OLYMPIA — With almost all the fingers pointed and all the fists pounded over the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard, state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald has thrown his hands into the air.
His long-awaited report on the debacle to the governor and the Legislature, released Tuesday, does less to fix blame than it does to recount the nine-year effort to replace the floating bridge’s corroding eastern half.
Released at the state Transportation Commission’s monthly meeting Tuesday in Olympia, the 1-pound, bound report is 234 pages long, counting its table of contents, preface, appendices and glossary.
“It’s a relief, although somewhat on the anticlimactic side, to make public this report,” MacDonald said.
He added that explaining the decision to remove the graving yard from Port Angeles had to be done in its sometimes day-by-day context.
Reading it — knowing the graving yard’s unhappy outcome — is like watching Titanic. The difference is that this disaster had no iceberg.
What it struck was a Native American cemetery, part of an ancestral village that had occupied the crook of Ediz Hook for at least 2,700 years.
If any agency might be at fault for failing to find Tse-whit-zen beneath the former shingle-mill site, it was Western Shore Heritage Services, the archaeological firm that performed a cultural resources survey in November 2002 under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, the report said.
However, Western Shore’s culpability is lessened by Larson Anthropological Archaeological Services’ subsequent failure in 2003 to locate the 337 intact burials that excavators eventually blundered into, according to the report.
Almost a year passed between the two surveys, enough time for the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, state Department of Transportation, Army Corps of Engineers, state Historical Preservation Office and Port Angeles city officials all to become involved in the study — and share the blame.
MacDonald’s report, while obviously written from the Transportation Department’s perspective, spares no one.
