PORT ANGELES — Nineteen years later, former Sen. Bill Bradley remembers vividly the testimony given by four Lower Elwha Klallam women in support of freeing the Elwha River.
“I heard what had happened to the river, and because of that, what had happened to the tribe,” said the former Democratic New Jersey senator.
“It is one of those stories that stays with you.”
Bradley, who chaired the Senate’s Water and Power subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when the Elwha River Restoration Act, passed in 1992, was being considered, was among those — along with Rep. Norm Dicks and actor Tom Skerritt — who received standing ovations from the crowd at the Lower Elwha Kallam tribe’s dam removal gala Friday.
Bradley told the approximately 200 people present at the Vern Burton Community Center that the river’s two dams needed to come down not just to restore an ecosystem, but to right a wrong.
“It’s a grand, magical moment,” said Bradley, a basketball hall-of-famer, former presidential candidate and one of those who began to champion Elwha River restoration to a wild state when relicensing questions for the dams came up in the 1970s.
“In this time, it is time for beautiful fish to restore the circle of energy and nutrients, prompt the rich life of the sea to flow up into the mountains, and the mountains, enriched again, to move stone by stone, grain by grain, down to the sea.
“It is time for the river to return to life.”
Dicks, Rep. Al Swift and the late Den. Brock Adams, two other Democrats from Washington state also were instrumental in freeing the river.
Dicks, a longtime supporter of Elwha River restoration and a co-sponsor of the restoration act, told the crowd that the legislation faced many hurdles, from both dam supporters and budget cuts.
It took many people dedicated to the project to see it through, said Dicks, a Democrat from Belfair whose 6th Congressional District includes the North Olympic Peninsula.
It also took compromise, he said.
“We didn’t agree on everything, but we worked it out — unlike what’s going on in Washington these days,” Dicks said to laughter.
“We could not do this today,” he added.
“We could not do this today with the current thinking in Washington.”
Dicks was instrumental in securing federal stimulus funding that jumped the removal of dams forward by one year.
In 2009, as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, he helped secure $54 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for mitigation projects that began that summer — and moved the dam removal date, until then set for 2012, forward.
Skerritt, a board member of American Rivers, referred to graffiti painted on the Glines Canyon Dam in 1987 calling for the removal of the dams and recalled seeing salmon in a pool underneath the Elwha Dam trying in vain to swim upstream past the obstruction.
“What really struck me was that after over 100 years roughly of being deprived to moving upstream to ancient spawning grounds, these salmon still breed . . . an unyielding stubbornness worse than us Irish,” he said.
“And in 2014, if all goes well, the Elwha will be free,” he added, raising his hands.
Friday night’s audience included tribal members, scientists, current and former superintendents of Olympic National Park, and other federal officials, past and present, who had a hand in this large $325 million project.
“It’s been a challenge for us in many different ways,” commented tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles.
“It’s an honor to be here tonight and witness this with our honored guests.”
The gala also included tribal dancers, an auction of a few dam artifacts and a large cake formed into a landscape of the Elwha River Valley.
All proceeds benefit the tribe’s scholarship and educational programs.
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.