Plans for Skokomish restoration

Next meeting is scheduled for October

Matt Baide | Sep 08, 20220

The Mason Conservation District updated the public on federal regulations and the Skokomish Valley Road project at its Aug. 30 meeting at the Skokomish Community Church.

Senior Conservation Manager Keith Underwood led the meeting and talked to the 20 people in attendance. He said the Federal Emergency Management Act states that if a rise is created for the 100-year flood event by making changes in the floodway, as some of the projects Mason Conservation District might do, the public must be informed of the changes. A new flood map must be created and go through a public process to update the map. Habitat projects are exempted from that because they are given a couple of inches of rise capability before they affect the regulation.

“That decision was made in Region 10. … When the national FEMA found out this was decided, they rolled it back and said that the region was out of step with the national regulations,” Underwood said during the meeting. “The reason was the ESA, Endangered Species Act, was going so strongly in this area trying to improve the habitat that they’re working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others to try to speed up the habitat improvement process.”

Any structure built in the floodplain cannot increase the 100-year flood event by more than 350ths of an inch, determined through hydraulic models, and would require the approval of FEMA. The habitat projects were not held to that standard until August 2020, and Underwood said most projects going out for funding before that hadn’t considered they would have to go through this analysis, according to Underwood.

The floodway is defined from the mouth of the Skokomish River to where the north and south forks meet. Any projects above the fork can have increased effects. If there are any impacts in the floodway, it must go through a process to determine whether that impact is allowable or not.

The lidar survey was completed Aug. 30. With the FEMA regulations, projects must provide formal documentation of hydraulic models to establish what the base flow elevation is or what the elevation of the 100-year flood event will be.

The conservation district would then submit a flood permit to the county and would also send all the information to FEMA to make determinations about the project and enter into the remapping process with FEMA. That process will add six months to a year to the projects. This is why for the road project, planned for construction next year, there might be some rise (in the base flood elevation) and the conservation district is starting the process.

The remapping of the 100-year flood, which is called the conditional letter of map revision (CLOMR), is part of the process prior to a project going in. A letter of map revision (LOMR) is after the project goes in, and the county wants to bring the CLOMR to the public so they have a chance to weigh in before construction begins.

“That actually means you kind of do the process twice,” Underwood said. “So you do the CLOMR, which is what you end up with is a conditional letter of authorization from FEMA, and that process had a fairly stout public involvement process with it. And then you get the project on the ground and completed and then you have to do the LOMR process, which is basically as built, this is what we actually built and here are the results of that and you would end up with a new map of the floodplain.”

Underwood said the conservation district is close to having the money for the front end of remapping for most of the projects, but with fluctuating construction costs, they might not have enough money for all of the projects because of inflation on materials.

Underwood talked about habitat restoration projects at Skokomish River mile 6.5, near Hunter Farms, and river mile 5, which is under the U.S Highway 101 bridge near Purdy Cutoff and the Skokomish Valley Road intersection. He said he is worried about public fatigue with so many projects to bring to the public.

“We’re trying to figure out how to bundle this analysis up in a way that gives us as many projects at once, but we don’t all understand each one of these projects the same amount at the same time so it’s trying to get the logistics on how we can get the analysis and have a conversation and have as comprehensive an analysis as we can,” Underwood said. “There’s also problems with funding and it retiring on us and we need to get the project done before the funding goes away ... there may be frustration because we’re having this conversation over and over again and it just may be what has to happen because we need to get these projects on the ground.”

Underwood said it costs $30,000 to $100,000 for analysis, depending on how extensive each project is.

Underwood updated the attendees on the Skokomish Valley Road project. The design project looked at eight alternatives and the preferred alternative was a balance between fish habitat and human safety. Some of the design attributes include a bridge 35 feet long and elevated for the 100-year flood. Underwood said the flood waters would barely touch, if it does touch, the bottom of the girders.

The road has to go up to the bridge so it changed the geometry of Skokomish Valley Road, according to Underwood. The road elevation will be set so water will not go over it below a 1.4-year flood event. The project includes going into the wetlands and doing some grading and creating channels to take on an increased capacity in the area, with the side channel width at 30 feet and the side channel activation at 800 cubic feet per second.

“The balancing act of this project is this road is acting as a weir, so as the river comes along here, it historically would overtop the road and then people couldn’t pass because it was overtopped and water was flooding into this area,” Underwood explained. “It’s not good for fish because then fish were getting trapped down in here and they didn’t have a good way to get out. So what we were trying to figure out is how to get the water into here and not being pushed down this way, but not have so much water come down this way that we’re creating problems for folks on this side. That was that multi, many alternative analysis, trying to figure out how to balance all of that and I think this design does a very good job of all of balancing all of those problems.”

Underwood and Public Works Director Loretta Swanson confirmed to the Journal that the road project is part of the six-year Transportation Improvement Plan. The cost of the project is $4.5 million.

The next steps for the road project is the flood permit analysis. An update on the project and other Skokomish Valley Restoration projects will be presented at the next meeting from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Oct. 11 at the Skokomish Community Church.

“We are looking at this though and thinking about how to solve this problem in a bigger, global way,” Underwood said. “We too, see, that if it’s just all this one piece at a time, that’s a lot of work for all of us and so if we can figure out how to see this in a larger systematic way, that would benefit us all. One part of the community support objectives is trying to figure out what are those objectives that we have, how do we measure those, how do we understand if we’re moving in the right direction or not. So as these projects go in through that other analysis, we’re figuring out if we’re getting what we’re trying to get out of it. It’s not just fish habitat, it’s about the flooding and trying to solve that flooding issue as well.”