Navy placing 10,000 yards of sand on Puget Sound seafloor as part of legal settlement

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/19/navysand-seafloor-puget-sound-lawsuit-settlement/ [login to see] /
The U.S. Navy is placing about 10,000 cubic yards of sand onto the seafloor of Sinclair Inlet in Washington as part of a legal settlement with the state, the Suquamish Tribe, and environmental groups.

A contractor's sand-filled barge currently rests above the former site of the USS Independence, a retired aircraft carrier whose hull was scraped for marine life in 2017 before it was sent to a Texas scrapyard for dismantling.

But the tribe, along with other groups, claim in a lawsuit the hull-scraping actually released copper, zinc and other pollutants into the inlet.

The work, at a cost of $2.4 million, is known as the "Thin Layer Placement project," according to Joe Kubistek, a spokesman for Naval Base Kitsap. The Navy completed a test plot prior to the heart of the work, which began on Aug. 15.