PORT ANGELES – The harbor front bluffs will echo with the clanging of pile drivers this summer as they extract the walls of the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard like so many sheet-steel teeth.
Contractors also will break up and haul away the yard’s 9½-acre, 11,000-cubic-yard concrete floor, most likely sending it and the steel pile away in trucks.
The work probably will start in mid- or late June after the state hires contractors and pays them $3 million to fill the hole that the State Department of Transportation spent $87 million to dig, said John Wynands, project manager.
The new money also will pay to return 2,000 dump-truckloads of earth to the mammoth cavity in the crook of Ediz Hook from the Fields Shotwell Recycling Facility west of town.
That’s where dirt dug up early in the doomed graving yard project was taken.
Eventually – months later, perhaps longer – the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe will rebury the intact remains of 337 ancestors uncovered at Tse-whit-zen, the ancestral village and cemetery that occupied the site for centuries before Europeans arrived.
Later still, the tribe plans to build a museum and cultural center on the Marine Drive slice of the 22.5-acres site.
There it will share some of Tse-whit-zen’s archaeological 86,000 treasures that now are stored at the Burke Museum.
