SEQUIM — A draft environmental assessment for Olympic National Park’s plans to improve U.S. Highway 101 along Lake Crescent is expected to be released to the public sometime after Jan. 1, park Superintendent Sarah Creachbaum said Monday during a Clallam Transit System board meeting.
At that time, it will be viewable online, she said, and a public comment period will begin.
“The public comment period will start as soon as we release the draft for review,” she said.
The draft assessment will include a proposed schedule of public meetings, she said.
The park, along with the Federal Highway Administration as a cooperating agency, plans to replace sections of road bed, remove rock-fall hazards, repair or replace failing retaining walls and rotten guardrails, and repair culverts on 12.3 miles of the tourist and commuting route around the lake.
That section of the highway falls within park land.
Without rehabilitation, catastrophic failure of portions of the roadway could occur, causing an increased frequency of unplanned delays and closures to repair the road, according to the National Park Service.
If approved, the project — currently estimated at about $20 million — could begin in the spring of 2017, Creachbaum said during the meeting in response to a question from Dennis Smith, board member.
However, “at this point in the project, there is potential for the project not to go forward,” she said.
Project funding would be provided through the Federal-Aid Highway Program. The Federal Highway Administration implements the program in cooperation with state and local governments.
“That funding has been available,” Creachbaum said.
“We have been on the list, as most federal highways are, for many, many years.”
Project options
The park’s options include the required alternative of performing no repairs, three years of 30-minute delays in the construction season from March to November, or closing the lake stretch of the highway entirely for 1.7 construction seasons with traffic rerouted to state highways 112 and 113.
Those time tables are subject to change as planning goes forward, Creachbaum said.
“Right now, some of those figures are being recalculated,” she said.
“If you have closures of a road for any length of time, then you can do a lot more work faster.”
Alternatively, “if you have only 30 minute delays, then the project is strung out a little bit longer.”
The draft environmental assessment “will refine the information,” she said.
“It is really rough and our ideas of what the impacts and alternatives might be are a real broad brush. As we start to write the analysis, which people will be able to review in the draft plan, we are going to be able to fine tune that a little bit.”
Public comments
The draft environmental assessment includes responses to public comments taken through June 7 about six alternatives for scheduling traffic delays and closures during construction, Creachbaum said.
“It will have the summary of public comments and it will have a description of the alternatives and also a description of our analysis of what the environmental impacts might be,” she said.
“Overwhelmingly, what we heard from the public is that they wanted us to really look hard and consider any avenue that we had to limiting the impact on our local communities, to make sure that whatever wait time we had was going to be as small as possible,” she said.
As such, “we have gone back to the drawing board. We are going to do our best to propose to the public a range of alternatives that has as much specificity regarding time frames and times of year.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
Executive Editor Leah Leach contributed to this report.
