Area near Percival Landing will be closed -- to people and cars -- until July
A downtown Olympia attraction will be off limits until July as crews work to replace a rotting wooden barrier under the Percival Landing boardwalk.
Construction started Monday at the corner of Water Street Northwest and Fourth Avenue West, where the wooden bulkhead is to be replaced with steel sheet piling to stabilize the bank.
During construction, expected to last until July, one lane of southbound Water Street and westbound Fourth Avenue next to the boardwalk will be closed to traffic. The boardwalk in that area will also be closed.
Percival Landing was built on the east side of Budd Inlet starting in the late 1970s with a wooden boardwalk, bulkhead and pilings. Over the years those have started to decay.
In the first phase of restoration, which started in 2010, crews replaced the bulkhead and boardwalk near Percival Landing Park, added the Harbor House and two pavilions for about $15 million, according to Olympian archives.
Eventually, the city will have to dredge the inlet and replace all the wooden boardwalk and pilings and floating docks, said Kip Summers, senior engineer for the city. There is no plan for when that will happen or how the city will pay for it.
“The longer we let this go, the more likelihood that we could have more failures along the roadway or boardwalk edge, let alone any earthquake that could tumble it all way,” Summers said.
The city does checks on Percival Landing every year and more thorough structural evaluations every five years. The most recent one in 2014 found the bulkhead was the most vulnerable element and needed to be replaced.
The city got a state grant for $921,500 to put toward the $3 million price tag. It has hired Aberdeen-based Quigg Bros., Inc., the same contractor who did the 2010 work.
Sheet pile driving is expected to start in mid-to-late March and last more than a month. The 60-foot-tall sheet piles will be installed from a barge and placed below grade, hardly visible once the work is done.
While sea level rise isn’t the cause of the construction, the design could serve as the basis for future mitigation work, Summers said.
A draft of the city’s sea level rise response plan for downtown Olympia, developed with LOTT Clean Water Alliance, the Port of Olympia and consulting firm AECOM, was released in December. It says a sea wall and elevated boardwalk is one way to combat flooding at Percival Landing.
This story was originally published February 26, 2019 at 4:01 PM.
