EDITOR’S NOTE: Work to remove the two Elwha River dams begins today — and special events to commemorate the beginning of the river restoration project also are under way (see related story).
In conjunction, Port Angeles writer/historian John Kendall continues his look-back at the dams, their role in North Olympic Peninsula development and their legacy as they come down.
Parts 1 through 4 of this series can be found by searching the word “historical” in the search engine on the home page.
By John Kendall
For Peninsula Daily News
“All the water that came down the river went all the way down the river.”
That’s Orville Campbell’s explanation of “run-of-the-river dams.” He was Crown Zellerbach Corp.’s resident engineer in Port Angeles from 1973 to 1988.
Crown Z, as it was known locally, owned the paper mill at the entry to Ediz Hook on Port Angeles Harbor as well as the two Elwha River dams, which gave it hydroelectric power until the Bonneville Power Administration came into being.
The Elwha and Glines Canyon run-of-the-river dams have “been something that the tribe in particular has had a great deal of trouble understanding.”
The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe’s reservation is below the dams, near where the Elwha River empties into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Robert Elofson, the tribe’s natural resources director and its point person for the river restoration project, disagrees.
“They didn’t do any flood control,” Elofson said in an interview.
“The dams didn’t make any difference on the amount of floods down here [near the river’s mouth].
“The first time we did anything that was effective was to build the levee in the late 1980s. That was the first real protection.”
One levee is about a quarter-mile upstream on the east side. A levee district serves the other side of the river, which has built a separate berm.
A free-flowing Elwha should eventually replenish gravel and sand now lost along the beaches where the river meets the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Elofson said the tribe has lost as much as 30 acres of its reservation to erosion.
No sediment replenishment, he said, means that the fish spawning grounds in the five miles below the Elwha Dam have been in bad shape for years.
Flooding was a problem before the dams were built.
“From interviews I have done with early residents of Hot Springs Road [following the river east from U.S. Highway 101 to the Olympic National Park campgrounds and ranger station] and a 1909 photo and another photo, date unknown, I can say that residents usually had at least one or two floods a year,” said Alice Alexander, an Elwha Valley native, historian, author and Peninsula Daily News history columnist.
“Water would come up over the banks and the road,” Alexander said.
—
Friday’s series finale: What’s under Lakes Mills and Aldwell after the reservoirs are drained?