SEQUIM — Clams, mussels and clean Sequim Bay water may one day help detect use of weapons of mass destruction in U.S. coastal waters.
The $10 million Sequim-based Marine Research Operations has been charged with finding sensors that can give early warnings of biological, chemical or nuclear releases in the marine environment.
The 150-acre campus is the coastal arm of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.
The cluster of labs and water treatment tanks is on a piece of windswept waterfront, about a mile and a half from John Wayne Marina and practically next door to the dairy cows, corn and cauliflower at Maple View Farm.
The lab has been here since the late 1960s, when Director Richard Ecker moved a small team of researchers into the old Bugge Clam Cannery.
They performed experiments in the bathtubs and basins of what was called “the mansion,” the Bugge family residence.
From the beginning, Marine Research Operations has won major contracts from the Environmental Protection Agency, Navy and other federal entities, and its scientists have studied the effects of oil and other chemicals on the environment.
Modern-day problem
Almost four decades after those bathtub experiments, Ecker has a staff of 95, a campus of modern labs and a 21st-century problem — how to detect weapons of mass destruction in coastal waters.
In 2000, Don Bradley, who had spent more than 30 years on the Pacific Northwest lab’s Richland campus, began to reconsider what the Sequim lab was capable of.
“We hadn’t done a lot of work in the national security area in the marine sciences,” he said.
“There was a real opportunity there that we needed to take advantage of.
“The United States has 95,000 miles of coastline.”
Those shores are vulnerable to chemical attack — yet the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concentrated much of its post-Sept. 11, 2001, attention on airports and airspace.
That changed when the Coastal Security Institute was established here in 2003.
The institute, which employs about 30 researchers, is charged with finding those sensors that can give early warnings of releases in the marine environment.