PORT ANGELES — Trucks laden with huge boulders soon will no longer be seen trundling through the city to the Lower Elwha Klallam reservation.
That’s where workers are beefing up the tribe’s Elwha River levee in preparation for tearing down the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams later this year.
DelHur Industries Inc., a subcontractor for the $8.76 million project, started hauling rocks large and small to the dike in July.
The company plucked them from “two or three” different quarries west of Port Angeles, near Sequim and near the Hood Canal, said Scott McCollough, National Park Service project manager.
DelHur will finish hauling riprap and gravel to the levee in the next several days, Robert Elofson, the tribe’s Elwha River restoration director, said Tuesday.
Then pumps and backup generators will be installed.
DelHur, a heavy-construction company, is based in Port Angeles and has offices in Hermiston, Ore., and Durango, Colo.
Company President Tim Holth did not return calls for comment Tuesday on the project.
The levee project is entirely funded with federal stimulus money.
Elofson said the entire project will be completed in about two weeks as part of the $351 million Elwha River restoration project, which includes tearing down the dams beginning in mid-September and ending by March 2014.
A rise of up to 2 ½ feet is expected in the Elwha River as the dams are being dismantled, Elofson said.
The levee barrier is being raised in various places from 2 feet to 4 feet and being extended to more than 8,000 feet, increasing the length by about 20 percent to 25 percent and armoring it to withstand 200-year floods.
A several-hundred-acre parcel on the southern portion of the thousand-acre reservation cannot be used for housing because the levee does not sufficiently protect the property, Elofson said.
The reservation is at the mouth of the Elwha where it empties into the Strait of Juan de Fuca west of Port Angeles.
“We’ve been waiting for the levy to get done before we build any housing,” he said.
The improvement project also will protect existing housing, Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles said.
“With the experiences we’ve had in previous years, we have had some flooding.”
Without the levee improvements, part of the reservation would have flooded with up to 2 ½ feet of water when the dams are removed, Charles said.
Waters are not expected to rise until about June 2012, about nine months after the dams start coming down, Elofson said.
That’s when at least 19 million cubic yards of sediment will begin moving past the dams and downriver, Elofson said.
“That’s when the river levels will start changing because it will start restoring the sediment transport.”
The sediment, blocked by the dams from coating the riverbed, will provide salmon habitat in an effort to replenish once-prodigious salmon runs that have dwindled to a paltry 3,000 spawning salmon annually since the Elwha Dam was built in 1913 and the Glines Canyon Dam in 1927.
Park officials hope that by 2039, the river will return to its pre-dam level of an estimated 400,000 annually spawning salmon.
Chinook, coho, steelhead, pink, chum and sockeye are species expected to return to the Elwha, entering and exiting the river not far from the levee that will now better protect the reservation.
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Senior staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
