sites a year that need to be cleaned up.
"Most of the stuff I look at is from complaints," he said. "Most of the time there's no address, so I have to hunt around in the general area (to find the sites)."
Often, vacant land is dumped on without the knowledge of property owners, Doescher said.
Sometimes county officials can't contact property owners where dumps have occurred, "and we can't do anything about it," he said.
On the reservation, the Yakama Nation is responsible for tracking such sites and ordering landowners to clean them up, and often faces similar problems of contacting landowners.
The tribe has made recent progress in getting some illegal dump sites cleaned up, said Yakama facilities manager Derald Ortloff.
About 260,000 tires were recently cleared from a site off Pumphouse Road near White Swan. Crews are now cleaning a dump site off West Wapato Road, he said.
"We're looking at bringing in actual Caterpillars and building a berm and putting a ditch behind it so they can't drive back there," he said.
There's also talk of building fences to keep people out and posting no-dumping signs, Ortloff said.
"And if you get caught dumping back there, then you're going to get fined," he said. Eventually other problem spots along the reservation will be cleaned, he said.
But there is a way the public can help. The first week of June is the kickoff of an annual national river cleanup, said Amy Kober with American Rivers, a national organization that advocates the protection of rivers.
Last year the river cleanup effort saw more than 600 tons of trash removed from roughly 7,500 miles of river nationwide, she said.
About 95,000 volunteers participated, and there were about 20 cleanup projects in Washington state alone, she said.
"This is a great way for people to make a difference, and connect with their river and their community," she said.
* Phil Ferolito can be reached at 577-7749 or pferolito@yakimaherald.com.
Volunteer cleanup
If you're interested in forming a volunteer group to help clean area rivers, contact American Rivers online at www.americanrivers.org. The organization provides a guide to forming a cleanup group and provides free trash bags.
E-mail
Print
Weather/Forecast
