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Gazing out across the beautiful vistas of western Washington, you'd never guess that the environment is under constant attack.

But it most certainly is mostly from manmade screw ups of every kind imaginable.

Responding to those problems from spills to meth labs to disasters and explosions are the environmental first responders.

That's the story of Ron Holcomb.

And he tells his story in this book, Constant Chaos.

And as the saying goes, we're embracing that chaos.

Next on Northwest now, Ron Holcomb grew up in California and fell in love with the outdoors while visiting national parks and exploring the great spaces of the American West.

That got him interested in the Environmental Studies Program at Humboldt State University.

After that, he got his master's from the University of Wisconsin, where he worked with Fish and Game for several years.

But he wanted to get back west, so he landed as a public information officer with the Washington State Department of Ecology and eventually became a frontline spill responder.

He spent 40 years with ecology, responding to derelict and leaking boats, meth labs, the Amtrak derailment and the Pacific pipeline explosion in Bellingham and an estimated 6000 other newsworthy scenes all across western Washington.

Many of those stories are found in his book Constant Chaos.

Ron, thanks so much for coming in Northwest.

Now, I hope this program isn't constant chaos for you, but I do love the title of your book and that was one of the things that intrigued me and then started learning about the things that you've been dealing with over the years.

And all of them very newsworthy.

A lot of the things, if people read this book, they'll look at the chapter headings, which we'll go through and they'll be like, Oh, I remember that.

Yep, I remember that one though.

That was a big one too.

And you were on a lot of these scenes.

Let's start from the start, though.

Talk a little bit about your background.

How did you find yourself into this line of work and give us a little bit of a bio, if you would.

Yeah, well, I actually started out as in the journalism field, and I ended up as a public information officer, first with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources after getting a master of science degree in environmental communications.

And then I came out in 1980, shortly after Mount St Helens blew and joined the Department of Ecology.

I was in that field as a public information officer until 1994, and I made a kind of a mid career change and I went from being in the office to being in the field to being an actual spill responder.

So I went from being a spokesmen spokesperson for the state at large environmental disasters or incidents to actually being a spill responder in the field.

That's interesting because the career path for a lot of former journalists, you know, the old saying is old journalists don't die.

They go to be PIOs, which would which would be my next step, probably if an agency big enough to have a public information officer.

But for you, though, you started as a PIO and then turned around and went into a more scientific work and more hard sciences based discipline.

I mean, you have to be able to go out there and read an MSDS sheet.

You can't just be making it up, not the PIOs make it up.

Although I've known some that have.

But the point being you you kind of went the hard way.

You got out into the field, you got out of the office, but now all of a sudden, you've really got to know things about how to set up a scene, how to investigate and see how to characterize and classify a scene.

I think you're a little unique that way.

Do you agree with that?

Yes.

It's not a typical career path, although in our field it's very interesting.

My coworkers came from all different backgrounds because of the spill response field.

It's such a wide variety of things we encounter and expertize needed that a lot of the training we developed on our own team.

Yeah, that was always one of the things too people ask me because I've spent a lot of years as a straight reporter to what, you know, what were the ones that kind of scared you or what were the ones that were kind of made you nervous?

For me, it was always the spills and the explosions of the big fires, because you had no idea of what you were running into.

Most of the stories you kind of had an idea about how they were going to go and about what they were.

Some big chemical plant lighting up or explosion happening.

I have no idea what I'm going to go if the wind's going to shift and I'm going to search duck and down all kinds of carcinogenic or what you're in the same kind of boat you never there's really there's never a normal day.

And that's what makes that job very interesting and challenging and exciting and, you know, puts a lot of satisfaction at the end of the day.

But if you're mentioning, you know, the hazards, you know, safety is obviously the number one priority of any, you know, organization involved in in emergency response.

But I will say, I kind of give you a two part answer on on that, where I felt most at risk in my more than 25 years of being a spill responder is literally on the side of a freeway and a truck wreck or something else.

People don't slow down no matter how many emergency vehicles are there.

And a lot of our colleagues in Department of Transportation, tow truck operators, I mean, they are injured and killed regularly.

So really, that's when it came to the chemicals and stuff.

We really you you have some more control about that.

So there were times, of course, you know, there's dangerous chemicals and we dealt with pressurized cylinders, especially during the meth lab years.

And that took a lot of extra care and preparation by the side of the road freeway.

That's where I felt.

Yeah.

Or the hair would stand up on the back of my neck.

Sometimes you make a good point though, because you can kind of set the perimeter for some of those scenes and take kind of a measured approach.

But on the highway you're trying to clear it.

So it's not a 20 mile backup trying to get it rolling.

And you're right there exposed to a lot of people who aren't paying attention or making great decisions sometimes.

Yeah, that's that's a good point.

I'm sure driving around, you're probably a lot like me.

You can give the crime scene tour or the body tours or the major event tours, and I drove my wife crazy.

We'd drive around town doing that.

Probably very much the same for you.

Probably aren't many counties or neighborhoods that you drive around here in western Washington that you haven't been to in response to something?

I'd guess absolutely true.

And even where I live in Tumwater, I went to meth labs, a number of them, you know, within a mile of my house, including the Motel six and Tumwater, you know, it just anywhere and everywhere we were at can be rural areas, urban areas, you know, environmental incidents happen all over the place.

Yeah.

Everything from derailments to the meth labs.

What were the meth labs like?

I mean, they're dangerous.

You can't come in contact or you don't want to breathe.

A lot of that stuff was that was mostly in the nineties, early 2000.

When was that wave really hitting here?

The biggest wave was kind of 2006 to 19 95 to 19, 2006.

And it still was before and after.

But that was really the high 2001.

Throughout the state we did more than 1800 meth labs and meth lab dumpsites.

It was a crazy time that we did so much and we still had to do the other spills and stuff while we were still dealing with this incredible workload of the illegal methamphetamine labs.

And that's the thing, too.

You dealt with you know, legal, legitimate accidents and also illegal illegitimate dumps or chemical labs or or bad actors as well.

That adds a sense of physical danger to it, too, because I'm sure you never know who you're coming up on.

You come onto a property, you have a search warrant and whatnot.

The cops hopefully kind of clear the area for you.

But was there some physical danger for you as well, dealing with some of these questionable characters?

Well, I'll give you a to start.

Safety is always the number one priority.

And we had a very close relationship with all the narcotic lab teams.

And we we worked it out because there were so many just like clockwork, they would go in arrest the suspects, you know, dismantle the lab, then, you know, we'd be right behind them.

And then the health department comes in after that for the weather, the building or structure home could be, you know, habitation it or has to be properly cleaned up.

So that was very good.

But what was amazing, the suspects at these labs a lot of times would be arrested and they'd be taken to jail.

And, you know, it's hours for us to do our work.

And a lot of times they'd be released and back out and waiting to get back into their house or other people drive up asking, is Joe here?

And it's like, you know, even though there's police and fire and they're here by mouth, they.

Still want to do it by.

Yeah, yeah.

So so there's that I do.

Right.

I have one story in the book where we went back to a lab in Milton.

There was a fire at a shed that was a meth lab.

And, you know, everybody scattered.

There were some suspects still at large.

We came back the next day with law enforcement and the detective was with us.

We weren't expecting anybody there.

And we were looking at the remnants of this burned out shed.

And my partner and I were just kind of walking down, kind of looking around.

And the detective lifted up what looked like a piece of canvas.

And underneath was one of the at large suspects with a gun.

And, you know, he had a, you know, get your f and hands up.

And we were like right next to it.

And, you know, we were glad that gunfire didn't erupt.

But, yeah, that was a close call.

Yeah, always a possibility on stuff like that.

Talk a little bit about the importance of institutional knowledge, and I keep relating everything to TV stations, but there's kind of this this idea that you can get rid of the old reporters and bring in a bunch of cheap ones.

The same thing probably happens to first responders, too, but that institutional knowledge, the experience you bring, the fact that this isn't your first time on this kind of a scene, but you remember the derailment from last time and last time when it was downhill.

We were able to do this and it worked pretty well.

Is that valued enough?

Do do we do we hold that experience and and enough have enough reverence for it?

I would say kind of yes and no.

Yes for when we're when I was working where you're in the field, a lot of that is relationships.

There are so many response partners we work with.

We're actually department ecologies, special teams, pretty small and you know, they're not everywhere like fire departments.

So we rely on local fire police, public works department, state parks, you know, natural resources, a lot of partners.

So those relationships are important to come together and the familiarity with working with each other and also, you know, just the type of incident the other is, are we passing that information on to the new responders?

And they come on, it takes about a year to get a new person trained on the job experience and up and running to be a competent spill responder.

So that and I really enjoyed that part of the job was mentoring the new responders as they came on.

Now, in the big picture, do agencies and even business succession planning is kind of a big thing?

I don't think we do a good enough job with that.

And a lot of times, like, you know, when when I left it, you know, there's a couple of decades of information and and experience and expertize I've just gone.

I've, you know, tried to mentor as best I could, the people behind me.

Yeah.

But yeah.

As those of us were getting older and retire, you lose a lot of that institutional memory.

One of the.

Other interesting pieces of this book, too, that you touch on is that it's not just cleaning up the spill and looking at the groundwater plume and remediating it, documenting.

There's a huge litigation piece and an attempt to do cost recovery.

And you're in court testifying.

So there's an administrative and legal piece to this, too, that seems to be very plodding and kind of it's I'm sure it's not the good part of the job.

Well, it's an important part of the job.

But one of the reasons I did want to write this book was to kind of document this because, you know, some of these, as you mentioned, some of these incidents were well known.

They were in the media at the time.

But even at the time, we're on to the next incident.

So to complete the rest of the story, does take time whether, you know, some of these people ended up going to jail.

You know, our agency can issue significant civil fines and Spillers can be liable for restoring the environment.

And that does take take years.

So that was one of the reasons I wanted to kind of wrap up some of these bigger incidents to show from beginning to end.

And of course, this is from my perspective, I tried to do this as a boots on the ground person.

You know, the spill responder.

There's many different parts of it, much more than I write about, but hopefully a give a good enough perspective to get get a feel for what these incidents were like.

Yeah.

You wanted you wanted to be doing that part.

But every now and then you get dragged into kind of litigation.

Well, enforcement was part of our our job.

I mean, we had to deal with the spill.

And, you know, I coined the kind of the term environmental medic.

We we triage, we stabilize, and then we try to, you know, heal these environmental wounds.

We're also kind of environmental detectives, you know, who did it, why, what?

And then what kind of liability.

And, you know, we were civil as far as our enforcement, but we had the ability to to issue penalties.

And then if it was criminal action, then we work with the like the Environmental Protection Agency.

They have criminal investigators for for federal follow through and fines.

And I ask you about those various points.

The on scene piece, the litigation piece, the investigation piece to ask you this question with your years behind you.

Are Washington state's environmental laws tough enough or are they too tough?

Too much administrative rulemaking and they've gone too far.

How do you see it?

Well, I'll first answer that by there have been trimming modest improvements.

When I first started as a spill responder in the eighties and nineties, we had large spills regularly off the coast in Puget Sound.

That doesn't happen anymore.

And that is directly the reason of of laws and regulations and an emphasis on preventing spills, because it is much more cost effective to prevent a spills because it's very expensive to clean them up.

Could our laws be tougher?

Of course.

You know, we're facing a much bigger global climate change and stuff.

And part of the focus of my book is that bigger picture of climate change and kind of ratcheting down on greenhouse gases.

We need that and we need to keep getting tougher on that.

But no matter how many laws and regulations that you have in place, people screw up, people intentionally do bad things and equipment fails.

And that was our world.

And and as long as there's fossil fuels and chemicals that are, you know, just a part of our society, we're going to need to deal with when we have these accidents and and mishaps.

When you talk about oil, you describe it as the devil's excrement, which I which I love.

So here's the big question.

Do we have the resources in place?

Do we have enough resources?

Are we ready for the big one?

If that ever happens in the Salish Sea.

Washington State is one of the best prepared states in the country for, you know, in oil spill prevention, preparedness and response.

So, yes, we are.

However, I must be very honest and real and I write about this in the book, unlike, you know, residential or commercial fire or a medical emergency, when you call 911 there, there in minutes, when it comes to an oil spill, a big oil spill on the water, the response is not in minutes, it's in hours and days.

And that is the reality is because even though there's equipment staged all over the the sound and and the state, it takes time for it to be mobilized and and brought to the scene.

So the public expectation is always sky high when there is a big spill.

And, you know, and understandably so, especially if there's oiled wildlife and obviously oiled shorelines, the spill will be cleaned up, but the damage is done.

Unfortunately, once oil spills, you've lost half the battle because it's out and it's spreading and it's it's hard to, you know, contain it.

But, you know, the beaches will be cleaned up.

The oil will be cleaned up.

You know, there'll be tremendous damage.

But that's the reality of a big oil spill.

Knock on wood, we have yet to have the big one on the Salish Sea in the Puget Sound like an Exxon Valdez scale deal.

And I good grief.

I know we all hope we don't.

And I'm glad you're able to talk about that as one of the major threats.

Another one of the major threats that was identified and was a big issue politically several years ago was oil trains.

We had a big explosion down on the Columbia, I think it was down in the Vancouver area.

And I think you were at that one.

Talk a little bit about oil change.

Do the oil trains, do they remain a threat?

Has there been any improvements with double holed tankers?

Where are we?

Well, the the type of oil we're talking about on the oil trains is the the Bakken oil that comes from those fields in North Dakota and eastern Montana.

There are no major pipeline from there running from the east to the west coast.

So that oil and that was from fracking and there was a big boom.

It started coming in about 2012.

And it comes on these trains and they're basically pipeline on wheels because these are the tank cars and that's the whole train is like that.

And, you know, the first big one we had was on the Columbia River is actually on in Oregon.

Okay.

Mosher But anything that happens and a lot of people probably don't realize anything that happens along the Columbia River, even if it's in Oregon we care about because the Columbia River sure is shared by Washington and same for Oregon.

So we work closely with with Oregon.

They don't have nearly the spill program that we do.

So sometimes.

And in fact, on this one in Mosier, Oregon, we went down and basically helped out their spill program and and served in a lot of capacities in that response.

We were very fortunate the the train derailed, caught fire and spilled in a small town.

And I was on the helicopter when soon as we heard about it, we hired a helicopter out of Olympia.

I was on it with some other folks and we flew directly over to kind of get the first reconnaissance of what it was.

It had damaged the little town's sewage treatment plant and so a lot of the oil flowed in and, you know, overwhelmed and and got their sewage treatment.

But it didn't get in the Columbia River because the tracks are very near the Columbia River.

And so over the the spill event of only a small amount got into the river.

So we dodged dodged a bullet.

After I retired, we had our first train derailment and fire up in Whatcom County.

Right.

And again, the same thing happened.

Dodged a bullet.

There was a fire and there was a spill, but it didn't get into any waterways.

And although, you know, big cleanup for the soil and evacuations at the time, we dodged a bullet.

But those trains keep you know, they're they come through the state from Spokane down to the Tri-Cities, along both sides of the Columbia River, up from Vancouver through Tacoma, Seattle, and up to our the main refineries in and, of course, in north of Bellingham.

And I wanted.

To talk to you about that.

One of the chapters in your book, Under the Devil's Excrement, is Bomb Trains The Danger of Back in Oil, which you touched on there.

But there are a lot of interesting titles in here for your chapters.

Calamity in Penn Cove, Midnight Mishaps ten Month Cleanup along the Shore.

Haley's Meth Lab Madness.

Chemicals, Guns and sex toys.

Well, this is a this is a family show.

We'll stay out of that one.

What are we going to do now?

Daily danger on the highway.

Mystery death in Tenino.

The burning highway.

Kim Trail conspiracy.

So you've you touch on all of this in this book.

What are what are one of your two what's your what's your favorite story?

If you talk to somebody about this book you've written, what is one of the stories that you tell people and they go, Oh, isn't that interesting?

Well, I think one of them goes back to actually the days when I was still a public information officer.

But one of the defining spills in the state are for ramping up our spill preparedness.

Prevention response program was the stock oil spill in late 1980 889, and it was a 230,000 gallon heavy oil spill right off of Ocean Shores, and it killed tens of thousands of seabirds.

It oiled the coast from Ocean Shores all the way up to the West Coast of Canada and got Canada and British Columbia into.

They were angry at us for allowing this to happen.

But they've been flushing their sewer into the into the Strait Juan de Fuca for 30 years.

So, you know, we're even that's another story.

But but that story, I lived it.

It was many months.

And that one has particularly impacted me back in the early days seeing the damage.

Another one more.

Although recent, not so much.

But when I was a spill responder was in June of 1999, when the Olympic pipeline exploded after a 277,000 gallon gasoline spill occurred.

And that wasn't in my region, but I was part of the investigation team for Ecology and was actually side by side with the National Transportation Safety Board included in their investigation.

And that's where the spill happened.

And they really weren't sure at the control what was going on because it had problem with this line.

They actually restarted it.

And there were 210 year old boys in the creek playing with fireworks.

They ignited this.

And ironically, they probably saved lives and damage because the gasoline was flowing down towards the city of Bellingham.

It could.

Have been right into downtown Bellingham.

Could have been way worse.

It was, you know, horrible.

There was an 18 year old kid that was fly fishing in the river and was overcome with the fumes and basically drowned.

And then then the explosion happened.

You know, of course, quite the environmental damage.

And, you know, some people did go to jail.

Yeah.

Last couple of seconds here.

I want to talk about one that's near and dear to Tacoma's heart, and that is the collapse spent its last couple of days down on the houseboats here.

They couldn't save it.

So maybe give us give us the 32nd rundown on on what?

Why couldn't we save that darn boat?

Well, boat owners know, even when everything is going well on a boat, it's a money pit.

It's very expensive.

So you can imagine an old, you know, several hundred foot ferry deteriorating it.

Creaking.

To fix it up, you know, and it just wasn't going to happen unless some, as you mentioned earlier, billionaire or multimillionaire sweeps and swoops in to save the day.

And fortunately, it didn't sink when it was here and it was demolish rushed in and some of the pieces will still live on I think up in Kirkland is are is public art.

That one must have heard a little bit.

All right, Ron Holcomb, thanks so much for coming in Northwest.

Now the book is Constant Chaos, and I hope this wasn't too much chaos for you.

No, thank you very much.

You bet.

Ron Holcomb describes environmental degradation as death by a thousand cuts.

The bottom line, there's no getting around it.

Our modern lives degrade the environment, but over time, we're slowly learning to prevent contamination and extract resources in a sustainable way, galvanizing the political will to implement.

What we've learned is the challenge and frankly, the only hope for this resource hungry world.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking to watch this program again or to share it with others.

Northwest now can be found on the Web at KBTC.org and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Northwest.

Now, a Streamable podcast of this program is available under the Northwest Now tab at KBTC.org and on Apple Podcasts by Searching Northwest.

Now, that's going to do it for this edition of Northwest.

Now, until next time, I'm Tom Layson and thanks for watching.