Imagine a substance that if children are born near it, 95 percent of them will die and the remaining five percent will be mutated.

Wood treated with creosote does just that to the eggs of fish that are deposited next to it. This is part of the reason that more than $20,000 and the hours of volunteers are being used this week to clean up tons of wood treated with the substance this week at Fort Casey State Park.

Creosote is a conglomeration of approximately 300 different chemicals, most of which are carcinogenic, said Tony Frantz, Island County’s “Mr. Creosote.”

“If it doesn’t belong on the beach and it’s a chemical, we need to get it out,” he said.

Frantz said his mission to educate the public about the impacts of creosote began for personal reasons. He said he suffered poisoning from his work around the treated wood.

For years, wood was treated with creosote as a precaution against insect damage. Usually seen in the form of power poles and pilings, the treated wood washes up on beaches all around Puget Sound, said Lisa Kaufman, restoration manager for the Department of Natural Resources. At Fort Casey, they found more than 500 pieces of large pilings in a half mile stretch of beach.

“We were just looking for a site and walked this beach,” she said. “We were pretty shocked.”

Kaufman said that similar cleanups have occured in Whatcom and Skagit counties. Under the watch of State Parks and the Department of Natural Resources, along with the Northwest Straits Commission, the cleanup will spread around the Sound, she said.

The wood will be transported to a lined landfill in Roosevelt County for disposal. On the beach, the scent of the oily wood is noticeable, even to untrained sniffers. Crews are careful not to disturb natural beach wood.

And for good reason — at $85 per ton, disposal of the wood is not cheap. In addition, the wood on a beach provides a natural shady spot for various sea creatures, Kaufman said.

Frantz said that creosote infiltrates human use of the beach as well.

“I looked at a kid’s fort and it had 126 pieces of wood in it — 28 of those were treated,” Frantz said. “I also see campfires where people pick up the treated wood and burn it. It makes a pretty blue flame, but it’s very dangerous.”

A 40-foot long section of a piling can contain as much as 40 gallons of the substance. Environmental Protection Agency standards state that an official clean up must be conducted if eight ounces of the substance are spilled, Frantz said.

A creosote cleanup is also planned this spring at Double Bluff beach near Freeland.

You can reach News-Times reporter Eric Berto at eberto@whidbeynewstimes.com