They were still standing when the gravel barges stopped coming.
Sawn off stumps in the shallows, tar black below the tide line, silvered above it.
Anything wooden that sits in salt water is supposed to be eaten by borers or rotted by fungus within a few years, and this timber had been sitting there for decades doing neither.
That was the whole idea.
The awkward part is that the same treatment keeping the wood alive was leaving the wood the entire time.
What the black stuff actually does
Creosote is a coal tar distillate.
Wood goes into a pressure cylinder, the tar is forced deep into the grain, and what comes out is timber that borers will not touch and rot cannot get started in.
It works extremely well.
The problem is that the treatment never becomes part of the wood in any permanent chemical sense, so the piling is less a treated object than a loaded reservoir standing in moving water.
What leaves it is a family of compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
They come out slowly, they do not dissolve away, and they bind to fine sediment particles and stay in the seabed under the structure that released them.
So the leak has no failure moment.
Nothing breaks and nothing spills, because the release is what the material does while it is working perfectly.
Why this beach and not any beach
The site is not open coast.
It sits on a bay on the east side of an island in the inland waters between Washington State and British Columbia, shallow and sheltered and biologically busy in a way open shoreline is not.
Eelgrass grows just east of where the piles stood.
Forage fish, meaning the small oily schooling species that most larger animals eat, spawn on the beach gravel itself rather than somewhere convenient and offshore.
Which is the entire connection.
Those fish feed salmon, salmon feed the resident killer whales of these waters, and both the whales and several of the salmon runs they depend on carry federal endangered listings.
The chain from a derelict pier to an endangered whale is short and it is not rhetorical.
It is three links, and all three of them assemble themselves within a few hundred feet of where the tar was.
What the record says, and a number that does not match
The work ran over two and a half days in mid October 2023, from a barge, with a regional marine contractor doing the pulling.
The piles were remnants of an old sand and gravel dock.
Funding came through a one time federal award administered by a regional marine commission, and the removal took the overwater structure along with the timber.
Now the awkward part.
Every account published at the time puts the number at 117 pilings. A county retrospective published in 2026 says 132.
Both figures come from credible sources and nobody has reconciled them publicly.
The likeliest explanation is that the later count includes piles pulled from the nearshore beyond the pier footprint, but that is inference, so the lower figure is the one to print.
What creosote does that can be measured
The food chain argument only works if there is evidence at the bottom of it.
There is, and it is specific.
State managers cite studies in which herring eggs exposed to creosote show high mortality, which matters because herring spawn on exactly this kind of nearshore substrate.
Flatfish carrying these compounds show more disease and altered growth and reproduction.
Juvenile salmon moving through contaminated estuaries grow more slowly and show changed immune function, which is the same species and the same life stage the whole restoration is aimed at.
Removal stops the source. It does not lift what already went into the sediment.
This is the standard shape of bonded outdoor materials, the same one that turns an artificial turf field into 220 tons of problem that was fixed on installation day.
The part that is still being argued
Phase two has not gone smoothly.
A grant for further restoration was cancelled by the county council, rock armoring went in against beach erosion, and restoration advocates argue armoring scours the beach and blocks the natural sand supply the spawning gravel depends on.
The barge landing is still a working barge landing.
Roughly 6,000 tons of aggregate a year come across that beach, which is not a detail anyone can wish away on an island.
A committee now exists to make both things fit on the same shoreline.
Softer approaches do exist, and a roll of coconut husk holding a stream bank is the small version of the same argument about armor.
Statewide the numbers are blunt. Since 2004 the state has taken out more than 14,400 pilings and over 21,300 tons of treated wood, and thousands of creosote pilings still stand.
The state fact sheet has the tonnage and the toxicology. The local reporting has the argument still running.
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