By Brian Mittge, The Chronicle 8/22/2002
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The main floor of Kathleen Spencer's 85-year old farmhouse has never been flooded, but she's worried that a planned system of levees around the Twin Cities might push just enough water onto her farm near the Newaukum River to force already high water into her home.
The Corps' long-awaited $1 00 million "Centralia Flood Damage Reduction Project" is complex and hard to understand, Spencer said, but she's willing to dive into the recently released draft environmental impact statement to learn about effects to the home that has been in her husband's family for 46 years.
"All I have been able to understand is it will raise our water levels by as much as a foot or a half foot," she said of the flood-
waters near the Chehalis-Centralia Airport. "I'm not sure how much more water we can stand." A dozen other local residents spoke at the hearing, an official part of the Corps' process for finishing its thick EIS.
The Corps has proposed raising the Skookumchuck Darn to hold back an extra 20,000 acre-feet of water, allowing it to drain slowly after deluges from the Chehalis and Newaukum rivers recede.
"If we don't do something here, we're going to go out of business. The only thing that's going to help this area is to turn dirt."
Buck Hubbert, |
Much of the Twin Cities would also be surrounded by a series of "environmentally friendly setback levees," similar to the dike protecting the airport. Corps engineers estimate the levees could raise local flooding in some areas near Riverside Golf Club, and the confluence of the Newaukum and Chehalis rivers, by as much as 6 to 12 inches in a 1996-type flood.
To relieve some of the water level increase from the levees, engineers propose building a new flood channel just east of Scheuber Road, bypassing most of the Chehalis River near the city of Chehalis.
The channel, in the so-called "Scheuber Ditch," would connect the Chehalis River just east of the Highway 6 Chevron station with an old oxbow channel, and would run through agricultural lands before reconnecting with the river.
This flood channel would carry water every year or two, on average, said project environmental coordinator George Hart.
State Route 6 would be elevated to allow winter water to pass underneath, and wetlands along the route would be restored, Hart said.
BUCK HUBBERT, president of Tires Inc. on State Street in Chehalis, said his business had 6 feet of water in 1990, and 9 feet in 1996.
"If we don't do something here, we're going to go out of business," he said, urging the Corps to move forward with the project.
"The only thing that's going to help this area is to turn dirt." Like others at the meeting, Hubbert urged the Corps to reconsider its decision not to pursue an excavation project that would expand what is now a bottleneck on the Chehalis River at the Mellen Street Bridge.
The Corps is still studying that option, but is not including it in its proposal up for consideration by Congress.
If Congress puts together a water resources bill this year which looks increasingly unlikely - the local project would have to be authorized for work to begin by 2004.
Separate from that authorization, Congress must approve a 'Anew start' and fund the project, something that's been relatively rare in the last few years, said Col. Ralph Graves, Seattle district engineer.
The federal government would pay 65 percent of the roughly $100 million project, Graves said. Lewis County would be responsible for the rest, but most of that $35 million would come from the state, which would save money by not having to raise Interstate 5.
State funding depends on passage this fall of Referendum 5 1, a grab bag of state transportation projects paid for by a gas tax increase.
Pe Ell resident John Penberth, who spoke at the hearing, said the Corps' plan is misguided, especially in a time of budget deficits.
He criticized the levee plan, quoting a Joint Natural Resources Conservation report advocating removal of dikes whenever possible.
Julie Powe also spoke against the dikes, saying they would have to be maintained "from now until forever," with failure a possibility at any time. She also spoke against "moving" wetlands, a necessity in the Corps proposal.
Dan Sokol, with the Washington Department of Ecology's shorelines program, asked why
data from the Corps studies hasn't been used to update official maps of the 100-year flood plain, which date from 1981.
Judy Breen told the Corps to consider the flooding ramifications of filling at Exit 72 from Interstate 5 at Napavine.
Curtis DuPuis, a Chehalis Indian, echoed her sentiments, saying filling in the flood plain is the real problem. "We brought a lot of gravel down here. The water had to go someplace," he said.
He urged the Army Corps to build its improvements to maximize flood control downriver in the event funds dry up for the project: first raise the Skookumchuck Dam, then build the state Route 6 floodway, then go ahead with the dikes.
DuPuis said he's been attending flood meetings since 1982, and has heard a lot of talk, much of it about proposals he thinks would make things worse on the flood-prone Chehalis Indian Reservation.
"We've talked a lot about this, and maybe talking's good, because we haven't done anything," he said. "People downriver want to make sure we aren't harmed."
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