POULSBO, Kitsap County — Just hours into the experiment, the prognosis was grim for salmon that had been submerged in rain runoff collected from one of Seattle’s busiest highways. One by one, the fish were removed from a tank filled with coffee-colored water and inspected: They were rigid. Their typically red gills were gray.

“He’s way dead,” David Baldwin, a research zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Northwest Fisheries Science Center, declared at the four-hour mark.

This was the fate of coho exposed to the everyday toxic brew of dirt, metals, oil and other gunk that washes off highway pavement after rains, directly into Puget Sound.

When that runoff was filtered through a simple mixture of gravel, sand and compost, however, the outlook was much brighter. Salmon exposed to treated water were healthy and responsive, even after 24 hours.

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