A company report, accepted by state regulators, said that in late November a hole opened within the bowels of a pulp and paper mill and, briefly, poured a small stream of untreated wastewater into the city's bay.
Within a few minutes of its discovery, crews slowed the spill to a trickle and four hours later sealed the hole, the Port Townsend Paper Co.'s environmental manager wrote. In all, he figured about 150 gallons of waste and pulp spilled into Puget Sound.
Washington’s Department of Ecology didn’t investigate.
That is, until months later, when John Tippins, a veteran millwright, gave inspectors at Ecology dozens of his own photos and videos from the November spill. He described the episode as “catastrophic,” the worst he had seen.
Now, state officials are taking a second look and looping in the attorney general’s office.
The Port Townsend Paper Co. stands by its original assessment, said spokesperson Randy Coté, senior vice president at a Seattle-based public relations firm. If its report is insufficient — and the company's not saying it is — then the blame lies with Tippins and others who responded to the spill. Those workers never gave the company the now-surfacing photos or videos, Coté said. He also acknowledges senior managers never interviewed Tippins before turning their official report over to state officials.
The discrepancy between Tippins’ story and the mill’s report to the state raises questions not only about the spill itself, which might have killed fish and nearby wildlife, but also about Washington’s regulatory framework for heavy industrial businesses.
The debate also compounds increased scrutiny heaped onto the state’s pulp and paper industry after a chemical tank failed at a Longview mill in May, killing 11 workers and maiming eight others. The problems at these mills, as well as another in Cosmopolis where federal authorities have seized thousands of gallons of dangerous chemicals, underscore the limitations and blind spots of state and federal regulators, experts and engineers say.
Since the Longview disaster, state officials have more aggressively scrutinized Washington’s mills. In September, Ecology fined the Port Townsend Paper Co. $734,000 for a series of spills earlier this year, including two that poured thousands of gallons of a chemical into its own wastewater lagoons. That’s a much heftier sum than the $20,000 fine it issued for a 114,000-gallon spill in the bay last year.
Before he contacted state regulators, Tippins said, he raised a ruckus at the mill. Not to try to close the place down but to make sure it operates safely and responsibly. First he spoke with middle and senior managers, then he tried corporate officers. He said the complaints and warnings were ignored. Increasingly frustrated, he contacted state and elected officials, alongside news reporters. To each of them he warned that the November spill was hundreds of times worse than originally reported.
Not only does a spill like this dump harmful particles and fibers directly into the ocean, but the wastewater itself can consume an outsized amount of oxygen in the water, which can kill fish, plants and animals. State regulators can’t say precisely which compounds poured into the sea during this spill. Nobody followed up to test the water after the fact. Similarly, they can’t say whether any fish or wildlife died. They didn’t look.
The mill fired Tippins after his complaints. Now he’s fighting for protections. U.S. Rep. Emily Randall, whose district includes the mill, confirmed she’s looking into the case and is connecting Tippins with resources for whistleblowers. Coté said the company fired Tippins in the summer for previous and unrelated performance issues.
Tippins said he understood the risks of speaking out, though, and that he’s mostly comfortable with the path he chose. He grew up on the Olympic Peninsula and said he watched as local mill owners and operators sold their businesses to faraway companies and corporations with little connection to the area.
Not long ago, Tippins said, a former colleague at the mill asked him why he chose to speak out, risk his job and apply pressure on other workers.
“I told him, ‘This is your bay. This is your town,’” Tippins said. “This is my bay. This is my town.”
The spill
The Port Townsend Paper Co. runs around the clock as Puget Sound laps its eastern edge. It employs around 300 people and churns out some 1,000 tons of unbleached paper, containerboard and pulp each day, which can be used to make everything from tissue paper and printing packaging to skateboards and building materials. It does this by using a highly alkaline chemical called white liquor to break down vast quantities of wood chips and transform them into pulp.
White liquor is the same substance that spilled from the ruptured chemical tank in Longview during the deadly disaster there this May. At the back end of the milling process, a mixture of unwanted fiber and chemicals flows into a treatment lagoon to be cleaned and sifted before the treated waste stream can legally be poured into the sea.
But on Nov. 20, 2025, something broke in that system.
Around 8:41 p.m., Tippins said, he heard a call over the radio. A colleague had discovered “sludge” pouring out of a 24-inch pipe and directly into Port Townsend Bay. The gunk clearly came from the mill’s waste stream, he said.
Tippins said he arrived third on scene and by then the spill had slowed because mill operators had shut down the waste stream. Tracing the flow of the spill, he crawled under a nearby dock to assess the damage. He reeled back in shock.
Seawater, murky with wastewater and pulp, had retreated with the outgoing tide. Fibrous muck, which he estimated to be half an inch thick in places, coated rocks and shoreline as far as he could see. He captured video of the aftermath, letting loose profanities on occasion as he poked and kicked the fiber left behind.
Within a few hours, Tippins said he and his colleagues had found the hole — big enough to stick your boot into — and patched it with epoxy. Best he could figure, someone using a power washer might have accidentally blasted a hole in a trench meant to carry the waste stream toward the treatment system. The hole allowed some of that wastewater to escape into an unmonitored pipe that pours directly into the bay. Problem was, anybody doing that kind of work would have wrapped up hours earlier, so there’s no telling how long the spill had been going, he said.
Early the next morning, Tippins emailed his supervisor.
“I went back down under the dock with a fan rake and garbage bags but it was too late, the tide had already started coming back up and washing everything away,” he wrote. “We had a window of time where we could have done something but we didn’t. Very frustrating.”
This spill was so severe, Tippins thought to himself, surely soon he’d be reading about it in the news or see something from state inspectors.
But nothing happened. The mill’s environmental officer didn't interview Tippins. Nor did inspectors with Ecology.
150 gallons
Tippins said he waited and watched closely until July when a local reporter gave him a single-page document in which Micheal Clea, the mill’s environmental manager, detailed the spill for an inspector at Ecology.
In his Nov. 24 report, Clea estimated the spill lasted 25 minutes, from the moment of its discovery to the moment crews shut off the stream. For that time, he figured the sludge flowed at a rate of about 6 gallons per minute. He attached a single photo of the leaking pipe, which showed a trickle of clear fluid.
Tippins sat with the report for a minute.
“I was almost physically sick,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Clea’s report described a drastically different spill than the one Tippins remembered.
And the photo Clea shared with regulators drew a stark contrast when compared to the pictures and videos Tippins has of the scene. One photo in particular shows a thick gray-brown sludge pouring out of the same pipe at an obviously higher rate.
Mill spokesperson Coté said managers hadn’t seen that extra evidence before and gave Ecology all the photos they had at the time. Any others were withheld, he said.
While Tippins took nearly all his own photos and videos, one of them, which slows sludge pouring from a pipe, was taken on a work phone shared by the foreman on duty, he said. Tippins had snapped a photo of that phone’s screen. At the edge of that image is a photo gallery, containing both the official picture submitted to Ecology and other pictures that weren’t submitted, and which show a much faster rate of flow.
After seeing those additional photos, Brian Peterson, the mill's senior vice president of manufacturing, still said no more than 150 gallons of wastewater poured into the sea during the spill. His estimate is based on photos, videos and our familiarity with the facility as its longtime operator, he said.
The Seattle Times asked five experts — two engineers, a safety expert, a mathematician and an ecologist — to review images and videos of the spill. Each of them cast doubt on the mill’s official report.
One fluid mechanics engineer with decades of experience in the pulp and paper industry analyzed the two photos and quickly dismissed the mill’s estimated spill volume of 150 gallons. Depending on the size of the pipe (Tippins estimated it is 24 inches wide or more), the sludge pouring out might have actually spilled at a rate of between 530 and 2,100 gallons per minute, said the engineer, who spoke on a condition of anonymity because they do business with the mill and fear retribution.
Another expert, Christopher Bretherton, professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s Department of Applied Mathematics, also analyzed the photos and estimated that the larger flow might have poured out at a rate of between 120 and 480 gallons per minute.
Marissa Baker, an associate professor of occupational health at UW; Michael Brett, a civil and environmental engineer with UW; and Carri LeRoy, an ecologist with The Evergreen State College, all examined the photos and videos from Tippins and came to the same conclusion.
“It’s a much bigger spill than what they reported,” Brett said, “that seems obvious.”
Based on these new flow estimates, a 25-minute spill could have dumped out between 3,000 and 52,500 gallons of wastewater. And Tippins argues the spill, which poured out of a generally unsupervised portion of the mill, lasted at least several hours.
Coté said mill managers hold fast to their own timeline, though.
“From their perspective, the event happened, they found it, they fixed it, and they voluntarily reported the estimated discharge,” he said.
Raising the alarm
Tippins didn’t have a mathematical analysis at the time. He just knew his experience didn’t match the mill’s report. He attempted to speak with his supervisor and mill managers, and even tried calling corporate officers. He gained no traction.
So, in late July, Tippins walked into a packed morning meeting with his colleagues and high-ranking mill officials, report in hand. He wanted to make sure everybody had seen the document, knowing it wouldn’t match their recollection of the spill. Afterward, his supervisor suspended him for three days.
Early the next month they fired him.
In his termination paperwork, mill officials said Tippins had become “increasingly agitated, used profanity and repeatedly asked to be fired.” They accused Tippins of harassing and threatening mill managers over text messages. He said they should “watch the news” because something was “coming,” the document said.
Tippins provided those text chains to The Times. Earlier in one conversation he warned that the spill might have amounted to “500,000 gallons of process sewer that we lost into the bay!” In another he remarked about the “massive spill into the bay.”
One manager, who could not be reached for comment, replied: “John… you realize there are 295 other families that rely on those jobs… I understand how you feel about certain people there, I have my own feelings too but there are a lot of good people that will be effected by this. Let alone the position you just put me in…”
Tippins started looking outside the mill for help. In July and August he wrote to regulators at Ecology, public officials and journalists.
No investigation
Ecology’s internal documentation shows that months after the spill, a state inspector assigned to the mill planned to issue a notice of violation for the reported 150-gallon spill. But at no point did the inspector question the size or scope of the spill or investigate further.
Industrial spills that aren’t covered by oil and gas regulations — like this one — allow state inspectors some judgment in whether they investigate on their own, Ecology spokesperson Andy Wineke wrote in an email. This spill had been reported as brief and relatively small, so the inspector decided a follow-up wasn’t warranted.
A 150-gallon spill would have quickly dissipated in the waters of Port Townsend Bay, “making testing or additional investigation challenging,” Wineke said. Because they didn’t investigate or test the waters after the fact, regulators aren’t sure precisely which compounds were dumped.
The extent of damage wrought on the environment by this type of spill would depend on its size. Generally speaking, Wineke said, untreated wastewater like this can consume vast quantities of oxygen in the ocean, which can kill fish, wildlife and plants. These spills also contain other harmful particles.
Confronted with all the new evidence, Ecology’s inspectors are taking another look. In an Aug. 11 email, Mady Lyon, a regulator within the department, told Tippins she shared his evidence with an assistant attorney general.
“We are taking your report seriously as we review the material,” Lyon wrote.
So far, Wineke wouldn’t say whether regulators still believe that 150-gallon estimate to be accurate. He only wrote that Ecology is continuing to evaluate the spill “and will take appropriate actions if we determine the incorrect data was provided.”
The big picture
At this point, discovering the true size or scope of the November spill will be exceptionally difficult. Nobody looked closer at a time when they could have collected meaningful data.
That blind spot carries significance for the spill itself, the mill and Washington’s regulatory process, UW experts Brett and Baker agree.
Washington’s regulators have effectively fostered a culture of self-regulation, which allows major issues to slip through the cracks of public oversight, Baker said.
Large operations, like pulp and paper mills, are required to report incidents like spills to state inspectors. But the regulating agencies themselves are spread too thin to follow up on every report, even if they wanted to, Baker said. So these large businesses are incentivized to omit or obscure the worst details about incidents in the hopes that they don’t attract too much attention.
Fines or fees, when they are issued, often don’t cut much into the facilities’ bottom lines or force change anyway, she added.
At a maximum, Ecology is allowed to fine a business $10,000 a day per violation, a figure that hasn’t increased since 1985.
“It’s a race to the bottom,” Baker said.
The Port Townsend Paper Co. has had spills like this before. It’s been fined for some of them. Until last month, most of those financial penalties have been relatively minor for a business with a corporate owner, Atlas Holdings, which reported annual revenue of $26 billion. Mills in Longview and Cosmopolis have similar track records of repeated violations and relatively small fines, though since the fatal disaster in May, regulators have tightened their grip somewhat.
To shore up gaps in its regulations, Brett said Ecology could invest more people and resources into inspecting mills and other industries. This summer, however, state officials projected they’ll have a nearly $500 million budget deficit in 2027. Alternatively, Brett said, regulators could raise fines and fees it imposes when things go wrong, he said.
The road ahead
Tippins, 58, isn’t sure what happens next. More than likely, he thinks, his family will have to move away from their longtime home. He’s seeking whistleblower protections, but doesn’t expect to win his job back. The trust is broken with mill managers anyway. State unemployment officers have told him that his actions at work didn’t qualify as misconduct, which Tippins took as a small victory.
Coté maintains, however, that the mill didn’t fire Tippins for “whistleblower activity or protected reporting.” Earlier in the year, he said, mill management received “unusual and concerning communications” from Tippins, in which he claimed that his family owned the Pacific Ocean.
Tippins clarified:
His grandfather, a World War II veteran who had returned from the Pacific Theater, used to tell his grandchildren that he had won the Pacific Ocean in a card game. For years, Tippins said his grandfather used to make all the children promise that they’d take care of “his ocean.”
Speaking out against the mill was no easy decision, Tippins said. His life’s been turned upside down in the process. Nowadays he carries a well-worn black-and-white photograph of his grandfather in his front pocket. From time to time, he’ll pull it out and think about the promise he made.
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