Jerry Cressa: Longshoreman stands up for environment

Monday, January 24, 2005

JULIE SULLIVAN

The Port of Portland's recent cleanup of a diesel seep at Terminal 4 looked complete. Trees and shrubs covered the reclaimed site on the Willamette River. But a rockhound on a break from his waterfront job saw something else. In and around the plantings were shiny black rocks, buckets of them, unlike any he'd ever collected. Suspicious, he took them to longshoreman Jerry Cressa.

Cressa made a call. And last Wednesday, he arrived at the site with public health advocate Jane Harris and an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality official. Within seconds, they held handfuls of solidified coal tar, a cancer-causing pollutant so toxic the federal government sued the Port more than a decade ago to get the waste out of the river and off the site.

Cressa, who's worked on the Portland docks for decades, told the state expert the coal tar had been spilled from ship-unloading equipment years before. But clearly the problem persists despite a massive effort to get rid of it. "All we are trying to do," Cressa told the DEQ manager, "is get this done right."

Port managers have downplayed the new find, saying the solid coal tar isn't likely to move and isn't in a particularly public place. But the state officials who oversee the well-studied industrial site -- which is part of Portland's federal Superfund area -- say they are dismayed to find toxic waste on freshly moved earth. The coal tar must be removed as soon as possible.

For most of his 42-year career, Jerry Cressa has been a rank-and-file longshoreman, picking up his assignment each day at the union hall and operating a crane more than 100 feet above Portland docks. But in the past year, he's also become an environmental activist, a waterfront whistle-blower.

His complaints that soda ash was washing into the Willamette at Terminal 4 forced a Houston-based company into federal court where, earlier this month, Kinder Morgan Inc. tentatively agreed to clean up its operations.

Cressa inspired Bill McCauley, a fellow longshoreman, to watchdog Portland harbor Superfund sites. And Cressa tipped the Environmental Protection Agency to rumors that a foreign ship illegally dumped 159 tons of potash at sea after leaving Portland in 2003. The EPA is investigating.

Cressa and his wife, Karen ("the other half of my brain -- we do everything together"), say they are not environmental experts. "We're average people," says Karen Cressa, 56.

"Our only skill is we're observant," says Jerry Cressa. "We just want people to look at what is happening and ask: Does this make sense?"

Such questions and the Cressas' persistence in demanding answers irritate many people. When Cressa first complained about soda ash, Kinder Morgan publicly attacked him as a disgruntled employee. Managers at the Port, where Cressa has worked for more than 26 years, do not return Cressa's calls. A fellow longshoreman has called DEQ to challenge Cressa's motives.

"Jerry has gotten a lot of flak from different people because of speaking out," says McCauley, who has retired from longshoring. "He has been drastically denigrated. I may be, too, but I'm not there to hear it. He's still out there working."

A union tradition

Cressa says it is precisely because of his work and his membership in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union that he does speak out.

"My union is the union of Harry Bridges," Cressa says. "It is still a democracy on the waterfront."

Bridges was the incorruptible Australian who for 40 years led the West Coast longshoremen to excellent wages and benefits -- all while taking sharp stands against racial segregation, mistreatment of farmworkers and the exporting of U.S. jobs.

Bridges once told Congress that the ILWU, "is a union that recognizes that from time to time it's got to stand up and fight for certain things that may not necessarily be about wages, hours and conditions. Things like civil liberties and racial equality." Cressa has a film clip showing the testimony.

David Olson, a political scientist and former chairman of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington, says that Cressa reflects the ILWU's tradition of taking principled, though costly, stands.

"If you've been working on the docks 40 years, you have lived this life of concern for others that goes beyond wages and benefits to issues like job safety and boycotting South Africa because of apartheid," Olson says. "This individual worker is not exceptional, not out of the mainstream ILWU."

Union ambivalence

Union members have lobbied for cleaner air in Los Angeles, but they've also supported dredging the Columbia River and keeping its dams. And some ILWU members openly fear that Cressa will drive jobs to other ports by angering waterfront companies.

"There are people who are not happy with what he's done," says Steve Stallone, communications director for West Coast longshoremen. But, he says, it is unlikely they can take formal action to kick Cressa out of the union.

Others wonder why he waited until now to speak up.

"Why didn't we say something about coal tar? We didn't really know," Cressa responds. "We weren't educated, and it's all about educating people."

On the second Wednesday night of the month, every ILWU member in Portland stops work and heads to the mandatory monthly meeting of Local No. 8. Docks empty. Cranes stand silent. Cressa is there, but as soon as the meeting ends, he races to another -- the monthly gathering of citizens overseeing Superfund sites. Slipping into a front-row seat next to his wife, Cressa leans forward, listening to a discussion of dredging and the way it may stir up dangerous sediment. He quickly breaks in.

"The reality is out there on the docks," Cressa says. "I'm out there every day. I see the contradictions. You are our regulators; you have to be out there, too."

A longshoring family

Cressa's road to this forum began not on the river but on long walks through his Hillsboro neighborhood.

He grew up in San Francisco, where his longshoreman dad went from backbreaking, dangerous physical work in the 1940s to operating one of the first container cranes in 1959. The use of containers cut West Coast longshoring numbers from 100,000 in 1960 to 13,000 today but made the remaining jobs key to the global economy.

In 1969, Cressa was working as a casual longshoreman and studying engineering in college when he was drafted. He spent two years in the Middle East, came home and went back to work on the docks. He married Karen in 1973. She'd studied comparative literature and German in college and worked for the Austrian trade delegation.

They fell in love with the Northwest on their honeymoon. And, after they had two daughters, they moved to Hillsboro in 1979.

Karen volunteered in schools and libraries, and Jerry worked nights moving cargo through Portland harbor. Every afternoon, they took long walks through their growing city.

When a new subdivision was announced in their older neighborhood in 2001, they questioned how the existing 8-inch sewer pipe could handle the increased flow. They'd already smelled seepage in nearby wetlands and had seen manholes pop and water overflow into Turner Creek after heavy rains.

Hillsboro disagrees

The normally reserved Karen was concerned enough to go door to door, gathering a petition asking for a study. But city officials said the line was fine, and the project went forward. Two years later, the neighborhood learned that city studies dating back a decade showed that the line was badly deteriorated and leaking.

The Cressas accused the city of misleading residents so that the development could go ahead. Officials said the debate was over semantics and maintained that the sewer line still worked. Development continued.

The experience convinced the Cressas that nobody was paying attention. An exhaustive researcher, Karen Cressa began questioning other decisions.

The couple lobbied for public hearings on Intel's air-quality permit when the company boosted its production at Ronler Acres. They wanted a hearing when Oregon Health & Science University proposed building a top-security bioterror lab near a major retail hub in Washington County. OHSU's proposal to build the lab was not accepted by the National Institutes of Health.

The Cressas' involvement has irritated some Hillsboro leaders. "I'm not sure whatever we do is going to satisfy them totally," City Councilwoman Karen McKinney said at one 2003 meeting.

Lone Rangers

Cynthia O'Donnell, another Hillsboro city councilwoman, defended the Cressas at the same meeting.

"In my observation, if the Cressas are being singled out as the Lone Rangers because they have more questions than other people, it's because they know a little bit more or have a little bit more life experience to continue to ask questions."

In fact, Jerry Cressa says, only Jane Harris, executive director of the Oregon Center for Environmental Health, listened to his concerns on the waterfront. Her Portland nonprofit sued Kinder Morgan for violating the federal Clean Water Act based on Cressa's complaints and reached a tentative agreement with the company Jan. 3.

After Wednesday's visit, she was making calls to get the coal tar cleaned up. The Port is planning to include coal-tar removal in an upcoming project.

"With the longshoremen and Jerry Cressa working with us, we can reform how waste is handled and corporations do business," Harris says. "There is a risk to them for speaking out, but the risk is even greater if they don't."

Julie Sullivan: 503-221-8068; juliesullivan@news.oregonian.com