Indian remains stop work at yard
OLYMPIA – The Washington Transportation Department on Tuesday ended work at the Hood Canal bridge construction yard in Port Angeles where hundreds of Indian remains have been discovered.
In a written statement, the department said all work at the yard was stopping, and a new site for building bridge pontoons and anchors would be found. The state has already spent $55 million on a project initially slated to cost $283 million.
The Port Angeles project included a dry dock where large sections for the floating bridge would be built, then towed to the bridge site 50 miles away. During excavation work, however, extensive artifacts from a 1,700-year-old Indian village were discovered, along with hundreds of sets of human remains.
“We do not come to this conclusion lightly,” the statement read. “Despite the mutual good faith efforts of both WSDOT and the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to develop an acceptable place to allow the fabrication of work to continue … we have jointly determined that it is not possible.”
The state said it chose the 22.5-acre site on the Olympic Peninsula as a favorable spot for the dry dock because other sites were too small or had problems with permits or hazardous waste. But on Aug. 20, 2003, the first human bone fragment was found and work was shut down six days later. Since then, the discoveries continued, and hundreds of additional full or partial remains have been found.
The site is where the Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen stood for 1,700 years before it was leveled in the 1920s to make way for a sawmill.
The Transportation Department said construction at the site was halted because of the historical and cultural importance of the site, and because it was not known how many more remains and artifacts might be found, or how much more delay or additional costs the state might face.
“When we started the work a year ago with such high hopes in Port Angeles, no one knew how big of a problem we would unexpectedly encounter,” the Department of Transportation statement read.
“The bridge rehabilitation will, in the end, take more time and cost more dollars – perhaps substantially more dollars – than we originally expected. We have, however, no real choice.”
Both the state and the tribe were aware of the former village before work began, and the department hired Western Shores Heritage Services to survey the site for archaeological remains.