Hoh tribe losing ground to flooding

FORKS, Wash. – The Hoh Indian Reservation shares its name with the Hoh River, but the river is getting greedy.

Amid record flooding, fueled partly by clearcut logging and an ill-designed public works project, the glacier-fed river has moved progressively southward and eroded about 10 percent of the 443-acre coastal reservation about 14 miles south of Forks in the past decade.

With each shift the stream moves closer to the tribe’s six government buildings, including tribal headquarters, and 30 homes with 111 residents.

In bygone years, Hoh Tribal Chairwoman Mary Leitka said, she had to walk clear across the reservation to reach the river.

“Now I just have to look out my back window and I can see the river,” Leitka said.

In more than a century since the federal government confined the Hoh to the wetlands and steep hillsides at the river mouth, flooding has been a not uncommon threat.

In recent years children and the elderly have often been evacuated at night by small boat in flooding that also contaminates the water supply and overwhelms the septic system.

Tribal members often are warned to boil tap water, “but if you’re elderly and can barely carry a pot, are you going to boil water?” Leitka said.

Census figures show the tribe’s population has nearly tripled in the past 30 years, more than half the tribal members are younger than 20 and the birth rate is more than twice that of the state – but the last home built on the reservation was in 1988.

Three or four families sometimes share a house, and there is little chance the tribe can win grants for more housing because almost all the available land is in a flood plain, officials say.

“There’s nowhere left to go,” Leitka said.

Before being confined to the reservation, the Hoh ranged from the Olympic Mountains to the coast, said Rick Cook, a regional fisheries biologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“Historically, the tribe never had to live permanently on the river,” Cook said. “If it flooded, they could always move to higher ground.”

Initially covered by the Quinault treaty of 1855, the Hoh gained separate tribal recognition – and a reservation covering less than a square mile near a rainforest with average precipitation of about 160 inches a year – in the 1960s.

Since 1995, logging upstream in the Olympic National Forest has left “nothing to hold the water in place,” says Rod Thysell, the tribe’s natural resources director.

Worsening the problem was the use of riprap, or large rocks, by Jefferson County workers to shore up the river bank just upstream from the reservation to protect a public road, resulting in a swifter streamflow that figures strongly in the southward shift.

“At times, it’s like a pipeline right into the reservation,” Thysell said.

One recent flood left a foot of standing water in the Tribal Center, damaging carpets and heating systems in the tribe’s main government building.

Late last year, when a foot of rain fell in 24 hours, prison inmates were brought to join tribal members in a frantic round of early morning sandbagging to save reservation buildings. An earthen berm now surrounds the tribal center year-round.

“Essentially, it’s throwing Band-Aids on arterial wounds,” Cook said. “What the tribe needs is a permanent solution.”

Thysell and others said that means new land for the Hoh.

“Inevitably, we have to let the river do what it’s going to do,” he said. “We just don’t want to be here when it does.”