By Brian Mittge, The Chronicle, 5/7/2003
bmittge@chronline.com
Even the tallest person could easily walk through the culvert at the end of Big Hanaford Road, but young fish can't make the leap up from the lower creek into the corrugated steel tube.
This summer, crews will tear out the 11-foot-wide culvert and put a 70-foot-long bridge in its place, with a 28-foot-wide natural creek bottom that is friendly to increasingly rare native salmon and cutthroat trout.
Walking down a steep grassy slope from the little-used county road, Rod Lakey, Lewis County senior engineer for special projects, looks at the rushing water pouring from the pipe in a miniature waterfall.
"This is definitely a juvenile barrier," he said. "Adults could probably make it up a percentage of the time."
The project should open up 7.4 miles of spawning and rearing habitat for coho, steelhead and cutthroat trout on the upper Big Hanaford Creek watershed outside Centralia. Juvenile salmon can use the creek to hide out during high flows in the Chehalis and Skookumchuck rivers downstream.
The project is the highest on Lewis County's list of fixes for barriers to salmon.
On Monday, the county commission opened seven bids for the project. The lowest was $335,250 from Five Rivers Construction Co. in Longview. A state salmon recovery funding board grant will pay for about $300,000 of the cost.
The project is projected to take place over two months, from July 15 to Sept. 15, the "salmon window" when work can take place in streams without major harm to spawning fish.
County engineers have looked at all 1,265 culverts that are 2 feet in diameter and larger throughout the county. About 545 are barriers to fish, either because they are on too steep of a slope, the water rushes too quickly, or there are dropoffs on the downstream end that block fish from jumping up into the culvert.
In ranking all the problem culverts, this one on Big Hanaford Road came out as the most "bang for the buck" in terms of miles of upstream habitat that will be opened up, said Lakey.
Although the project may be the equivalent of a new aquatic freeway interchange for salmon, it is taking place on the slowest of backwater country roads.
The county's Big Hanaford Road ends just a few yards past the creek, and serves four major landowners, including Weyerhaeuser and TransAlta. The coal and energy company has major mining operations on nearby hillsides. Giant dump trucks crawl up and down the recently logged hills, but even those trucks don't use the county road; TransAlta has its own bumpy roads for its vehicles.
Still, the county has to maintain its road. State law says public roads that cross streams and rivers can't be abandoned, said Lewis County Engineering Services Manager Bill Frare.
The current culvert, now a bit rusty, was installed in the 1970s, and probably still has 10 to 20 years of life left in it, said Frare. The new concrete bridge will be good for 70 to 100 years, will require less maintenance, and will be less likely to be clogged by upstream debris during floods. The current culvert is full to capacity during normal high-water events.
The county has already finished a handful of mostly state-funded culvert replacements, on Winlock-Vader Road, Lost Valley Road and Wildwood Road, the latter two near Boistfort.
Two more are in the works in addition to the Big Hanaford project. One could be constructed this year on Skook Creek on Howe Road near Salkum; the other will be done next year on Lambert Creek on Falls Road by Glenoma.
Brian Mittge covers politics, the environment and Lewis County government for The Chronicle. He may be reached by e-mail at bmittge@chronline.com, or by telephoning 807-8237.
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