PORT ANGELES – A report issued by Clallam County at a hearing Wednesday night said that Lynn and Kathy Emery’s house was to be relocated as part of the removal of a dam on the Elwha River.
That was news to them.
“We actually had a neighbor who was at the meeting last night that forewarned us, and we were really surprised,” Kathy Emery said on Thursday.
“Then to open the paper and see our name and our house in there and we didn’t know anything about it – it’s very disturbing.”
The report was wrong.
A 3½-hour hearing ended with a decision by attorney Kristin Ballinger, sitting in place of vacationing Hearing Examiner Chris Melly, approving 15 of 16 projects sought by the National Park Service for removing the Elwa River dams.
Her decision allows Olympic National Park to remove the Elwha Dam – one of two dams that are scheduled to be removed beginning in 2009 – and to make mitigations the removal will require.
Glines Canyon Dam is within the park and therefore does not need county permits.
The Elwha Dam lies outside the park and within county jurisdiction.
One of those projects approved concerned houses that were to be relocated.
The Emerys home on Olympic Hot Springs Road near Mount McDonald Road upriver from Lake Aldwell was included on the list.
They hadn’t been notified about the possibility of their house being moved.
So they called Clallam County Senior Planner Bruce Emery, the County Commissioners’ offices and the Peninsula Daily News, and Lynn Emery headed up to the courthouse to talk to someone in person.
“We are all for river restoration,” Kathy Emery said.
“But we hadn’t been notified that our house might need to be moved.”
The mixup happened as a result of a table that was wrong, said Bruce Emery, who is no relation to the couple.
Their property’s description was confused with another property.
“The structure should have been listed as needing protection or possibly elevating, but we described it as either relocation or moving,” Bruce Emery said.
“It was an error in the table we created a long time ago,” he said.
“The mistake was made awhile back and unfortunately carried through until now.”
The mistake was made by the county, not the National Park Service.