With more and more debris from last year’s tsunami in Japan floating ashore in Washington, Governor Chris Gregoire is looking to reassure communities up and down the coast.

On Monday morning, a Department of Health physicist showed Gregoire how the agency plans to check items that wash up for radiation.

Gregoire said the latest expectation is that debris will “dribble in” over the next few years.

The state Department of Ecology, along with the health department and other top agencies, are working together on a plan to manage the debris, especially the risk of radiation and invasive species that may be present on things that wash ashore.

But the governor made it clear the cleanup is going to largely be a volunteer effort.

“We don’t have the resources at the state level to do what we’re going to have to have done here,” she said. “We don’t, nor does the federal government. This is really a volunteer effort. But when we see an instance – a boat comes ashore, whether large debris comes ashore, whether a drum comes ashore – that’s our job.”

The governor has also reached out to the federal government for financial help with any cleanup effort.

As for the fear of radiation contamination, experts don’t expect to find much, if any, on the items that wash up. That’s because much of the debris that floated away did so before the nuclear emergency at the Japanese reactor last year.

Experts also said any radiation that was present would have been washed away during the trip across the Pacific Ocean.