PORT ANGELES — Members of a Wisconsin-based consulting firm will visit Port Angeles and Olympia in August to investigate what went wrong with the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard.
Three teams from Foth & Van Dyke Associates Inc. of Green Bay will focus on separate areas of the project — transportation, the National Environmental Policy Act and coordination with the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe.
The teams expect to visit Washington on Aug. 8 and 15 for in-person and telephone interviews with participants in and observers of the graving yard controversy.
Confidential report
Curtis Hudak, Foth & Van Dyke director, declined to speak about the scope of the probe, although he has asked PDN personnel to cooperate with the investigation.
“I have to decline to comment,” Hudak said.
“This is confidential until the day the report comes out.”
The report is not expected until December.
State Rep. Jim Buck, R-Joyce, requested an audit into how the Washington State Department of Transportation handled the graving yard closure after spending $58.8 million before pulling out in December 2004.
In February, he asked the newly created Transportation Performance Audit Board to conduct an investigation after Gov. Christine Gregoire declined to form a legislative task force to investigate the issue.
The audit board subsequently handed off the investigation to the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee, which in turn hired Foth & Van Dyke.
The committee’s spokesperson in Olympia, Keenan Konopaski, could not be reached to answer how much the firm would be paid or how it was selected.
Hudak also declined to say what Foth & Van Dyke would receive for the probe or what qualifications the firm has for such an inquiry.
However, the company’s Web site says it does consulting engineering in Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey and Puerto Rico.
It also explored a 10,000-year-old archaeological site in western Minnesota in 2002.
Discoveries stopped yard
Archaeological discoveries stopped the graving yard, an onshore dry dock where the state had hoped to build huge concrete anchors, pontoons and bridge decks to reconstruct the crumbling east end of the Hood Canal span.
Starting with the discovery of the first human remains in the summer of 2003, archaeologists discovered 335 intact burials, thousands of skeletal fragments and more than 10,000 Native American artifacts at the ancestral village the Lower Elwha call Tse-whit-zen.
The Foth & Van Dyke investigation is not the only action hanging fire in the former graving yard’s future.
Lower Elwha Klallam Chairwoman Frances Charles said Wednesday there were no breakthroughs in negotiations with the state Department of Transportation over what will be done with the site.
The tribe wants the burials returned to what ancestors thought would be their final resting place.
Nor has the Transportation Department chosen a new site to construct the pontoons. It is considering locations in Everett, the Mats Mats Bay quarry in Jefferson County, and Elliott and Commencement bays on Puget Sound.
Port Angeles’ bid to build at least the anchors on a shoreward slice of the yard also remains undecided.
And Transportation Secretary Douglas MacDonald now serves at Gov. Gregoire’s pleasure, thanks to the Legislature transferring his job from the supervision of the independent Washington Transportation Commission.
Gregoire said last week during a visit to Clallam County that she has not yet made a long-term decision regarding MacDonald’s continued employment. She said he currently serves in an “interim” basis.
102 canoes to visit
On Aug. 1, as many as 102 canoes from Northwest tribes and Canadian First Nations will paddle into Port Angeles harbor for the annual Tribal Canoe Journey, hosted this year by the Lower Elwha.
It will be the largest journey since the voyages started in 1989, thanks in part to the Tse-whit-zen controversy. The journey’s theme will be “Reflections of Our Past: Honoring Tse-whit-zen Village.”
Meanwhile, the east end of the bridge continues to crumble, threatening to sever the North Olympic Peninsula’s lifeline for food, fuel and other commodities, including tourists.
About 14,000 cars cross the bridge each weekday and about 20,000 on summer weekends, according to the Department of Transportation.
Costs of repairing it — originally $204 million, now $283.6 million — continue to rise. Completion, first set for 2007, has been delayed at least to 2009.
