PORT ANGELES — State Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald has lashed back at his critics in a point-by-point rebuttal to a legislative audit of the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard fiasco.
MacDonald issued a 29-page answer to a state report on the graving yard.
The critique spent more of its 180 pages discussing Transportation Department policies and procedures than it did examining whether the state should have stopped the project after excavators found human remains at the site on the Port Angeles waterfront.
Legislators — foremost among them Rep. Jim Buck, R-Joyce — requested the inquiry shortly after work at the graving yard stopped in December 2004.
The yard was to have been the site to build giant pontoons and anchors to replace the deteriorating east end of the bridge.
To conduct the probe, the legislature hired Foth & Van Dyke Associates of Wisconsin, a consultant that sent investigators from its Minnesota field office to review the graving yard events.
Judgments criticized
MacDonald said Foth & Van Dyke failed to meet professional audit standards, especially by offering its own judgments, “though this was not what it was asked to do.”
Foth & Van Dyke’s analysis also virtually stopped with events in August 2003, when excavators for the graving yard uncovered a fragment of a human skull in the eastern part of the site.
The audit blamed the state’s archaeological consultant, Western Shore Heritage Services, for failing to find the remains.
