PORT ANGELES — The latest report on the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard appears to be a case of closing the barn door after the dead horse you were beating has gone.
It’s loaded with shoulda’s, woulda’s and coulda’s that may fascinate public policy wonks or lay a trail for folks seeking someone to blame for the $87 million misadventure.
It contains two fiscal recommendations, 29 policy recommendations and 12 professional suggestions.
Yet it’s also pedantic, patronizing and packed with 80 acronyms that require their own two-page glossary.
The report, prepared by consulting engineers Foth & Van Dyke and Associates of Green Bay, Wis., basically blames the state Department of Transportation for a Mack Sennet-style scramble in 2002 and 2003 to build the graving yard atop what it should have known was an ancestral Native American village and cemetery.
It also says that in the rush, Transportation’s archaeological consultant — Western Shore Heritage Services of Bainbridge — in 2002 did a hasty, sloppy and ultimately disastrous assessment of the site, where 6 feet of fill dirt had been spread to raise a timber mill above tidal levels.
Incomplete information
In Western Shore’s defense, Foth & Van Dyke says the state furnished incomplete and inaccurate information to the archaeologists, including the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the proposed 9.5-acre excavation.
Western Shore owner Glenn Hartmann said Friday he had not seen the report could not comment on it.
However, Foth & Van Dyke’s analysis itself has two huge holes:
* It fails to explain why a second archaeological consultant who followed in Western Shore’s steps didn’t discover that the 22.5-acre graving yard site overlay Tse-whit-zen, a Native American village whose artifacts date to 700 B.C.
* It has scant input from the Lower Elwha Klallam, which declined to cooperate with Foth & Van Dyke on the advice of its attorneys after the tribe sued the state last August.
Comment from the tribe will not be forthcoming. All parties to the issue remain under orders to stay silent while the suit and other matters are mediated.
Missing pieces
The first of the missing pieces leaves unanswered why Transportation thought it might dig its way out of the burial ground long after archaeologists and their tribal assistants discovered intact human remains.
The second omission leaves a reader to wonder why the Lower Elwha let the work continue, albeit slowly, and to speculate about the tribe’s reasons to finally halt the project in December 2004.
Nonetheless, the report to the state Transportation Performance Audit Board reveals many of what it calls Transportation errors, at least if the actions are compared with what Foth & Van Dyke prescribes as best practices, many of them drawn from projects in the Upper Midwest.
