Green Diamond Resource Co. put the finishing touches this week on a busy summer of work that included removal of a Tacoma Power diversion dam and replacement of three outdated road culverts with bridges over McTaggert and Gibbons creeks.
The $500,000 project will open more than three miles of fish habitat currently blocked by culverts, as well as the dam just north of the High Steel Bridge near U.S. Forest Service Road 2340 on the southeast side of the Olympic Peninsula, above Hood Canal.
“Those are the last major anadromous-fish barriers in the Skokomish watershed,” said Mike Anderson, a senior resource analyst with the Wilderness Society and member of the Skokomish Watershed Action Team, a group of landowners, government agencies and conservation groups as well as the Skokomish tribe, all working on restoring the health of a watershed degraded by decades of clear-cut logging, road and dam building and other human activities.
One of the more challenging pieces of the $500,000 project reached a climax this week when a 300-foot crane was used to lift and fit two, 23-ton half-sections of steel bridge together across Gibbons Creek.
The bridge replaced a 54-year-old culvert and road fill 40 feet deep that needed to be excavated to recontour and restore the stream.
“That culvert had a 10-foot drop,” Green Diamond environmental engineer Rich Schmeling said. “No fish were jumping through there.”
Nearly half of the 175 miles of logging roads serving 23,300 acres of Green Diamond (formerly Simpson Timber Co.) timberland in the Skokomish Valley were built before forestry regulations began paying attention to the needs of anadromous fish – ones that ascend rivers to breed, said Patti Case, company manager of public and regulatory affairs.
In the past 15 years, the company has decommissioned or upgraded about 75 miles of logging roads in the Skokomish drainage where the other major landowner is the U.S. Forest Service in the Olympic National Forest. The Forest Service spent about $10 million on road upgrades and restoration work in the South Fork Skokomish River in the 1990s, according to the watershed action team.
“We’ve turned the Skokomish watershed from a poster child for bad forestry to a poster child for collaborative habitat restoration,” Anderson said.
All the earth moving and land clearing associated with the Gibbons Creek bridge project has left the work site barren of trees and forest vegetation and piled with dirt. But it will be reseeded and replanted as part of the healing process.
“Hopefully, with time it will look like we were never here,” said Rich Geiger, a Mason Conservation District engineer who helped design the project.
The diversion dam built by Tacoma Power in 1953 displaces all but about 3 cubic feet per second of water from McTaggert Creek into Lake Kokanee, which is part of the Cushman Dam project.
Agreement to remove the dam was part of a broad package negotiated between Tacoma Power and the Skokomish tribe to settle relicensing issues for the Cushman Dams. Tacoma Power contracted with Green Diamond’s road-construction crew to remove the dam.
Downstream on McTaggert Creek, two culverts were replaced with bridges to accommodate the increased stream flow.
Grants totaling $270,000 from the state Salmon Recovery Funding Board and EcoTrust, a Portland-based nonprofit group, helped pay for the project.
“Credit Green Diamond for taking on this project during a tough economic recession,” Anderson said.
The road improvements in the Skokomish watershed aren’t just good for fish, company officials said; they also reduced Green Diamond road maintenance and repairs after major winter storms.
John Dodge: 360-754-5444
