PORT ANGELES — Officials with the city of Port Angeles say they won’t take over operation of the Elwha Water Treatment Plant from the National Park Service until it is fixed.
“We can’t accept the water system like it is now,” said Bill Bloor, city attorney.
“That would bankrupt the city very quickly.”
The Parks Service plans to discontinue operating the water facility as of October of this year, according to a Jan. 6 letter from Sarah Creachbaum, Olympic National Park superintendent.
She said in the letter that National Park Service officials “do not think redesign [of the facility] is necessary.”
Creachbaum could not be reached for comment Saturday.
The National Parks Service currently operates the plant, located near the city’s industrial water channel at river mile 2.8.
The park service built the facility to remove sediment from the water supply during and after a project to remove two dams from the Elwha River.
The facility was intended to mitigate impacts to the city’s domestic and industrial water systems — as well as to water for Lower Elwha Klallam facilities, such as the tribal hatchery — but has been hampered by the tons of silt that flowed down the river following the removal of the two dams between 2011 and 2014.
According to a memorandum of understanding signed Aug. 6, 2004, the city, tribe and park service would agree on a time frame for the transfer of the facility to the city.
City officials believe they “have no choice but to insist, prior to any transfer of facilities, NPS fulfill its water quality and quantity obligations to the city” under the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act of 1992 and subsequent 2004 memorandum, according to a June 7 City Council memo.
$16 million in repairs
The city will not take over the facilities without an estimated $16 million in repairs first, Bloor said Saturday.
The city also is seeking funding to pay for estimated ongoing operating costs over the next 20 years, for a total of $41 million, he said.
“It is an estimate, and we fully expect the numbers will be refined,” he said.
The estimates were provided by a city consultant, CH2M of Bellevue, Bloor said.
CH2M “identified a number of things that really should be corrected in order to make the facilities function as efficiently and as smoothly as they were intended to function,” Bloor said.
“Those were the numbers that came from identification of what needs to be done.”
Impacts will not end
Consulting scientists have advised that impacts to the city’s water systems from dam removal have not ended and will not end with the mitigation facilities currently in place, according to the City Council memo.
Prior to dam removal, the city’s Ranney collector — a type of radial well used to extract water from an aquifer with direct connection to a surface water source such as a river or lake — functioned with little to no manpower requirements and minimal operational costs to the city, according to the memo.
In the 10 years prior to dam removal, the highest annual cost of operating the system was about $110,000, Bloor said.
“Now that the dams are out, that won’t be true — even if these facilities run correctly. On a magnitude, on a scale, it is going to cost us nine to ten times the amount to run the system every year,” he said.
“That is the estimate that we have, and again, that was produced by an outside consultant. We have given those numbers to the parks service.”
On June 7, the City Council approved the hiring of Lane Powell PC, a Seattle law firm, to represent the city in regard to issues arising form the dam removal project.
Elwha tribe concerns
The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe also is concerned that the facility isn’t ready for a transfer.
“It is evident that there are a number of issues of mutual concern to both the city and the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe,” wrote Dan McKeen, Port Angeles city manager, and Michael Peters, Lower Elwha Klallam CEO, in a joint letter to Creachbaum dated Dec. 18.
Peters could not be reached for comment Saturday.
“It is clear that the Elwha Water Facilities are not capable of functioning as intended,” McKeen and Peters wrote.
“We know that the facilities are able to function, if at all, only by the application of extremely expensive, labor-intensive, management and intervention.”
Additional expected costs, according to the letter, include redesigning and fixing the Elwha Surface Water Intake structure and fish screens, which do not currently operate as originally intended or designed.
There also are one-time costs to obtain permits for discharges to the river, one time costs to install accurate water meters and operating costs of the Temporary Diversion Pumping Facility during periods of high turbidity, the letter said.
“The consumers of Elwha River water simply cannot absorb the increased operational and impact costs as a result if the NPS simply abandons the dam removal project in its current state,” McKeen and Peters said.
NPS response
In her answer to McKeen and Peters, Creachbaum said: “The operational problems the NPS experienced were the direct result of unnaturally high sediment loads in the river resulting from the release of over 100 years of sediment accumulation in a relatively small amount of time.”
Such conditions, “will never be seen in the Elwha River again,” Creachbaum said.
Creachbaum added that park service officials welcome further discussion on the topic.
Meetings planned
“We have offered to have frequent, very focused meetings with the tribe and the Parks Service to go through these issues,” Bloor said.
“We’ve got a lot to be done, and I think . . . all three entities recognize that the best thing for us to be doing is to be working together on this and to try and resolve some of these issues.
“We will expect to have continuous and frequent meetings coming up in the next couple of months.”
The idea is to come up with a solution to benefit all parties involved, Bloor said.
City officials also are reaching out to legislators to explore the possibility of receiving additional funding for maintenance costs, he said.
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Features Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56650, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
