The state Department of Transportation on Tuesday announced that it is abandoning its multimillion-dollar Hood Canal Bridge graving yard project in Port Angeles.
After 11 days of speculation that followed the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe’s request that work be halted, Transportation said Tuesday it will pull out of the Marine Drive site.
Doug MacDonald, state transportation secretary, said his department and the tribe “have jointly determined it is not possible” to finish the graving yard — a huge onshore dry dock to build concrete anchors, pontoons, and road decks for the east end of the Hood Canal Bridge.
Work started Aug. 11, 2003, at the 22.5-acre site on Marine Drive just east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill.
It stopped Aug. 26, 2003, less than a week after workers dug up the first human bone.
For the next 16 months, archaeologists and tribal members continued to exhume scattered and intact burials at the location — skeletons of 265 Klallam ancestors, almost 800 isolated skeletal parts, and more than 10,000 artifacts.
Not deep enough
According to MacDonald, the state’s archaeologists simply hadn’t dug deeply enough to find remains before starting the project so big it could have floated four battleships.
The longer the work continued, the more burials were found.
The Lower Elwha Klallam appealed to the Federal Highway Administration, asking that all remains be removed from the site lest the burials be paved over.
The FHWA said the state had no such responsibility, but added that the tribe had the last word.
That word came Dec. 10 when Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Chairwoman Frances G. Charles wrote to MacDonald, urging that the project stop.
Five days later, a majority of the state Transportation Commission, meeting in Olympia, said construction couldn’t continue without the tribe’s approval.
