PORT ANGELES — Angeles Point is pointless today.
The Strait of Juan de Fuca has washed it away and left a rounded lump of land.
Worse, for residents of low-lying areas on the Lower Elwha Klallam Reservation, Sunday’s storm breached a strand that was their last line of protection from wind waves and tides.
Eight fisheries workers and volunteers filled sandbags Thursday to stack around tribal member Doug Charles’s house near the Strait.
They’ll be joined today by workers from the General Assistance and the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programs.
Nearby, at a summer cabin, beach logs lay in what had been the front yard, and the owner has removed valuables and keepsakes.
Altogether, 10 dwellings — seven of them on the reservation — are threatened by flooding.
Decades of erosion
Over the last few decades, the Strait has eroded about 500 yards of land that once formed the point on Angeles Point just east of the Elwha River delta.
It seems nothing can stop the erosion.
Russ Hepfer, tribal secretary-treasurer, said the Lower Elwha have sent photographs to the Army Corps of Engineers and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a request for help.
Hepfer isn’t hopeful, however.
“We’ve contacted the Corps and FEMA, knowing that we probably aren’t going to get anywhere,” he said Thursday.
“But we have to ask anyway.”
Removal of dams needed
Even if federal authorities come through with flood-control devices, they’d only slow down the Strait’s incursion into the reservation.
Only removing the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams on the river will allow it to replenish the beach and perhaps rebuild Angeles Point.
However, dam removal won’t start until 2008, and rebuilding the point will take decades.
