Qualla: Gateway Pacific Terminal

Gateway Pacific Terminal: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The sentence that ended a half-billion-dollar project was written in 1855. Article 5 of the Treaty of Point Elliott secures to the signatory nations "the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds and stations." A hundred and sixty-one years later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers weighed that clause against a proposal to build one of the largest coal export terminals in North America at Cherry Point, on the Whatcom County shoreline of the Salish Sea, and found that the terminal would infringe on Lummi fishing rights. The permit was denied. Nothing was built. The gravel bench above the water is still a gravel bench above the water.

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Gateway Pacific Terminal: Xwe'chi'eXen

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cherry Point has another name, older than the county and the state: Xwe'chi'eXen. The Lummi Nation has an ancestral village site here, and the waters offshore have been fished by Lummi families for as long as there has been anyone to fish them. The site carries religious and cult...

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Gateway Pacific Terminal: Four Hundred and Eighty-Seven Ships

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

SSA Marine filed for state and federal permits on 28 February 2011, opening the environmental review of a $500 million project. The design called for a dock 2,980 feet long — well over half a mile of pier reaching into the Salish Sea — and capacity for as many as 487 vessels a ye...

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Gateway Pacific Terminal: The Hearing in Bellingham

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 1 June 2011, more than 300 people turned out to a hearing hosted by Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike, and the concerns raised were as much about daily life as about the planet. Coal dust blowing off open rail cars and its effect on people's lungs. Diesel exhaust from ships and locomo...

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Gateway Pacific Terminal: Spills, Letters, and Lawyers

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In December 2014 the Washington State Department of Ecology put numbers to one specific risk. With the terminal operating, the median count of oil spills in the nearby waters was projected to climb 26 percent — from roughly ten a year to roughly thirteen by 2019 — with the volume...

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Gateway Pacific Terminal: What Stands There Now

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Corps ruled in 2016 and the terminal died. Five years later Whatcom County went further and made the outcome structural, passing a zoning ordinance in July 2021 that prohibits new refineries, fossil fuel shipment facilities, coal plants, piers, and wharfs along this shoreline...

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