[5] Elwha Dam Removal Timeline Slides Three Years

The EPA announced April 17 it has issued a Clean Water Act permit which signals the go-ahead for building water treatment plants for the city of Port Angeles and its industrial customers. The new plants will ensure a clean water supply while two dams on the nearby Elwha River are removed and the river restored. It's the most ambitious project of its kind yet undertaken in this country, approved by Congress 14 years ago.

But the construction of the plants may take up to five years, and could push the schedule for beginning dam removal out to 2012 from its tentative 2009 date.

The treatment plants will keep the water supply clean while 18 million cubic yards of sediment is sluiced downriver, a bit at a time. About half the sediment is expected to plaster the sides of Lake Mills between the two dams, but the rest is likely to go clear to the estuary and raise the river bed by several feet.

Dikes near the river mouth will have to be raised over three feet and extended nearly half a mile to protect lowland areas from future flooding, and nearby well systems must be modified to avoid damage from potential flooding in the future.

With the water table expected to rise from the change, all houses in the Lower Elwha Klallam Reservation with septic systems will have to be hooked up to a new sewer system.

At one point, engineers thought that the best way to tear the dams out would be to tackle the downstream project first and study the results for years before taking out the 210-foot barrier in Glines Canyon. But later, a different plan of attack was developed. A bypass channel will be constructed next to the Lower Elwha Dam while it's torn down, to allow the river to pass. A large area behind the dam will have to be cleared out as well, a giant plug made of woven fire boughs and gunnite was used to plug a huge leak in 1912, a few weeks after the dam was completed.

The upper dam will be notched and taken apart in steps to reduce sediment loads and adverse affects on fish in the river below. The tribal hatchery will be relocated, but the state's chinook rearing channel will stay open while the sediment is released and a rearing pond will be built on nearby Morse Creek.

Questions still remain about how much chinook numbers will improve from the restored Elwha and the addition of 70 miles of unblocked habitat. An old EIS estimated the numbers could grow to 30,000 from the 2,000 or so chinook that return now with help from the hatchery. Depending on productivity levels, the co-managers' targets in the latest recovery plan range from 7,000 to 17,000 spawners in 25 years, but only 2,000 in 10 years.

But scientists who reviewed the Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Plan, approved by NOAA Fisheries last December, have raised questions about the high harvest levels of Elwha chinook by Canadian and Alaskan fishermen that could put a big damper on recovery efforts, expected to cost in the $180-million range. The stock has been listed for protection under the ESA since 1999.

210-foot high Glines Canyon Dam

These harvest issues aren't new, they were raised back in 1993, when Natural Resource Consultants, a Seattle firm, reviewed the potential fisheries which could accrue from the restored river system and estimated its economic value at $14 million over the next 50 years. But their report also noted the high degree of uncertainty about restoring the stock to full theoretical productivity, and it concluded that removing the dams wasn't necessarily "a positive contribution in the even narrow sense of fishery conservation," especially since most of the benefits would go to fisheries outside the region.

The technical review team that recently reviewed the Puget Sound chinook recovery plan said the Elwha chinook population is a significant contribution to the overall "viability" of the Sound's evolutionarily significant unit because of its location at the edge of the ESU and its historical structure, and with Elwha's reputation of once being home to the largest chinook in the region--some weighed over 100 pounds.

However, the TRT also said the historic and potentially future harvest levels developed through the Pacific Salmon Treaty are "inconsistent" with assumptions about the potential productivity of the Elwha chinook and the ability of the habitat to support the recovery of the stock. They said potential harvest levels may exceed the stock's productivity, "given current and near-term habitat conditions." The scientists recommended that upcoming treaty negotiations should include measures to reduce harvest impacts on the listed stock.

These uncertainties are never mentioned in media accounts of the Elwha recovery effort, but the drumbeat of impending crisis is steady and shrill. Kathy Fletcher, executive director of People for Puget Sound told The Seattle Times last week that the region doesn't have any more time to lose because the Puget Sound's ecosystem is at "a tipping point."

But wild chinook numbers in the Strait of Juan de Fuca area are higher now than in the mid-1980s and have remained in the 2,000 to 4,000 fish range since 2000. Other wild chinook stocks in the Sound have remained steady as well, or improved, with special cases like the Skagit, where the wild numbers have more than quadrupled from a 5,000-fish return in 1999. -B. R.

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