And another dam just not so big from the World.


Hoquiam dam removal ?

Salmon, water supply to benefit: City probing for alternate water source, further funding before moving ahead with project

Clayton Franke

The Daily World

The most imposing physical obstacle for salmon and steelhead entering the Hoquiam River lies 11 miles upstream from the river’s mouth. There, for the last 70 years, fish have met a wall of concrete and whitewater, to which first they are drawn and attempt to jump over, but after a tiresome effort yield to the right, where a series of ascending stone troughs might help them pass the dam to prime spawning grounds. But West Fork Hoquiam fish of the future may not face the same challenge as previous generations.

The West Fork Hoquiam dam, listed by the state as one of the most harmful barriers to fish passage in the entire Chehalis Basin, could be removed in the coming years, potentially connecting downstream habitat with a dozen more miles of precious egg-nurturing gravel.

The city of Hoquiam, the dam’s owner, has eyed its removal for years. The city must first figure out how to put to rest the aging infrastructure the city relies on to capture some of its drinking water.

Last week, local government leaders, fish biologists, project



The West Fork Hoquiam dam, constructed in 1956, diverts water to the city of Hoquiam’s treatment plant, accounting for about 10% of city drinking water supply. The city is searching for an alternate groundwater source so it can remove the dam and restore fish habitat. CLAYTON FRANKE / THE DAILY WORLD


engineers and representatives from salmon conservation groups met for a tour of the West Fork Hoquiam dam, hosted by the Chehalis Basin Partnership.

In December 2022, the city received a $1.2 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for two purposes: to find out what tearing down the dam might look like, and to determine if another water source in the area can replace it.

After the feasibility study is complete, some of the construction costs could come from $4 million federal funding through the offices of U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell. The project is included in their funding lists, and Hoquiam City Administrator Brian Shay said he is “confident” the money will come through.

For the city, removing the dam is a priority not only to improve fish habitat, but to improve the long-term sustainability of the city’s water system, Shay said.

The dam spans the West Fork Hoquiam river a few yards east of U.S. Highway 101, just north of the town of New London. Currently, the city diverts water at the dam and pumps it underneath U.S. Highway 101 to its water treatment plant a few miles south. The road poses inherent water quality risks, while the aging dam, which was built in 1956, needs significant improvements to comply with current regulations.

In addition, a pattern of warmer, drier spring and summer conditions will mean lower summertime flows and inconsistent water availability. Removing the dam will also keep more water in the stream.

Water is diverted from the West Fork dam at two cubic feet — or sevenand- a-half gallons — per second, which accounts for only about 10% of the city’s supply. The majority of drinking water comes from a dam on Davis Creek (which also ranked highly on the state’s priority list), just north of the water treatment plant. That means the city needs to find one-tenth of its water elsewhere.

“This is a big part of the feasibility of the dam removal because if we can’t get water that the city needs that would replace the source, it’s hard for the city to justify getting rid of the dam if they don’t have an alternative source,” said Kelsey Mach, a project geologist with Aspect Consulting, the city’s contracted engineer for the project.

This summer, as part of the recent NOAA grant, Aspect Consulting will drill two test wells to probe an aquifer they’ve identified in the area of the water treatment plant. In a pilot study conducted by the city 10 years ago, two wells on the grounds of the plant brought water to the surface.

The key is finding the “sweet spot” — a blend of sand gravel to naturally filter groundwater, deep enough to avoid surface contamination but not quite down to the hard bedrock, said Jill Van Hulle, a water rights specialist with Aspect Consulting.

“Our exploratory drilling is going to give us a very, very good understanding of whether or not we’re going to get the kind of capacity that the city wants,” Van Hulle said.

If the test drills discover an adequate aquifer, Van Hulle said, it will justify the cost of improvements to the city’s water treatment plant. The two test wells could then be converted to functioning wells pumping water into the plant.

But tapping into an aquifer also means applying for a brand new water right. The city currently holds surface water rights for the West Fork Hoquiam River, but not for the water held in gravels deep underground. Van Hulle said Aspect filed that application last year through the Department of Ecology and is currently in the department’s “laborious” process.

The city’s current grant will also pay for some designs, cost estimates, and the massive amounts of permitting required for the project. Aspect and the city will have to do something about the heavy silt settled in the slow-flowing water behind the dam. When the dam breaks, that silt will flow downstream, potentially causing adverse effects for fish.

Curt Holt, a fish biologist with the Department of Fish and Wildlife who worked for years on the West Fork, recalled a time when silt from the dam washed downstream, smothering and killing salmon and steelhead.

Starting in 1985, Holt spent many hours standing in the fish ladder on the West Fork Hoquiam. A fish biologist for the Quinault Indian Nation at the time, Holt needed to nail down a reliable method for fish counting, and the West Fork was his testing grounds.

The 1974 Boldt decision upheld tribal fishing treaty rights by finding that half of all available fish harvested in traditional rivers could be taken by the tribes. That meant it had to be determined how many fish were in rivers and streams. But, given their environment, counting fish can be difficult.

In their study, Holt and a fisheries crew used the West Fork dam’s dividing power to their advantage. When fish passed through the ladder, Holt scooped them up, measured and tagged them, took scale samples, recorded their sex, and released them above the dam. Then they swam upstream to spawn.

There, John Bryson traversed the banks of the river, searching for round gravel nests in the streambed

DAM from page A1 to A6

From left: Hoquiam water treatment plant operators Rob Sobolesky and James Kruger, Grays Harbor County Commissioner Kevin Pine, WDFW fish biologist Curt Holt, and Kirsten Harma, watershed coordinator for the Chehalis Basin Partnership, listen to Holt give a presentation on fish use of the West Fork Hoquiam River on May 24. CLAYTON FRANKE / THE DAILY WORLD


John Bryson, left, looks down at water flowing from the West Fork Hoquiam dam. He spent 30 years working in fisheries, including participation in a study on the West Fork in the 1980s and ’90s. He is now on the Quinault Indian Nation tribal council. CLAYTON FRANKE / THE DAILY WORLD

— salmon redds. Based on the number of redds in the stream, Bryson formulated a number of total returning salmon, and, at the end of the season, compared it to the exact number of fish counted by Holt in the fish ladder.

For the most part, they were spot on. They went on to use the redd counting method in other Olympic Peninsula rivers. The study carried on for 16 years, and Bryson, who worked in fisheries for 30 years and is now a Quinault Indian Nation council member, spent many hours on the West Fork.

“There’s some really nice habitat for the fish above here (the dam), and I think when we remove this dam it’ll be utilized even more,” he said.

Depending on the species, dam removal will open anywhere from two to 13 miles of spawning habitat for salmon and steelhead. For fall Chinook, about one-third of total spawning grounds in the Hoquiam basin are located upstream of the West Fork dam.

About 1% of the total fish in the Chehalis Basin travel above the West Fork dam to spawn. That number, while small, is still crucial, Holt said.

“Every fish counts,” he said.

Throughout his long career in fisheries, Holt said he never expected he would see the dam come out, or even a proposal to do so.

Ultimately dam removal will be followed by stream restoration through planting native vegetation. The result is greater stream complexity: a messy, meandering river. The more wood in the stream, the better for fish, Holt said, adding that the name Hoquiam is derived from a Native word meaning “hungry for wood” — a testament to the debris that once cluttered the river.

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld. com. -

The Chehalis flood control dam proposal is far more than 10 years old, even more than 20 years. The state continues to throw money at it because the local politicians have forged alliances with others in the Legislature, mostly people who I assume aren't aware that the project does not meet the qualifications for Corps of Engineers federal funding. (The B:C ratio is less than 1.0.)

I was surprised a few years ago when the project details came out that the best flood reduction it could do is reduce peak flood elevation at I-5 by 1.5 feet. So even with the dam, it would be necessary to dike or raise the road elevation. Why not just raise the freeway elevation and be done with it? It would be much cheaper and not screw up the watershed.

stop building in the flood plain

The flood control is a local issue to be sure but the longevity of this proposal is about I-5. A more accurate way to describe it that it is about Puget Sound and what happens when food and similar things cannot use I-5 for 5 to 10 days.

Somewhere way back I was around a discussion on raising I-5 and it is way more difficult than one would think. The thing I recall that stuck was the bridges upgrade, material cost, small stream drainage in the area, and the cost as now adays the permitting process described was way past awesome.

The thing about I-5 is way over blown IMO. The extreme case, which has never occurred, is estimated that I-5 could be out of service in that limited area for UP to 10 days about once every 10 years. The total number of days that I-5 has been out of service in the Chehalis area would be 65 days since I-5 was built if that extreme case were true. I-5 has only been closed a hand full of days over the entire history of the freeway, and most importantly, there are viable alternate routes for those few days that the interstate is closed. It adds a few hours to delivery schedules for trucks coming from LA or the Central Valley. No one goes hungry. Vegetables still get to the grocery store. Lettuce might cost a dime extra for that week, worst case scenario.

Raising I-5 would be expensive, but feasible from an engineering perspective. Not so feasible is how to manage Salzar Creek (the small stream drainage). It drains all the floodwater from the hills of Chehalis onto the floodplain, and that water needs to get to the river. If it's impeded by dikes, gates, or other obstructions, it floods all the area that hasn't been filled along the freeway over the last 20 years. That fill never should have been allowed, but the movers and shakers around Chehalis want to be like California, where water flows uphill toward money.

California, Nevada, and Arizona need the water. Just install some really big pumps and send it south. We can solve any problem with enough money and engineering.

Plant fish and log it all.

And the fish are going to survive un the logged watersheds how?

I still think a diversion of the water to a large holding area would be the best approach. In the best of worlds, the water could be then used to recharge some of the deleted water sheds.

This would require changing the laws of physics, gravity, specifically. It's not like we can dig a gravity fed hole in the ground to store floodwaters. The reason being that a big enough hole that is also deep enough would exposed the groundwater table and fill with water long before the flood even happens. I applaud you for thinking about the issue, and a lot of people have studied flood issues for a very long time.

What the agency leaders seem reluctant to say is the clear, but not so obvious truth about flood water. That truth is: "The key to flood management is to divert the flood water away from my property onto your property." In other words, flood water has to go somewhere, and generally there is no place for it to go that won't negatively impact someone. If there were easy answers, the engineers would have identified them long ago.

People won't stop building in flood ways and flood plains. So they want flood control dams (i.e. move the water off their property onto someone else's). They are dumbstruck that the cost of those dams is too high to meet federal C.O.E. cost:benefit requirements where every dollar of cost must provide at least one dollar of benefit. So the perceived Chehalis dam solutions seems to be to build it with OPM, also known as "Other People's Money." That would require special Legislative or Congressional action since most taxpayers don't want to shell out their money for an uneconomic public works project.

The Central Valley in CA has some neat bypasses. When the Sacramento River reaches a certain height the water is diverted into the floodway (bypass). Essentially the dig a new and miles wide channel that rejoins the river down in the delta. The bypasses are protected by levees so the water stays in. The land is used for farming with lots of crops grown. Don't know who owns the land itself but I think a lot of it is privately owned. Can't have permanent structures in the bypass. Problem up here is that trees would likely want to grow in all that low-lying ground.

But, you could rather easily protect I-5 and and other current structures by setting the diversion wier at the right level. Probably would also mess up fish migration.

I drilled all of the Geotechnical holes all the way around hoquiam and into aberdeen last summer. The purpose of our portion was to collect soil samples to provide to the engineering firm that is putting together the design build of a new wall that will provide flood protection from the hoquiam and chehalis rivers. Major flooding issues as I'm sure you all are aware of. But what got me is why they are collecting water from open source for drinking instead of having a well field and withdrawing from an aquifer. Cost? Water rights? They withdraw water from the wynoochee at the spill way too, correct?

Probably the first reason is pumping costs. Gravity is cheaper. Treatment of surface water to human health standards is probably more expensive that treating groundwater. They may also have not found groundwater in sufficient quantity.

They might be able to do what was done on the Elwha where they created what were called infiltration galleries next to the river. I think in the floodplain. I believe it was pumped from the galleries but it already had some filtering of the sediment at least.

I got one for you guys. For about a two weeks several substantial schools of fish ( think bait ball ) have been hanging out around and below Higgins island. Some balls 50 to 60 feet in diameter but others cover as much as an acre as far as I can tell. They are in shallow water and seem to just stay in one spot for some time before moving with the tide as water deepens. Not hard to see them as the water has that boiling look on steroids! No idea what they are but the Kingfishers are beside themselves with joy pigging out!


MS thought that there are a couple of possibilities, maybe peamouth or redside shiners. Both can tolerate brackish waters and typically spawn in May through July and will gather in schools before moving the spawning areas, graveling river edges. I wouldn’t think they’d be spawning down there though; they prefer freshwater. May be amassing before heading to spawning areas. If the fish are 6 to 10 inches, probably peamouth, if they are 3 to 6 inches, maybe redside shiner. Those are some pretty larger groupings of fish. You should try to catch one and take a picture. My first thought was shad, but than you mentioned the kingfishers, most shad are a little larger for those guys.

With my boat in the shop no way to catch them but judging by what I could see in the Kingfishers mouth they are not all that large. The bird gets airbourne easily enough.

6/19/2023



There is not a "withdraw water", at the dam.....Maybe you are thinking about the "water intake", which has been taking water from the Wynoochee River, and is controlled by the City of Aberdeen. I'm not sure who currently uses this.....so many major companies are "shut down or long gone"

The industrial pipeline used to be a solid pipe above and below ground from the noch intake to Hoquiam and y's to cross the Chehalis to Cosmopolis. The wooden section across Aberdeeen Lake was removed and it flows into the lake and water is then pumped from the lake near the hatchery. I am not sure that water coming from the lake is suiteable for humans and in the summer fish have problems with it.

Years back prior to the dam the Daily World had pictures of Wynoochee being nearly dry below the intake in dry years and a bit down stream the ground water brought back some flows. The dam releases insure that will not happen anymore but if used to full water rights the flows below the industrial intake would not look like what exist now.

As summer comes on some of us are watching the river conditions and right now they are on a rather poor track. Record low flows for this point in a year at Porter is somewhere around 400 cfs and average for years is about 810 cfs. We had a bump with the rain that came through but the Chehalis at Porter is pojected to be at 572 cfs by July 1st and the lower tribs are performmming in a similiar manner. That is the good news as the Chehalis at Doty is at record lows now as is Chehalis at Gand Mound. The water quality has been fine in tide water and nothing much out of the ordinary except for the schools of rather small fish I posted about earlier.

Looking forward I imagine we will hear a lot about flows but frankly for adults returning it is a normal thing for the Chehalis Basin. For the juvenile rearing areas not so much. Unless something dramatic happens they are going to get hammered with the low flows, high water temperatures, and low DO.

So our late spring and summer so far has rather nice for us land lubbers and not so much for the fish. Long range forecast ( taken with some optimism ) is July cooler than normal first to weeks and warmer than normal last two weeks. August little wet cooler than normal and Sept mostly dry / warmer than normal with some cool spells.

So summer for us OK but for the rearing areas not so much.

Ahh, but again today, mucho snow at Paradise !

Wet and cold she be in the mountains.

Have a great Solstice.

The Chehalis watershed is, I believe, primarily a rain-driven system. They'll dry out a whole lot sooner. The snow-melt driven systems will maintain higher flows until the snow is gone. The glacially fed streams will flow higher until the ice is gone.

Rivers like the Puyallup will actually clear up if we get a day or two of lower temps, with or without rain. I had one day in August a few years ago when we had a few cold days and I was able to go out and catch a few that could see the bait and bit. Most of the times I avoid it as visibility is down to less than an inch.