Friday, February 13, 2004
By Brian Mittge, bmittge@chronline.com , The Chronicle
Eight years ago this week, Twin Cities residents were ripping out carpet, throwing away water-soaked treasures and shaking their heads in disbelief after the worst flood they'd ever experienced.
Vowing to prevent a repeat of the flood that peaked Feb. 9, 1996, Lewis County citizens rallied around proposals to hold back the waters.
Now the result of those efforts await federal action, and the earliest such work could begin is in 2006, a decade after the 1996 flood.
Centralia and Chehalis city councilors and county Commissioner Richard Graham plan to fly to Washington, D.C., next month to push for federal funding and approval of an $80 million to $100 million project to improve the Skookumchuck Dam, and to surround the Twin Cities with protective levees.
Back home, consultants are writing a proposal for studying a way to change the timing and amount of floodwater that flows through a bottleneck under the Mellen Street bridge.
Local officials say moving more water through that pincer-point on the Chehalis River could reduce flooding upstream from the Chehalis-Centralia Airport by two feet or more.
| "We won't call it a bypass, although it will function as a bypass," said Marie Garrett, a senior environmental planner for Pacific International Engineering. |
They face strong opposition from the Chehalis Indian Tribe, however, which worries that water moving faster and heavier out of the Twin Cities means more water flooding its reservation. Tribal leaders have vowed to oppose any work that resembles a bypass around the natural choke point on the river.
State and federal fisheries and environmental agencies are also wary of any excavation in the banks or river bed.
Hoping to yank out such worries by the roots, the Olympia-based flooding consultant for Lewis County is putting together a plan that focuses on habitat improvements, with flood reduction a secondary concern.
And whatever you do, don't use the b-word: "bypass." Renamed the "Mellen Street Habitat and Flow Conveyance Feature" last month, the still-undefined project could create off-channel habitat for coho salmon, create or restore wetlands and, incidentally, keep water from backing up and creating such a massive lake in the floodplain upstream.
"We won't call it a bypass, although it will function as a bypass," said Marie Garrett, a senior environmental planner for Pacific International Engineering.
Speaking at a meeting Thursday of the Chehalis River Flood Executive Committee at the county courthouse in Chehalis, she said the No. 1 issue is "permitability." "If it does not work from a habitat standpoint, it does not work," Garrett said, later adding, "just designing some flood management feature and tacking on a few things to mitigate impacts will not be a success." Local leaders hope they can convince the Army Corps of Engineers that this kind of project helps the environment and decreases Twin Cities flooding without making it worse downstream. If they can prove that, they want the project included in a larger project set for construction later this decade.
Until the Corps is on board, however, local governments would have to pay for the studies themselves.
The "scope of work" for the Mellen Street project study will be finished later this spring, according to PIE consultants, and would have to be approved by Lewis County, Centralia and Chehalis.
Graham has estimated the cost at up to $50,000 for each of the three governmental entities, but the payoffs could be substantial if the project ends up being built.
As the flood control proposal stands now, surrounding the Twin Cities with levees would, according to computer models, reduce flooding in most developed areas, but would increase it in some other places.
Floodwaters would be about 8 inches higher than they were in the 1996 flood outside the levees at the confluence of the Chehalis and Newaukum rivers, according to PIE computer models.
Moving more water through Mellen Street would drop that level by around 2 feet, according to PIE projections, drastically adding to protection of the city of Chehalis and outlying areas.
"This opportunity here is too good to be missed," said PIE consultant Chuck Gale.
According to leaders in the Chehalis Indian Tribe downstream, however, the Mellen Street proposal misses the mark altogether.
As good neighbors, the tribe supports the flood control project as it stands now, said David Burnett, chairman of the Chehalis Tribal Business Council in a recent interview.
"Just like everybody else downstream, we just want to know we're not going to get flooded out," he said.
Mark White, director of natural resources for the Oakville-based tribe, was more blunt about any type of bypass at Mellen Street.
"If they try to include it in the Corps plan, we'll oppose it," he said.
Comparing moving more water through the Mellen Street hourglass to cutting the top off a pop bottle to empty it faster, he said it's common sense that flooding would worsen downstream.
Not so, say the upstream engineers.
Lewis County's consultants say that the ground rules for their flood control studies have always been that they couldn't make flooding worse downstream.
The key, they say, is a 30-year-old dam upstream of Bucoda on the Skookumchuck River.
The flood control proposal centers around modifying the dam to hold back more of the first floodwaters, releasing them gradually after the bulging Chehalis River has gone down.
The "Mellen Street feature" would change the timing, not the amount of floodwaters moving downstream, they say.
"Whatever is done, you can't enhance downstream flooding," said Garrett. "That would have to be one of the main criteria that would have to be met."
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