PORT ANGELES — Belly up to the barge, boys!
A proposed $7.5 million award from the Hood Canal Bridge graving dock settlement has set the Port of Port Angeles to thinking of a barge berth in the harbor.
The state money, still pending legislative approval, will compensate the Port for job losses from halting graving yard construction, which was expected to provide 120 “family wage” jobs.
The site of the canceled graving yard occupies 22.5 acres of land the Port sold to the state for $4.84 million in 2004.
Nearly half of the land — 11 acres — plus $2.5 million, will be ceded to the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe to rebury ancestral remains that were unearthed from Tse-whit-zen village and its cemetery.
The Port will receive the shoreline strip of the site. The land, which will connect Terminals 5 and 7 on the waterfront, includes the canceled graving yard’s unfinished coffer dam .
It’s the dam as much as the money that inspires barge-berth thinking.
“There’s some structural components to that coffer dam that could be very easily be converted to a bulkheaded barge dock,” Robert McChesney, Port executive director, said Tuesday.
“The way to think about it, rather than the coffer dam, you might see a barge dock.”
Such a dock would handle commodities such as lumber, plywood and paper products from the region’s mills, McChesney said.
The idea isn’t new, he added. The notion was floated in 2000 but was sunk by concern over the loss of trucking jobs.
Then, the cost of a barge-loading facility was pegged at $2.1 million to $2.4 million.
