SEKIU — The rumor persists — cloaked like the grim reaper — that tons of mustard gas lie beneath the Strait of Juan de Fuca near the Clallam County shore.
The report surfaces regularly in news accounts and on Web sites that Canadian forces dumped deadly chemical weapons into American waters in September 1947.
That the Canadians and the other World War II Allies had stockpiles of mustard gas is no secret.
U.S. Forces buried mustard gas after the war on the Tulalip Indian Reservation north of Everett.
It injured excavators when they dug it up in September.
And there’s no denying that a Canadian tugboat hauled barges from Esquimalt, British Columbia, through the Strait and into the Pacific Ocean to dump the weapons 100 or more miles off Cape Flattery.
What keeps cropping up — but hasn’t been verified — is the report that the Canadians jettisoned tons of artillery shells and drums of the deadly chemical two miles north of Clallam County beaches.
A sailor’s story
There are four threads of evidence in the story:
* Patrick Thomas of Calgary, Alberta, described his voyages aboard HMCS Heatherton, a Canadian tug that four times towed barges stacked with the weapons out of Esquimalt.
Three of the trips took the Heatherton 100 to 160 miles into the Pacific to dump the shells and drums.
But at least one voyage was cut short and never cleared Cape Flattery, according to Thomas.
The crew dumped the cargo north of a point between Pillar Point and Tongue Point.
* Thomas’ account is documented by the records of the Esquimalt harbormaster, which show the Heatherton leaving port at 8 p.m. one night in September 1947 and returning at 5 a.m. the next day.
With a maximum speed of 4 knots towing a loaded barge and 11 knots towing an empty one, there was no time for the Heatherton to have made it out of the Strait, much less into the Pacific.
* A Canadian oil and gas exploration expert from Vancouver used an electronic device to locate a mass of metal beneath the water at a point consistent with Thomas’ accounts.
The location also jibes with where the Heatherton would have turned back toward Esquimalt after unloading its barge.
The Vancouver man is a government employee subject to his country’s Official Secrets Act, which outlaws revealing information the Canadian Department of National Defence keeps under wraps.
He declined to discuss his findings for attribution with Peninsula Daily News.
* Finally, former U.S. Rep. John Miller, R-Edmonds, was recorded by the Associated Press in 1991 asking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about weapons that had been dumped in U.S. waters.
Miller served the Seattle area from 1985 to 1993, when he joined the State Department’s office that fights human trafficking.
He now serves on the faculty of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Search beneath the surface
Weaving the four threads into a suspicion that weapons lie beneath the Strait’s chilly waters is an Olympia-area man who studies hazardous chemical incidents.
Joe Cole of Lacey, an Army veteran of Vietnam who says he was disabled by Agent Orange, spoke with Thomas, tracked down the Heatherton’s records, conferred with the Vancouver exploration expert, and dug up the news story about Miller.
He shared his findings with Peninsula Daily News.
The Vancouver oil and gas expert, while refusing to let the PDN publish his name, did say he used a molecular frequency discriminator to locate a large mass of metal.
“Treasure hunters have them,” he said of the instrument. “It’s pretty accurate.”
However, he said he couldn’t be certain of what he found.
“Until somebody takes a serious look,” he said, “I don’t suppose anyone will know.”
Memories have faded
Adding to the uncertainty is Cole’s inability to locate Patrick Thomas, the Canadian sailor, again. Cole presumes the man has died.
And Miller last month only vaguely remembered his request to NOAA.
“Either because it was so long ago or because I’m getting on in years, I do not recall it,” he told the PDN.
Nor could either of his aides at the time, legislative aide Chuck Broches of Seattle or administrative assistant Bruce Agnew, also of Seattle.
“I remember vaguely — very, very vaguely — hearing about this,” Agnew said. “Some environmental group had raised issues.”
Likewise, federal and state agencies queried by the PDN said they could not confirm that the weapons are where Cole says they lie.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all said they had no proof of Cole’s claims.
The state Department of Ecology also said it had no record of a weapons dump off Clallam County.
And the Canadian Department of National Defence said it dropped chemical weapons including mustard gas and phosgene (another World War I-era weapon) into the Pacific 100 miles off Cape Flattery — but not into the Strait.
Cole said he suspects the Canadians don’t want to admit dumping weapons in U.S. waters.
