PORT ANGELES — All concrete structures, an asphalt parking area and the pier would be removed at the former Rayonier mill site, returning lower Ennis Creek to its onetime natural meander and estuary habitat, a restoration plan for the fish-bearing stream proposes.
“The mill was built on top of what was basically the functional estuary,” Mike McHenry, Lower Elwha Klallam tribe fish and wildlife habitat program manager, said.
A number of fish-blocking city of Port Angeles road culverts would be replaced with fish-friendly bridges along the creek.
McHenry and Warren Snyder, Rayonier’s production manager for the former mill’s clean-up effort, presented the Ennis Creek restoration proposal from the Ennis Technical Team on Tuesday night at the Lower Elwha Kallam Heritage Center at First and Peabody streets.
About 40 attended the presentation.
“We’re really in the hotbed of depressed populations of salmon,” McHenry said of creeks running though Port Angeles and under its many streets and U.S. Highway 101, which all pose fish passage problems.
That means historic fish stocks of coho, chinook, steelhead and bull trout “are not doing very well,” McHenry added.
McHenry, the tribe’s mill site restoration manager, and Snyder, an environmental engineer for Rayonier, headed up the team of 12, including the tribe’s archaeologist, Bill White, and other engineers, geologists, biologists, environmental managers and ecologists.
The team includes five representatives of the tribe and Byron Rot, restoration ecologist with the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe.
The study is unrelated to, but comes on the heels of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s proposal for a Salish Village development at the mouth of Ennis Creek. Plans from architect Mike Gentry and a team of community planners were released for the cultural, lodging, residential, retail, commercial and light industrial proposal for the Rayonier-owned site late last week.
Gentry attended the meeting Tuesday and informed Jamestown S’Klallam tribal Chairman Ron Allen on Wednesday.
“The bottom line is it is not in context with what we are proposing,” Allen said of the Ennis Creek restoration plan.
“It is an update to what they have been working on and what it will take to restore the site to acceptable environmental standards for use, regardless of what that use is.
“I just don’t see it as a conflict at all. It’s just the first step before you can move that project forward.”
Rayonier’s Snyder said the company takes no position on if or how the mill site is used once it is cleaned up and the creek is restored.
“We have not particular view on that,” Snyder said. “Right now there’s a lot of ideas.”
If there is no buyer, Rayonier would leave the site as it is restored until a buyer came along, he said.
The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe and Rayonier are partners in the cleanup effort Rayonier’s former pulp mill site, and the restoration is Rayonier’s responsibility.
The 75-acre property on the eastern shore of Port Angeles Harbor is contaminated by heavy metals, PCBs and dioxin left from 68 years of a pulp-mill operation.
Rayonier mill closed in 1997 and the cleanup of the site has been handled by the state Department of Ecology since 2000.
The conceptual plan for the creek restoration was originally slated for late in the clean-up process, but Rayonier agreed to move it up to coordinate with the city of Port Angeles, which needed more information for its combined sewer-overflow project planning.
The city faces a deadline of 2015 to comply with a mandate from the state Department of Ecology to have no more than four rainstorm-related overflows a year by the year 2015.
The city is negotiating with Rayonier to purchase a 5-million-gallon tank formerly used by the pulp mill and one of few structures left standing.
Glenn Cutler, city public works and utilities director, said a new 100-foot-long pedestrian bridge will be located north of the current pedestrian bridge.
The Olympic Discovery Trail would cross the new bridge, and Cutler said the city and Lower Elwha Klallam tribe have agreed on its location.
That location will not be changed by any modifications to the restoration plans, he said.
The bridge will also carry pipes that will lead to the large tank on the property that the city is purchasing to resolve its sewer overflow problem.
Steve Sperr, city deputy engineering director, said the only “substantial berm” will be on the approach to the new bridge.
Sperr said the bridge will be 100 feet long to accommodate the stream’s future meandering path.
Cutler said the pipes for the tank, which will carry untreated sewage and storm water, will be fully buried on the property in some places and partially buried in others. He said the pipes can’t be fully buried everywhere because they will be gravity fed, and a certain grade must be maintained for adequate flow.
In addition to the restoration of Ennis Creek, the tribe, Rayonier and the state Department of Ecology are coordinating an effort to study what cleanup needs to be done on the site.
McHenry said the restoration would return the creek to a close approximation of its condition before man disturbed it.
All “human caused stresses” on the site would be removed, including concrete structures and non-native plant species.
The intent was to restore fish and wildlife habitat on Ennis and White Creek, the major tributary flowing into Ennis.
Not all was broken on the site, McHenry said, with the stretch of beaches east of Ennis Creek’s mouth on Port Angeles Harbor being the “longest contiguous gravel beaches” in Port Angeles.
West of the creek’s mouth, the team recommends removal of the west berm, riprap and a former marina jetty, replacing it with vegetation and allowing for establishment of the tidal floodplain as part of the 59-acre creek restoration.
The Elwha dams removal project will generate additional silt that will naturally add to the restored beaches.
McHenry cited about five miles of good fish habitat above the city’s Ennis Street culvert and he thanked Jim and Robbie Mantooth, who attended the presentation and have allowed the tribe to restore Ennis Creek through their property adjacent to Peninsula Golf Club in 2005.
The Mantooths’ property is the site of North Olympic Land Trust’s StreamFest, which is scheduled Aug. 29.
The restoration team also recommends removal of the mill site’s asphalt parking lot.
“The parking lot is an area that likely has cultural remains,” McHenry said.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
