PORT ANGELES — Anchors for the Hood Canal Bridge will not be built in Port Angeles.
Word from Gov. Chris Gregoire’s office reached city of Port Angeles officials and state Rep. Jim Buck, R-Joyce, on Thursday that the anchors will be built at Todd Shipyards in Seattle.
Todd is in partnership with Concrete Technologies of Tacoma to build concrete pontoons for the deteriorating east end of the bridge.
The floating span is the North Olympic Peninsula’s lifeline to the Puget Sound metropolis.
Anchors, pontoons and bridge decks would have been built in Port Angeles had excavators not unearthed a Native American cemetery on the site of Tse-whit-zen, an ancestral Klallam village.
More than 330 intact skeletons eventually were removed from the graving yard, and many more remain buried.
Until Thursday, Port Angeles thought that it might salvage the $40 million anchor portion of the project.
Twenty anchors, each 60 feet in diameter and 26 feet high, would have been built on the shoreward edge of the site. It consists of fill dirt that is unlikely to contain human remains.
The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, which stopped the graving yard excavation in December 2004, has made no objections to the anchor project.
A memorandum of understanding between the tribe and the state Department of Transportation even included an artist’s drawing of anchors lined up on the shore like huge cans on a shelf.
Sources close to the tribe said Thursday that the Lower Elwha had not changed their position supporting the anchor project in Port Angeles.
Reason unclear
What killed Port Angeles’ chances to build the anchors remained unclear.
State Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald told Peninsula Daily News that Gregoire’s chief of staff, Tom Fitzsimmons, had been working with legislative and local officials on the issue.
“We are preparing a status briefing that we want to make sure is shared with legislators, the local officials and so on,” MacDonald said.
“I expect that to be made over the next few days.
“I am not prepared to comment on its contents because we are very mindful of the need to talk about all the issues.
“I won’t comment about the anchors until we have had the opportunity to work with Tom Fitzsimmons to make sure there will be a full briefing.”
