Will Stelle, who is administrator of the West Coast Region of NOAA Fisheries, has an op-ed in today’s Seattle Times praising The Boeing Company’s  contributions to the Duwamish River clean up.

The Duwamish River is probably the hardest-working river in Washington. It has long supported industry, with Boeing building thousands of World War II airplanes on its shores. It has been dredged, channelized and, yes, heavily polluted along the way — it became a Superfund site in 2001.

But the Duwamish still supports salmon and steelhead, including endangered species, a testament to the tenacity of the fish and the river itself. If the fish and the river can persevere, then we owe it to them to deliver on the ambitious and collaborative plans for reversing the historic damage and making the Duwamish right.

To do that, we must recognize those property-owners who are living up to their responsibilities in cleaning up and restoring the Duwamish, and hold them up as the example that we expect others to follow. Their responsibility is all that stands between a severely damaged and struggling river and one that again can provide the natural values we seek from Northwest rivers — and be a river that Seattle and Washington can be proud of.

Boeing, in cooperation with regulatory agencies, has taken the lead in taking on that important responsibility and setting a high bar for others. In 2011, Boeing demolished its Plant 2 facility on the Lower Duwamish, clearing the way for the largest cleanup and habitat restoration on the river so far. The company has since removed the equivalent of 4,000 railcars of contaminated sediment from nearly 1 mile of riverfront, and that is just the start.

Boeing estimates it has spent more than $150 million on the entire project, which includes additional activities, such as building demolition and sediment cleanup, and others under the Environmental Protection Agency’s oversight.

The full op-ed is here.