The Chehalis Basin Flood Control Zone District gave an update on one of the largest flood projects proposed to be built in the Chehalis Basin.
Flood Control Zone District Supervisor and Lewis County Commissioner Scott Brummer led an unofficial meeting Thursday morning to give an update on the district's proposed flow-through dam project to local officials in the wake of recent flooding in the basin.
Local leaders — including members of both the Chehalis and Centralia city councils — gathered to hear the presentation as constituents ask for more information on flood projects after the recent high water event.
“Now, public attention is very high, and so the flood zone district especially thought it would be timely to have a briefing to update people on where the project is,” Chehalis Basin Board member J. Vander Stoep said. “That storm happened to center on Snohomish and Skagit County, and they experienced catastrophic flooding. Had that atmospheric river been maybe 150 miles south and hit here, we would have had another ‘96, another ‘07 level flood, and we would have had probably several thousand families hit.”
Vander Stoep and Flood Control Zone Project Manager Kathy Burnaman led the bulk of the presentation and showed a video developed by the district to explain the operation of the flow-through dam.
The two, with the help of Brummer and Flood Control Zone District Deputy District Administrator Eric Eisenberg, also answered questions from local leaders and attempted to rally their support behind the project.
During the presentation, the team first revisited why flood mitigation is necessary before sharing the most current information on the proposed flow-through dam.
The flow-through dam that has been discussed for many years is now officially called a flood retention facility by the Flood Control Zone District. The name is meant to highlight the fact that the installation is not a traditional dam. Instead, it would allow water to continue flowing through the river, except during extreme floods when it would be activated to hold back excessive flood water.
When commissioned, the proposed facility is expected to hold more than 60,000 acre feet of water, according to Vander Stoep. That would be more than 20% of the water that flowed through the Chehalis River at Grand Mound during the 2007 flood. According to the district, it would only be used in extreme flood events.
“This is really important, because in the normal state, the gate would have been closed only three times in the last 20 years,” Burnaman said.
Burnaman also sought to highlight the ways the facility had been designed to avoid impacting native fish populations, including a phased construction process to avoid blocking the Chehalis River and the fish species within.
The meeting comes shortly after a regional flood and also not long after the release of the state's draft environmental impact statement (EIS) study on the facility. The Washington state Department of Ecology published its draft EIS on Thursday, Nov. 20. The study predicted that the construction and operation of the flood retention facility would have "significant and unavoidable” environmental impacts to the surrounding area. Among them were severe impacts to native fish in the river, especially salmon species.
The state added in the study that it considered some mitigation only in minor ways. But it did not consider mitigation plans in its high-level modeling and analysis. Significant mitigation plans were not taken into account.
“It assumes the worst case scenario, and it did not model mitigation,” Burnaman said. “It leaves it for permitting.”
After the presentation, the group fielded questions from local leaders and added more updates on the status of the dam. According to Burnaman, Vander Stoep and the rest of the team, an environmental impact statement on the facility from the federal government is expected to be published in spring of next year.
Centralia City Councilor Max Vogt asked how long the facility would take to complete if it did receive support from stakeholders in the basin, along with funding from the state and possibly the federal government.
According to Vander Stoep, the timeline for getting through the permitting process and completing construction could range from seven to 15 years. Permitting for such a facility, he said, could take up to 10 years, depending on the obstacles thrown in the way, including potential legal action. However, Brummer, who formerly worked as a fish biologist for the Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said community support is the main factor that could help speed permitting along.
“I'll just tell you, from many years of experience in the permitting process, that it tends to speed up if we have a lot of public support,” Brummer said. “It encourages the agencies to move more rapidly in working on that permit cycle and getting us to the point where we can construct.”
